Clearing landmines for growth

Clearing landmines is critical for protecting lives – and for economic development. The latter point is crucial for post-war rebuilding but has been overlooked.

In the midst of war, planning for recovery can be difficult. Yet, it’s essential for Ukraine, where up to a third of its territory is estimated to be contaminated by landmines, improvised explosive devices, and cluster munitions. That contamination is threatening millions of lives. Clearance could take decades.

While war-torn Ukraine is now possibly the most landmine-affected country in the world, the tragic fact is that about 60 states – from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe – continue to be plagued by landmines, too. The United Nations estimates that one person is killed or injured by landmines and other explosive ordnance every hour, on average. And where landmine threats exist, economic development is also hampered. Post-war recoveries in Ukraine and other mine-contaminated lands will hinge upon mine clearance.

This point is made clear in an important research paper that has been years in the making. In “Landmines and Spatial Development”, Giorgio Chiovelli (University of Montevideo), Stelios Michalopoulos (Brown University) and Elias Papaioannou (London Business School) ask a crucial question about the economic impact of landmine clearance to better understand – and, ultimately, better direct funding to – clearance efforts.

Goal: to improve lives and livelihoods in mine-contaminated lands

Giorgio, Stelios and Elias analyse the case of Mozambique – the only country in the world to go from being “heavily impacted” by mine contamination (in 1992) to “landmine free” (as of 2015). The researchers first worked to assemble good quality data on the country’s mine clearance and indicators of economic development from 1992 – the year after its deadly, 15-year-long, civil war ended – up through 2017.

This multi-year data-gathering was critical, as Mozambique – already one of the poorest nations in the world – had seen its war-torn regions reduced to what the Human Rights Watch called “stone-age conditions” in 1992. “For our research, we really wanted the best possible data,” Elias explains; “Especially for the period between 1993 and 2008, before the Mozambican authorities were able to reliably collect it.”

To put that early post-war period in perspective, one should understand that over half a million Mozambicans, mainly children, lost their lives to the civil war, and about three and a half million were internally and externally displaced out of a population of approximately 14 million. As the researchers pooled agencies’ data and other resources, they found evidence of hundreds of thousands of landmines scattered across all of the nation’s provinces. (For scale, note that Mozambique’s landmass is about 30% larger than Ukraine’s – which, in turn, is Europe’s second-largest country.)

Phase one: the local impact of clearance

With the newly compiled georeferenced data, the researchers initially explored the impact of landmine clearance on local development. Given data unavailability for one of the world’s poorest countries in the early 1990s, the researchers examined the dynamics of satellite images of night-time lights before and after clearance. As related research has found, light density at night correlates strongly with education, public goods access, and household assets. As such, luminosity serves a useful proxy for economic development in areas without much socioeconomic data.

The initial results were promising, as might be expected. Where landmines were cleared out, there was a modest increase in nighttime lights visible from space, indicating boosts in local economic activity. After about five years, the surges in local development stabilised, corresponding to the average time required to complete clearance in an area.

Fully cleared localities saw an economic-development boost of about 6%, compared to uncontaminated areas that had not yet started clearance. This boost was not only statistically significant, but also economically meaningful, especially given the low level of development at the time (only 6% of Mozambican localities were lit in 1992, the paper noted.) Besides, the removal of landmines allows foreign aid to come in, revealing an additional plausible mechanism.

Phase two: aggregate benefits are the bigger story

There was more good news as the study looked at the aggregate economy-wide benefits of clearance. Removing landmines in one area was found to positively impact economic activity elsewhere, as transportation networks were unblocked. That is to say, securing roads, railroads and/or other means to move people and things leads to a more efficient allocation of labour across space – as well as other benefits. Crunching the numbers, the researchers found that the aggregate effects of clearance end up being two to three times larger than local effects.

“This finding is the most significant in my view,” Elias says. “Once you start thinking about how economic activity is structured across space, you see that unblocking transportation networks also allow goods and resources to flow,” he continues. “Landmine clearance can help get agricultural inputs like seeds and tractors to the right places and get goods to the city markets.” Surprisingly, little attention had been paid to these positive spillover effects or the aggregate impact of clearing mines in the past. On-the-ground analyses were often limited in scope. But this research, with data stretching clear across Mozambique, addressed this gap. 

