It was the French anthropologist Alfred Sauvy who first used the term Third
World in reference to the 'underdeveloped' countries of the global south.
Writing in the French magazine L'Observateur (Aug 14, 1952) Sauvy
concluded a powerful critique of colonialism by asserting that; "in the end
this ignored, exploited, scorned Third World like the Third Estate, wants to
become something too". He was paraphrasing Sieye's famous observation about
the Third Estate during the French Revolution where the peasantry had
aspirations of their own beyond the aims of the aristocracy (First Estate) and
the clergy (Second Estate).
In the Cold War era the phrase was adopted
readily as it became a handy way of demarcating that territory that lay outside
the immediate sphere of the two great superpowers. In time, with the dissipation
of hostilities that followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall, this meaning too
became largely redundant. Today, the Third World is a shrunken concept as it has
managed to reduce the diverse complexity of whole continents to stock images of
helpless black babies with bloated bellies mercilessly surrounded by tsetse
flies and barren moon-like landscapes.
As a matter of fact the phrase
has been long abandoned by serious campaigners precisely because of these
connotations of impotence, helplessness and passivity. The preferred terms used
nowadays by activists are either the 'global south' or the 'majority world'.
This is not to say there was no merit in Sauvy's original wording for it at
least intended to confer the dignity of an active narrative, a struggle for
rights and emancipation and, given the outcome of the historical events to which
they alluded, a sense of manifest destiny. It is in fact perhaps more
useful to retain this original suggestion of the ‘ignored, exploited and
scorned' to truly understand poverty in the global south for it is questionable
whether the people in these regions have ever actually attained true
independence and autonomy.
For instance, the debt crisis of the late 70's
and early 80's left many countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America looking
towards the IMF and World Bank as lenders of last resort. Conditionalities
attached to the concessional financing needed to alleviate the debt burden
amounted to the wholesale adoption of the corporate-led neoliberal model of
economic development. Two prominent theories underpin this economic philosophy;
(a) Friedmanite 'supply-side' economics which holds that lowering the costs of
production is the key to economic growth (ie tax cuts for the rich and
investors) and (b) the theory of comparative advantage which favours
specialization over economic diversification. The presence of both these
assumptions are behind the main elements that comprise a typical IMF-imposed
structural adjustment programme (SAP); deregulation, privitization,
liberalisation, currency devaluation and measures to stimulate export-oriented
growth.
In addition to these, austerity measures such as cutbacks in
health and education and the slashing of public sector wages are advocated to
release funds either to satisfy creditors or to fuel market-led growth via
private sector retrenchment. The net effect of these policies is to supposedly
liberate and empower the miraculate of 'capital' itself; which left alone to its
own majestical workings is assumed to be the panacea poverty is looking
for.
For example, deregulatory policies such as lowering of constraints
on hiring and firing, the undermining of trade union power, decreasing the
number of bureaucratic procedures required for setting up a business and the
altering of land laws to suit inward investment are all intended to create a
more conducive environment under which capital can thrive. However, the problem
here is that the prescriptions laid down by the international financial
institutions (the IMF and World Bank) more often appear to be drafted by
corporate lobby groups intent on prising open vulnerable economies for their own
benefit.
Export processing zones (EPZ's) are perhaps the most extreme
form of a deregulated business environment. Begun in India in the early 80's
when the government introduced a five-year tax break for companies who wished to
relocate their manufacturing base the vast majority of employees are young
women. Their primary purpose is to supposedly generate export revenue and their
numbers have since mushroomed. In 2002 there were an estimated 43 million people
working in about 3000 EPZ's spanning some 116 countries and producing items such
as clothes, shoes, electronics and toys. Naomi Klein describes the working
conditions as follows;
"Regardless of where the EPZ's are located,
the worker's stories have a certain mesmerizing sameness: the workday is long -
fourteen hours in Sri Lanka, twelve hours in Indonesia, sixteen in Southern
China, twelve in the Phillipines. The management is military-style, the
supervisers often abusive, the wages below subsistenceand the work low-skill and
tedious." (No Logo, pg. 205.)
Another notable feature that Klein
observed was that the majority of the women were migrants from rural areas;
"they would have stayed at home if they could, but the choice was made for
them: most of their families had lost their farms, displaced by golf courses,
botched land-reform laws and more export processing zones." (No Logo, pg.
220.)
One young girl told her; "Working on the farm was difficult yes,
but there we had our family and friends and instead of always eating dried fish
we had fresh food to eat". (No Logo, pg. 220.)
This brings us to the
heart of the issue because if EPZ's and large-scale plantations or monoculture
farming are to be the motors through which export revenues are going to be
obtained then they will require a readily available pool of cheap labour and
this can only be achieved by exerting a squeeze on rural households. As we know,
the majority of people in the 'developing countries' are small-scale farmers
with a few hectares of land. However, trade liberalisation means that cheap
imports from the heavily subsidised large producers of the West are undercutting
the capacity of these rural households to stay afloat. Recent FAO studies have
noted that there has been an increasing concentration of land ownership in a
wide cross-section of countries. In Cambodia, for example, mirroring global
patterns, 10-15% of the country's farmers have become landless since
1989.
SAP inspired government policies have withdrawn subsidies from farm
inputs that contribute towards domestic food production and instead switched
them to those products that are being grown for export such as tea, cocoa,
coffee and cotton. John Madeley writes; "Women, who produce 60-70% of food in
most African countries, have been affected disproportionately by the elimination
of subsidies, the drying up of credit and the surge of food imports as a result
of trade liberalisation".
In order to stay on the land many males are
forced to migrate to the towns and cities or to the plantations to seek seasonal
employment. This, of course, produces further hardships for women whose workload
is often doubled and has a negative effect on the education of their children
who are often forced to leave their schooling for long periods to help out at
home. Austerity measures such as cuts in health and education expenditure
further necessitate dependency or incorporation into a cash-based economy. The
introduction of 'user fees' for medical services and the increasing
privitization of secondary and primary schooling generates more pressure for
self-sufficient, subsistence based households to switch to cash-cropping. Those
that cannot afford decent medical care simply don't attend and in fact the 2005
UNDP report shows that for most African countries the maternal mortality ratio
has steadily disimproved since 1990. Increasingly tight domestic budgets may
also mean that some children will have to be withdrawn from school early and the
preference here is usually towards the girl-child.
One of the other
consequences of the theory of comparative advantage is the loss of economic
diversification. All too often countries in the south are streamlined towards
the production of a handful of basic commodities. Stock market fluctuations can
overnight halve the value of primary commodities as was the case for instance in
the mid-80's when the international price crashed for major exports such as
coffee and cotton. The neoliberal response is a currency devaluation to make
exports more attractive to international buyers. But what this creates over time
is a huge gulf in purchasing power parity between countries of the north and
those of the south. It also exacerbates the 'brain drain', encouraging those
with a university education to seek employment in the North and to sustain their
hard-pressed families through remittances thereby depriving the south of the
very talents that it so obviously requires in the years ahead. Many women,
anxious to keep their children in school are faced with little option but to
secure working visas for foreign posts in childcare or nursing, straining the
family unit and further eroding the social fabric.
It is these varied
elements of SAP, still expounded today, that, when stripped of their beguiling
veneer are seen to achieve their true ends; providing an army of cheap labour
and relaxing barriers for the extraction of raw resources. At this nether end of
the flows of late capitalism it is the impoverished themselves who have become
the anti-miraculate, the unspoken and the disenfranchised, frozen
timelessly in our images of dispossession.
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