Two myths that keep the world poor

[Jcrowley]

Two myths that keep the world poor
Vandana Shiva

<snip>

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.

<snip>

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.

http://www.odemagazine.com/article.php?aID=4192

[ninkasi]

1. Very good article

I guess it's always been this way. The natural resources any country has always ends up in the same few people's hands. Look at the Middle East, where even though the countries are rich in oil, the people themselves are not wealthy. The people sit on the oil, but the profits go to multi-national countries. They don't hate us for our freedoms, they hate us for our theft.

[Tellurian]

2. Excellent Article..

Thanks for posting, JCrowley..

Shiva's analysis throws the idea of allowing the government to strive for a global economy (backed by a Federalist Constitution,) out the window as a bad idea and the basic structural flaw augmenting world poverty. I appreciate her summary as it makes good common sense, we cannot destroy the world's natural resources and improve the standard of living, as the result of consciously doing so.

One of the best articles I've read in a very long time-

[Mnemosyne]

3. K and R, to keep it out there. n/t

[Jcrowley]

6. The myth of the solutions

It's about time you woke up to the good news, Jimmy!  If we can just unleash the forces of innovation, like the creativity that made Silicon Valley the hub of the Information Revolution, we can lick the environmental crisis and bring prosperity to all corners of the world once and for all!

Oh, Jimmy, don't make me laugh! You've been listening to those killjoy hair-shirt environmentalists again.  They called for tightening belts and curbing appetites, turning down the thermostat and living lower on the food chain. They rejected technology, business, and prosperity in favor of returning to a simpler way of life.  No wonder the movement got so little traction. Asking people in the world's wealthiest, most advanced societies to turn their backs on the very forces that drove such abundance is naive at best.

Those old fogey tree huggers didn't realize that technology can be a font of endlessly creative solutions.  Business can be a vehicle for change. Prosperity can help us build the kind of world we want. Scientific exploration, innovative design, and cultural evolution are the most powerful tools we have. Entrepreneurial zeal and market forces, guided by sustainable policies, can propel the world into a bright green future.

It certainly does, Jimmy. In the long run we won't have to give up anything.  Remember Jimmy Carter's sweater?  Boy, did he ever look silly! You can turn that thermostat up.  We can afford it. Just as soon as we get our hands on clean, inexhaustible power: wind turbines, solar arrays, wave-power flotillas, small hydroelectric generators, geothermal systems, even bioengineered algae that turn waste into hydrogen.

Wow! What a terrific future! That'll be whole lots of windmills! But what about the sealife disturbed by the wave-power structures? And don't hydro plants create reservoirs with silting problems and release CO2 from the vegetation they drown?

Don't worry, boy!  The sea life will adjust. And I'm sure we'll come up with a fix for the hydro problems, too.  We've got the technology basics. The challenge is to scale up these technologies to deliver power in industrial quantities -- exactly the kind of challenge brilliant businesspeople love

[patrice]

4. Another myth: There isn't enough for Everyone, ergo "each man for himself"

is a fundamental law of nature.

[glitch]

8. And natural selection as competition only, totally ignoring cooperation.

You can always tell when someone hasn't really read Darwin and is just parroting some rw blowhole.

K & R for the brilliant Vandana Shiva

[yurbud]

5. corollary myth: we have to invade and steal to have access

to resource.

Instead of just buy it.

The more "grown up" argument for invading Iraq is access to a strategic resource--oil. But if they ever withheld it or jacked the price up too much, they would be hurting themselves far more than us. Either option would spur consumers to demand alternatives that much faster, and oil is such a big chunk of Persian Gulf countries income that it would be the equivalent of killing themselves out of spite.

If we just did the supposed capitalist thing but the capitalists weren't allowed to subvert democracy, call the president and order up a coup or war, those people wouldn't be as poor, the transnational corporations wouldn't be as rich, and most of us in the middle class would be in roughly the same place we are now.

I suppose this concept is part of "fair trade" but it needs to be articulated into law.

[nam78_two]

7. Recommended-excellent article/nt