Considering how much funding post-war recoveries require, this point is worth underlining, in Elias’s view. In fact, the economic impact of clearance, on aggregate, may be comparable with the impact of massive transportation infrastructure projects, investing to build new roads and railways, Elias and his co-authors, Giorgio and Stelios have noted. Understanding aggregate impact is particularly important for securing funding, because the typical, localised cost-benefit analyses are “greatly underestimating the impact of clearance,” as the study’s three co-authors explain in an opinion piece.

Humanitarian demining

Along with stabilising a war-torn nation by boosting its development, mine clearance is also about saving lives, of course.

“Mozambique was one of the first countries (after Afghanistan and Cambodia) that experimented with humanitarian demining,” Elias notes. This meant that nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), instead of the military, were in the fields removing mines and unexploded ordnance (UXO). In the 1990s, coordination among the various organisations was still in its infancy, with the state short on resources and experience to centralise and prioritise clearance efforts, Elias reflects.

“When we went to the country, we worked with the Mozambican authorities, deminers who had worked in the 1990s and 2000s, and the Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining,” Elias says. In addition, we collaborated with various NGOs and international experts. Through the alumni network of LBS, Elias connected with various practitioners in the field – including a prominent and experienced leader, Paul Heslop, who was working at the time with an NGO called the HALO Trust. After serving in the British military and before obtaining his MBA at London Business School (2002-4), Paul worked in Mozambique in 1994 before moving over to Angola, where he famously escorted Princess Diana on a humanitarian mission in 1997. The lasting legacy of this trip includes famous photographs of Princess Diana with Angola’s landmine victims and fields marked “danger.” Awareness of landmines was raised through the proverbial roof.

Paul remains active in the field today, serving as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Manager for Mine Action in Ukraine. With mine action programmes, “it’s not just doing things right, it’s making sure the right things are done,” Paul says, commenting on Elias’s research. “Real-world evidence of the impact of effective mine-action programmes, as seen in studies like this one, can help the international community meet the right demands,” Paul continues. “It’s about improving the global economy while making the world a safer place.”

Recommendations

The trio’s research and outreach yields a number of recommendations – including the following four:

1. Accurate mapping of contaminated areas is the first step. As new deadly weapons of war have proliferated, there’s more to do here than ever. Cluster munitions yield hard-to-clean-up bomblets on the ground. Improvised explosive devices have been hidden inside civilians’ houses, among other places. This expands what was traditionally thought of as landmine clearance. At the same time, technology is making it easier to survey contamination, thanks to drones and targeted artificial intelligence applications. Hopefully, “Innovative technologies could rid Ukraine of landmines in 10 years,” Paul wrote for the UNDP blog recently.

2. Prioritise the clearance of corridors connecting key areas for market access, considering other risks. In Mozambique, that meant prioritising the clearance of corridors connecting the main highway and port cities with mining and agriculture-rich areas. In Ukraine, that will mean clearing the areas close to the railroads and key roads to generate stronger spillovers, which will be especially important for the world’s food security.

3. Centralise planning for landmine clearance operations. The government, donor agencies, specialised NGOs, and the United Nations need to work together on common clearance goals, sharing know-how and collaborating. The case of Mozambique illustrated what happened before coordinated efforts were in place. In the study, the co-authors analysed a hypothetical situation where there was more coordination to show significantly positive results.

4. Keep up international aid. The approximately 60 countries needing landmine clearance need funding to be sustained. It’s true that much is already given, but more is needed. It’s our humanitarian and moral obligation to assist those who most need it, and there’s also a significant economic dividend to be reaped. Facilitating trade and commerce can help develop and stabilise vulnerable economies.

As the UNDP noted, marking the International Day for Mine Awareness and Assistance in Mine Action this April, it’s about “clearing a path for development, one landmine at a time.”

Elias Papaioannou is a Professor of Economics and the Academic Director of the Wheeler Institute for Business and Development at London Business School. This work was done with Giorgio Chiovelli, who worked as a Research Fellow at the London Business and is currently an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Montevideo, and Stelios Michalopoulos, the Eastman Professor of Economics at Brown University.