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Article by Benny Dembitzer

Anyone who is concerned with the issues of poverty and inequality will have read Amartya Sen’s Development as Freedom, his seminal work published in 1999 which led to the Nobel Prize for Economics. Some of the book is not actually easy to read, but he helpfully advises the reader to skip some of the more theoretical chapters and still get to the nitty gritty of the issues he covers. You would expect a man who has become one of the most distinguished public thinkers of our generation to be able to conceptualise a range of issues and approach them from unexpected angles. In the process he has showed us, among other points, that economics cannot be seen as an end in itself. Material improvement is needed, but it is the freedom that it offers that lies behind the moral imperative for development.

I wanted to achieve something different in a book on development that I have just published under the title of The Attack on World Poverty. In my view, and surely I am not alone, what is currently happening in the world will lead not a diminution of poverty, and therefore an increase in opportunities for the majority, but inevitably an increase in the amount of poor people. Poverty is increasing in many parts of the world and we do not seem to see it. Perhaps it is something that we cannot do very much about and therefore do not wish to confront it. We in the West have been so overwhelmed by the financial crisis in our rich societies that we are not able to understand that when the US sneezes, Europe catches a cold, but in Africa they die of pneumonia. We will recover, I am not sure that the rest of the world will. We have built into our systems mechanisms that enable us to correct what is going wrong in the systems. Schumpeter thought that this capacity of the capitalistic system to adapt and change and implode would eventually lead to explosion and destruction. He was wrong of course. We phased in the car and out went the horse and cart. We phased in the mobile and out goes the landline telephone. We have the dot.com crisis and some people lose a lot of money and then we recover.

When the Berlin Wall came down back in 1989, the triumphalism of the West produced views and books like that of Francis Fukuyama – The End of History – in which he basically argued that from now on only liberal democracies could survive. Everything else would simply be swept away. Perhaps we cannot be that certain any longer. Because democracy overturned barriers in Eastern Europe and Russia we have assumed that the system can be adapted everywhere. That is simplistic. The increasing liberalisation of Eastern Europe was underpinned by the EU with its financial support and implied muscle power. The transition of the Soviet Union from a centrally controlled economy to a semi-democratic Russian Federation was achieved at great cost to millions of the least privileged members of their societies (some of the costs are well presented by Joseph Stiglitz in Globalisation and Its Discontents). But Russia’s economy has been propped-up by great wealth of natural resources and by many other favourable factors, among which I would count a considerable degree of social unity, a sense of national cohesion, commonality of language, unifying religion. It might be possible in some years’ time to see the severe traumas that the transformation of Russia caused was a difficult period, yes, but a process that inevitably would come out alright at the end because of its economic underpinning.

In my book I try to explore how, in the poorest countries of the world, there will be no transformation and no recovery: there will be an inevitable slide into more poverty and despair. What are the factors that make it so difficult for the poorest to get out of poverty?

To start with I see three sets of enormous forces against which the weakest states and their poorest people have to fight. They are; physical (the rapidly worsening climate, advancing deserts, growing salinity of land, decrease of arable soil), human (population increase, rapid urbanisation, emigration of their best people, lack of homogeneity and very often ethnic conflicts, corruption, inefficiency in governance) and global (debts to the rich world, using land to grow cash crops vs. growing food to meet domestic needs, the pressure to open markets, capital flight, arms trade).

We need to go take some steps back to examine what development is and what the challenges consist of. The poorest of the world are not concerned with university degrees, international travel, the hegemonic fights between Russia and America or the nuclear race between Iran and the West. They are consumed by the need to satisfy their basic physical and physiological needs. If, to follow Abraham Maslow’s 'pyramid of needs', we in the West are able to concentrate on the higher levels of satisfaction – the fourth level (self-esteem, achievements, respect by others) or the fifth level of self-actualisation (morality, creativity, etc.), the poorest of the world are still stuck at the first level (satisfying the need for food, water, shelter). It would seem that we need to go back to that understanding of the 'hierarchy of needs'. Those are the physiological and economic opportunities that the poorest seek; being able to have enough food and water for yourself, then for your family, then to seek basic physical security, then to be allowed to grow your own food, obtain shelter, and so on.

How many people are trying to live at the bottom rung and not succeeding? We have become familiar with the notion of one billion people living on less than one dollar per day. In fact the numbers are much greater. Since the summer of 2008 the World Bank has been working on the figure of around 1.2 billion of people who live on less than one dollar per day. In theory this is the number of people who survive from day to day unable to be sure of their next meal and to feed themselves. But the number is much larger. FAO, the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the UN, in a paper presented to the first World Food Summit in Italy earlier this year in preparation to the G8 meeting at L’Aquila, estimated that the number of people who were malnourished, eating the same food day in day out, unable to acquire the basic minerals and vitamins which enable the body and the brain to develop fully, is around the 2 billion mark. They are affected by ‘hidden hunger’. This definition applies to only tiny numbers in our societies in Western Europe. We have basic food, basic education, basic health services and most of us have physical and social security. And for the vast majority of us there are jobs. Because of these facilities, we are escaping the world of survival and entering the world of economics, which is fundamentally the world of choices.

