Two myths that keep the world poor (Environmentalist Vandana Shiva)

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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 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 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 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 “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

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 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 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, 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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