The Nation (Nairobi)
OPINION April 29, 2001 Posted to the web April 28, 2001
Mutuma Mathiu
The Third World has been talking about "development" and "progress" for more than 50 years.
We are told that in the last decade, mainly thanks to globalisation, there has been a tremendous expansion in trade. The US, for example, has, before President Bush came in with the nuksi, experienced a sustained period of growth throughout the 1990s.
But wherever we look in the Third World, there is no evidence whatsoever that the mass in these countries is enjoying the so-called fruits of globalisation or those of Bretton Woods' neo-liberal economics.
Certainly, it would be an insult to Kenyans to tell them that they have materially benefited in any way from years of taking orders from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Now these institutions define a poor person as one who survives on less than a dollar a day (at the 1986 prices!)
That is as arbitrary a measure as they come. For it does not take into consideration the context of that individual, particularly with respect to the differences in the costs of living in different countries and regions. Secondly, the measure refuses to acknowledge that Bretton Woods' prescriptions, especially liberalisation, necessarily leads to higher prices, at least in the short run.
Our own measure of poverty, Sh980 a month in rural areas, is well below the international standard. Therefore, when the Government says 47 per cent of rural dwellers live in poverty, it is being economical with the figures.
If we apply uniformly the international measure of Sh2,370 a month, it becomes clear that Kenyans are very poor, indeed. As a matter of fact, they could be poorer today than at any other time since their ancestors took off the bark cloth and the animal skin.
There are two facts that we can't run away from. First, capitalism is the ideology of the strong; it favours preservation of the strong and destruction of the weak. Money attracts money. Globalisation is Western capitalism internationalised. Global capital crosses borders every second in search of the highest return.
Point number two: We, in the Third World, are weak and oppressed. Weak because we are at a structural disadvantage. At a disadvantage because the policies foisted on us destroy our internal markets and our industries and force us to export primary goods.
Allow me to quote just one study. Enzo Grilli and Maw Cheng studied the terms of trade between primary goods and manufactured products between 1900 and 1986. They found in that period the prices of the primary goods declined by 36 per cent relative to those of the manufactured goods. That is an annual average of 0.5 per cent.
It is not lost on anybody that those developing countries that have improved their economies have done so by developing a strong manufacturing base. They didn't do it by flinging wide open their markets, but by the brutal force of subsidy and protectionism. The United States is the mother of all protectionists. It locks out the manufactured goods of the Third World and hoards technological innovations with miserly fervour.
We are oppressed because the IMF today runs 67 economies, including our own. None is free to take sovereign decisions, and none is doing well. How is it that countries with such great wealth are so poor? Because everybody is making money from the poor.
Even the IMF, which is supposed to be "assisting", makes money from the poor. Didn't it, in 1987, make $8.6 billion (almost a trillion shillings) from "aid"? The only reason the populations of the Third World tolerate the interference of the IMF in their economies is that our national leaders are incapable of governing.
Slavery and colonialism facilitated exploitation by force. Globalisation is exploitation through co-opting a vacant-eyed Third World elite that is happy to hold down their countries to be ravished by international capitalists.
Those who see the confrontation between China and United States as the opening salvo in a new cold war are right. But they are not seeing the conflict in its entire, frightening, glory. Each additional person that crosses the poverty line is an additional rivet in a new iron curtain. And the point of contention is not ideology, it is inequality.
Vincent Ferraro and Melissa Rosa, writing in World Security: Challenges of a New Century, pose a very profound question: "Can it be seriously expected that hundreds of millions of the world's poorest populations would be content to toil away in order to transfer resources to their rich rentier creditors?" The answer is shorter than the shortest verse in the Bible: Never.
The North has only 20 per cent of the global population. But that 20 per cent earns 83 per cent of the world's income, uses 70 per cent of its energy, 75 per cent of its metals, 85 per cent of its wood and 60 per cent of its food, and contributes 75 per cent of the pollution.
Development? No, conmanship! http://allafrica.com/stories/200104280057.html
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