Two myths that keep the world poor
Source >
http://www.odemagazine.com/article.php?aID=4192
Vandana Shiva
This article appeared in Ode issue: 28
Global poverty is a hot topic right now. But anyone
serious about ending it needs to understand the true
causes, argues Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva.
>From rock singer Bob Geldof to UK politician Gordon
Brown, the world suddenly seems to be full of
high-profile people with their own plans to end
poverty. Jeffrey Sachs, however, is not a simply a
do-gooder but one of the worlds leading economists,
head of the Earth Institute and in charge of a UN
panel set up to promote rapid development. So when he
launched his book The End of Poverty, people
everywhere took notice. Time magazine even made it
into a cover story.
But, there is a problem with Sachs how-to-end poverty
prescriptions. He simply doesnt understand where
poverty comes from. He seems to view it as the
original sin. A few generations ago, almost everybody
was poor, he writes, then adding: The Industrial
Revolution led to new riches, but much of the world
was left far behind.
This is a totally false history of poverty. The poor
are not those who have been left behind; they are
the ones who have been robbed. The wealth accumulated
by Europe and North America are largely based on
riches taken from Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Without the destruction of Indias rich textile
industry, without the takeover of the spice trade,
without the genocide of the native American tribes,
without African slavery, the Industrial Revolution
would not have resulted in new riches for Europe or
North America. It was this violent takeover of Third
World resources and markets that created wealth in the
North and poverty in the South.
Two of the great economic myths of our time allow
people to deny this intimate link, and spread
misconceptions about what poverty is.
First, the destruction of nature and of peoples
ability to look after themselves are blamed not on
industrial growth and economic colonialism, but on
poor people themselves. Poverty, it is stated, causes
environmental destruction. The disease is then offered
as a cure: further economic growth is supposed to
solve the very problems of poverty and ecological
decline that it gave rise to in the first place. This
is the message at the heart of Sachs analysis.
The second myth is an assumption that if you consume
what you produce, you do not really produce, at least
not economically speaking. If I grow my own food, and
do not sell it, then it doesnt contribute to GDP, and
therefore does not contribute towards growth.
People are perceived as poor if they eat food they
have grown rather than commercially distributed junk
foods sold by global agri-business. They are seen as
poor if they live in self-built housing made from
ecologically well-adapted materials like bamboo and
mud rather than in cinder block or cement houses. They
are seen as poor if they wear garments manufactured
from handmade natural fibres rather than synthetics.
Yet sustenance living, which the wealthy West
perceives as poverty, does not necessarily mean a low
quality of life. On the contrary, by their very nature
economies based on sustenance ensure a high quality of
lifewhen measured in terms of access to good food and
water, opportunities for sustainable livelihoods,
robust social and cultural identity, and a sense of
meaning in peoples lives . Because these poor dont
share in the perceived benefits of economic growth,
however, they are portrayed as those left behind.
This false distinction between the factors that create
affluence and those that create poverty is at the core
of Sachs analysis. And because of this, his
prescriptions will aggravate and deepen poverty
instead of ending it. Modern concepts of economic
development, which Sachs sees as the cure for
poverty, have been in place for only a tiny portion of
human history. For centuries, the principles of
sustenance allowed societies all over the planet to
survive and even thrive. Limits in nature were
respected in these societies and guided the limits of
human consumption. When societys relationship with
nature is based on sustenance, nature exists as a form
of common wealth. It is redefined as a resource only
when profit becomes the organising principle of
society and sets off a financial imperative for the
development and destruction of these resources for the
market.
However much we choose to forget or deny it, all
people in all societies still depend on nature.
Without clean water, fertile soils and genetic
diversity, human survival is not possible. Today,
economic development is destroying these onetime
commons, resulting in the creation of a new
contradiction: development deprives the very people it
professes to help of their traditional land and means
of sustenance, forcing them to survive in an
increasingly eroded natural world.
A system like the economic growth model we know today
creates trillions of dollars of super profits for
corporations while condemning billions of people to
poverty. Poverty is not, as Sachs suggests, an initial
state of human progress from which to escape. It is a
final state people fall into when one-sided
development destroys the ecological and social systems
that have maintained the life, health and sustenance
of people and the planet for ages. The reality is that
people do not die for lack of income. They die for
lack of access to the wealth of the commons. Here,
too, Sachs is wrong when he says: In a world of
plenty, 1 billion people are so poor their lives are
in danger. The indigenous people in the Amazon, the
mountain communities in the Himalayas, peasants
anywhere whose land has not been appropriated and
whose water and biodiversity have not been destroyed
by debt-creating industrial agriculture are
ecologically rich, even though they earn less than a
dollar a day.
On the other hand, people are poor if they have to
purchase their basic needs at high prices no matter
how much income they make. Take the case of India.
Because of cheap food and fibre being dumped by
developed nations and lessened trade protections
enacted by the government, farm prices in India are
tumbling, which means that the countrys peasants are
losing $26 billion U.S. each year. Unable to survive
under these new economic conditions, many peasants are
now poverty-stricken and thousands commit suicide each
year. Elsewhere in the world, drinking water is
privatised so that corporations can now profit to the
tune of $1 trillion U.S. a year by selling an
essential resource to the poor that was once free. And
the $50 billion U.S. of aid trickling North to South
is but a tenth of the $500 billion being sucked in the
other direction due to interest payments and other
unjust mechanisms in the global economy imposed by the
World Bank and the IMF.
If we are serious about ending poverty, we have to
be serious about ending the systems that create
poverty by robbing the poor of their common wealth,
livelihoods and incomes. Before we can make poverty
history, we need to get the history of poverty right.
Its not about how much wealthy nations can give, so
much as how much less they can take.
Taken and adapted with kind permission from The
Ecologist (July/August 2005), a British monthly
devoted to discussion of environmental issues,
international politics and globalization. More
information: The Ecologist, Unit 18 Chelsea Wharf, 15
Lots Road, London, SW10 0XJ, England,
[EMAIL PROTECTED], www.theecologist.org
Dr. Vandana Shiva is a physicist and prominent Indian
environmental activist. She founded Navdanya, a
movement for biodiversity conservation and farmers'
rights. She directs the Research Foundation for
Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy. Her
most recent books are Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature
and Knowledge and Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the
Global Food Supply.
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