The Development Conundrum

An advert appears on the computer screen, interrupting your daily dose of YouTube, in the advert a young boy or girl appears, they look forlorn, their skin and bone more often than not pokes through ill-fitting clothes. Before the advert ends, you are told a sad story about the child you see on your screen, and you are asked for a small donation, which you are told will make a world of difference. If the advert has done its job, you will have decided to donate as large a sum as your heart will allow, if, however, as is increasingly the case, the advert has done nothing, you will move on and some other unsuspecting person will see the advert next.

This is the conundrum facing organisations such as Oxfam. They have a message and a clear goal but they are struggling to meet their targets; be it ‘making poverty history’ or some other noble goal, they are struggling. Global poverty persists and because of that, the common man no longer seems to care. 

Perhaps the answer comes from this simple fact: independent watchdogs have found that claims of a dramatic reduction in poverty have been massaged quite dramatically thanks to a statistical sleight of hand. The sleight of hand has focused on proportions rather than absolute numbers, shifting the poverty line downward in real terms and by claiming China’s gains against poverty in the 1990s as a global trend.

The reality, these watchdogs state is rather bleak. Take China out of the question and global poverty is exactly where it was in 1981, and that’s using the UN’s Millennial Campaign’s own $1.25 per day figure as a benchmark.  As such, most scholars now argue that this figure is simply not sustainable for someone to live well, they point to India where children who live on this line still have a 60% chance of being malnourished.

Instead, they suggest that in order to achieve a normal life, the current poverty line must be tripled and the salary must be raised to $3.70/day at least. If this was done, they argue, the total poverty headcount would be around 3.5 billion people, more than three times what the Millennium Campaign would have us believe. 

These are shocking stats, and beg the question, how have they come to be? Well, the answer it seems lies in the fact that International Development as an industry simply assumes that poverty is a natural phenomenon, a problem that exists out there in the ether, disconnected from the rich world. It assumes that it has to do with the climate or tropical diseases in poor countries, or because they don’t have the right tech, things that can be resolved if they are made more Western.

This allows for technocratic interventions led by experts such as MIT’s Poverty Action Lab, or in quick fads such as merry-go-round water pumps. These are solutions that avoid getting to the real root causes of impoverishment: political decision-making.

First it was colonialism and its extractive enterprises that beggared countries, then when that fell out of favour, it became coup-making to remove governments opposed to the West, then it became IMF interventions. The latter of which forced countries outside the west to adopt crushing economic programmes that left them paying a never-happy master. 

The result?

A roughly 10% shrink in the GNP of the average country in Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s and 1990s. 

So, what are the solutions?

Well, the one solution that seems to have captivated the minds of some within the development sector is this: the addressing of the imbalances in the global economy.

How?

By putting an end to structural adjustment, closing down tax havens, cancelling debts, democratising global institutions, placing a moratorium on land grabs and suspending free trade deals until they can be renegotiated under more democratic and transparent conditions (ensuring companies can’t sue governments who improve working conditions). This could well release countries in the global South from the syphons of the west and grant them more control over their economies. It would also transmute the outside consumer power of the rich into better incomes for the poor.