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 world’s 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 doesn’t 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 behindâ€; 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 India’s 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 people’s 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 doesn’t contribute to GDP, and
therefore does not contribute towards “growthâ€.
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 life—when 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 people’s lives
. Because these poor don’t share in the perceived benefits of economic
growth, however, they are portrayed as those “left behindâ€. 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 society’s 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 country’s 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. It’s 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, theecologist@galleon.co.uk, 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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