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it is clear that soaring oil prices are undermining the benefits of debt cancellation in some countries, especially poor oil-importing nations.

In Escaping the Resource Curse, Columbia University professors Macartan Humphreys, Jeffrey Sachs and Joseph Stiglitz identify a vast array of contributing causes to the resource curse. Corruption is among the most severe, they conclude. “The short run availability of large financial assets increases the opportunity for the theft of such assets by political leaders. Those who control these assets can use that wealth to maintain themselves in power, either through legal means (e.g., spending in political campaigns) or coercive ones (e.g., funding militias).” Local corruption, they note, is often aided and abetted by international companies. “International mining and oil companies that seek to maximize profits find that they can lower the costs of obtaining resources more easily by obtaining the resources at below market value — by bribing government officials — than by figuring out how to extract the resources more efficiently.”

High oil prices have a clear economic effect. But for highly indebted, impoverished countries, climate change, fueled significantly by CO2 emissions from cars and other gas-guzzling vehicles in the North, will have serious ecological, social and economic impacts as well.

The stability or otherwise of the Delta matters a great deal, even to those who have never heard of it. Within a decade, the United States expects to extract around a quarter of its oil from the Gulf of Guinea. They see it as a safer option than the Middle East, and it has played a large part in the thinking behind the establishment of the US's Africa Command – a plan for a series of permanent military bases on the continent.

What have you learned from your experience on the book?MW: I have learned several things. The first is that oil is not always a curse, meaning that oil dependency does not always produce poverty or conflict or corruption. It did not in Norway or the U.K. But vast oil wealth captured by oil-producing governments always places the question of how that wealth is to be allocated and spent at the center. If oil is inserted into a corrupt federal system, then the combination of non-transparent Big Oil and authoritarian Big Government produces a perfect storm of violence, corruption, ecological destruction and poverty. And this storm will have a huge blowback.