|
Development :
The Essentials
Ted Trainer
For more than 20 years there has been a convincing alternative or critical
position on development, arguing that conventional development theory and
practice are fundamentally mistaken. Yet this critical analysis is totally
ignored by virtually all official development literature, agencies and
projects.
Following is a brief summary of the critical view.
1. The Third World is not
developing satisfactory. Despite significant improvements in some indices,
such as infant mortality, after 50 years of “modernisation” most Third World
people remain extremely poor and the conditions in which the most desperate
one billion live became worse in the 1980s.
2. In the last 50 years there has been a huge amount of development. But it
has been grossly inappropriate development. Cities have boomed, airports and
Hilton hotels and export plantations have been built, but the developments
that are most necessary to improve the living conditions of the poor majority
have been largely ignored.
3. It has mostly been development in the interests of the rich. Development
has mostly benefited the few who are rich, the small urban middle class of
technocrats and bureaucrats, the foreign corporations and the consumers in the
rich countries. The typical Third World country has basically been developed
only into that form which give businessmen the best access to its exploitable
wealth; the forests, soils and cheap labour.
4. This is the inevitable result in a global economy driven by profit, market
forces and growth. Of course, those with capital will only want to develop
the activities which maximise the return on their investments. In other words
the appalling poverty and misery of billions of people and the failure of 50
years of development to do much to solve their problems is directly due the
market forces and profit.
5. Hence we can state the most important of all economic laws: GROWTH
DEPRIVES! If your development goal maximising the rate of increase in
business turnover in production for sale or GNP, then you will facilitate the
flow of development resources into those ventures that will produce for richer
people, because that’s what will do most to increase sales and GNP.
6. The obvious fact is that very, very little ever trickles down. After
decades of this development ideology the poor majority in most Third World
countries remain extremely poor while a small group has taken almost all the
benefit.
7. Fundamental to the tragedy has been the warped concept of development that
has been assumed. Economic growth has been taken to be development, or to be
the key to it. Even now almost all official thought and action about
development is basically only about trying to get the economy going (although
they sometimes say it is not enough to have growth and they do now make some
effort to attend to the problems this causes).
8. The most important point of all which the conventional economist
steadfastly refuses to recognise is that there is no chance whatsoever of
Third World people rising to the material living standards typical of the rich
countries today. There are nowhere near sufficient mineral, energy or
biological resources to make that possible.
9. These are the absurdly impossible implications of conventional economic
theory and practice. It is difficult to understand the ideological forces
which continue to blind almost all economists, politicians and journalists to
the fact that conventional economic thinking has locked us into an impossible
and catastrophic path. At least 50,000 people, mostly children, die
unnecessarily every day because we are pursuing a development model that does
not and cannot work for the majority.
10. The saying that sums up the situation irrefutably is “The rich must live
more simply so that the poor may simply live.” Satisfactory Third World
development is not possible until the rich countries stop hogging far more
than their fair share of the world’s dwindling resources and move way down to
resource use rates that all could have.
11. The global economic system and conventional development work in the
interests of the rich, including people who live in the rich countries. We
get most of the world’s scarce resource output, about 20 times the per capita
resource consumption of the poorest half of the world’s people. We develop in
the Third World the industries that will harness their resources, their
capital and their cheap labour mostly to producing for us. A great deal of
rich world aid, military equipment and diplomatic activity goes into making
sure that Third World countries keep to the development policies that serve us
(and their ruling elites). If they show any sign of changing to a
development strategy that might gear their resources to the needs of the
people, they are very likely to be invaded by the rich countries on the
pretext of stamping out communists subversion. The most important fact of
making this domination possible is the unquestioned belief that the best,
indeed the only way to develop is to facilitate economic growth, i.e., to do
what will get more business turnover going.
12. Most distressing of all is the fact that there is an alternative. Once
you scrap the vicious deception that development is about economic growth and
start asking “What would be appropriate development for the people?” You
realise that, for rich and poor countries, development has to be about
achieving (a) relatively simply but sufficient material lifestyle, (b) within
small, highly self-sufficient local social control, not left to the freedom of
transnational enterprise or the whims of the global market, (d) which use
mainly, but not entirely, cooperative systems and above all (e) a zero growth
economy; one in which we can just produce as much as we need for high quality
of life on the minimum amount of work, production and resource use, with no
desire to increase GNP or consumption or “living standards” year after year.
(Ted Trainer, Professional Studies, University of New South
Wales).
Back
to Contents |