This contrast – our lack of basic needs vs. their fight for survival – is at the basis of the fundamental misunderstanding between policy makers in development in both the North and the South (mostly imbued by ideas from the North) and the recipient countries and peoples in the South. The West reacts instinctively and sometimes generously to requests for aid. Aid in emergencies of course is vital. But aid for development is something quite different and this is the base of the problem. Aid has become and extension of welfare and not a tool for development. I am not criticising OXFAM or Save the Children for doing what they are doing, far from it. They try to carry out both tasks – welfare and development – together and I would argue that they require different approaches and different tools.

But let us stay for one minute with the differences in approach. For Northern policymakers the nation state is the cornerstone of all decision-making and implementation, because the state is so ubiquitous in our societies. We simply ignore reality. We are fighting in Afghanistan to create one nation and support one government. Most Afghanis, by the look of things, do not see themselves as one single state – that concept simply has no validity. Many of their borders are porous. The people are Pashtun, Uzbeks, Hazara, Tajik and each of these groups are further subdivided into clans and sub-clans, to the extent that individual villages become separate ethnic groups. They have managed to survive in very hostile environments by isolating themselves. They perceive their national government and its agents as basically a group of people, not part of their own stock, who wish to lord it over them and their traditional interests, are deeply partisan and loyal to their own groups and deeply immoral and corrupt towards other groups. By the sound of it, that reading of their own government is correct. The West, by misunderstanding local priorities, is thus deeply distrusted because it is pursuing its own agenda.

Afghanistan might be the most extreme example because of the violent fighting that is taking place there, but we forget that Nigeria is made up of some 350 ethnic groups, Ethiopia of over 80. We forget that South Africa has 11 official languages and scores of unofficial ones. To start with, these divisions set priorities that we simply no longer understand. Germany developed from 17 different states (lander) into one federal country, but it has had the advantage of one common language and for most of the last 120 years a strong central government. Spain, in contrast, also has 17 autonomous regions and 6 languages, although Spanish, the language of the Kings that unified the country, has been the lingua franca of government and the elites for centuries. That, together with the physical power of the central government, kept everyone under one yoke. The West/Global North therefore starts with very different concepts of the most basic tool for delivery of governance and development.

What are the challenges to those among us who wish to offer opportunity to people in the South? Inequalities and opportunities in most poor countries need to be seen in a different light. For example, I would argue that at primary school children should be taught in a local common language, which might not be their own first language, but one that is prevalent in that geographical area. At secondary school they should continue in the same language plus a widely spoken common world language – possibly English or Arabic. If these rules are not followed, the children who learn minority languages only will never have the opportunity to access the higher levels of education or of job opportunities. Here you have an interesting potential conflict between those who say that the best thing for the poor is to be allowed to stay within their culture and those who say that modernity, the terms of which have been defined by us in the West, is the only way for them to get out of poverty in the long term.

This is but one of the many instances in which those in the North who are concerned with the South, should realise that definitions of inequality and opportunities are different in different economic and physical contexts. A more fundamental issue is the relationship between the individual and the state. We should not pretend that the state in most parts of the South will be able deliver the services that it does in our parts of the world; most people have simply no expectations from their governments and will do their own thing. Let us not pretend that we can solve other peoples’ problems in the abstract, which is what most of our governments seem to be doing. We can help directly – I am a great believer of that sort of initiative. A university group in the UK can communicate directly with a group in the South and help them directly. A school can help a school. But it must be done in the context of enabling societies to develop and take off, not to remain dependent on donations. To put it at its most basic, one should not give second hand clothing (except after an emergency) but one should help develop a local apparel industry – a far more difficult operation altogether. That will create new opportunities.

The world recession we are going through might well end up with a quite different outcome for most of the South, certainly for the poorest countries in Africa. The disengagement of the West/North will create a vacuum. China, certainly, and India, possibly, will have acquired more importance and influence on the economies of the countries from which they are obtaining minerals, in which they are acquiring land, and with which they are conducting far closer trade links than we ever did. Using their own technicians and often their own labourers to develop the infrastructure in the interior of many African countries will have far more long-lasting consequences that the colonial presence ever did. It will probably happen at the expense of personal freedoms. That should lead to question us the different dimensions we have to put to the concepts of opportunities. But Ghandi said ‘for a poor man, freedom is a loaf of bread’.

Thank you Benny for an interesting article. The issue of equality and opportunities are really the core of what UYDO is about, so we really believe that this is an important topic to discuss. I am looking forward to be reading your book.

This kind of clear thinking that tries to move away from development jargon is so important.

It is also, as you point out, essential that we all, as individuals do what we can. Even if that means something as small as assisting a single school develop their curriculum.

At UYDO we try to match up needs with skills and I hope that this will create sustainable, independant individuals and communities that can take themselves out of absolute poverty.