When oil wells don't end well: "Publish What You Pay" asks oil companies to help put an end to some slippery business. (margin notes).

HOW IS IT THAT SOME NATIONS REMAIN MIRED IN poverty even though they annually produce millions of barrels of oil--a commodity so valuable to industrial powers it's literally worth fighting for? The answer to that slippery riddle is complex, but one major contributing factor is outright thievery by government officials and business classes in many oil-rich nations.

Angola offers one example. As much as $1 billion of the $3 to $5 billion annually generated by oil production there each year cannot be accounted for. Similarly astounding amounts of wealth have been siphoned away by local elites in other oil boomlands, then squandered on luxury goods and outlandish lifestyles.

Petrodollars that could have lifted millions out of misery through investments in infrastructure, education, health care, and sanitation have dissipated without appreciable effect on the lives of the poor. Oil wealth instead can be a curse to the poor in many countries when the need to control petro-revenue leads powerful elites to suppress internal democratic forces or ethnic minorities.

Leaders of Third World kleptocracies couldn't get away with their slick practices for long without the complicity of large oil corporations who trade institutional silence for their cut of global oil wealth. What if those corporations were compelled to 'fess up to the arrangements they've made to secure access to oil fields, revealing precisely how--and how much--they paid off?

"Publish What You Pay" (www.publishwhatyoupay.org) aims to get oil companies to release information like this. The hope is that such transparency can prevent future oil wealth from evaporating before it can have a meaningful impact on living standards in oil-rich but dirt-poor nations throughout the world. Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and its English counterpart, the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development, are among the supporters of this international campaign.

This initiative could not have come at a more critical time for Africa. Industry insiders estimate that the United States could soon be importing 25 percent of its petroleum from West Africa. Oil production on the continent is set to double by the end of the decade.

More than $50 billion, the largest direct foreign investment in African history, will be spent on Africa's oil fields by the end of the decade. This explosion of resource extraction from Africa means that revenues available for poverty reduction will be huge. CRS conservatively estimates that sub-Saharan African governments will receive over $200 billion in oil revenues over the next decade.

If only that oil money could actually trickle down to the people and communities who need it most--the 1.5 billion people living on less than $2 a day in 50 developing nations where oil and other resource-extracting industries are active.

Oil executives can argue that it is not their business how governments use oil revenues and that revealing the details of their deal-making would only put them out of the global oil business. They are right on the latter point. That's why the PWYP campaign seeks international treaties that lay a level playing field by requiring all companies to open the books on oil deals. On the former point, they are just sadly mistaken. We are all called to watch out for the most vulnerable among us, no matter the stamps on their passports.

IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE POOR, IN DEFENSE OF AUTHENTIC development and human dignity, it is the responsibility of those who benefit so much from the trade in oil to participate in the stewardship of the wealth of oil-rich nations, to see that it is rightly directed toward improving the living conditions of people in the developing world. PWYP doesn't require corporate executives to be minders of government bureaucrats; it does ask them to step up to help be their brothers' and sisters' keepers. You can help, too, by encouraging your Congress member to learn about PWYP with an eye on authoring enabling legislation from here in the U.S.

Divine wisdom has placed vast reserves of oil in some of the world's most impoverished places, and the West has been content to merely exploit those resources, producing vast riches for some over the decades. Shouldn't it also make a difference in the lives of the world's poorest people?

KEVIN CLARKE, managing editor of online products at Claretian Publications in Chicago.