Most of the world's poverty is not self-inflicted, yet apparently many seem to think it is.
My experience, living in Africa, tells me otherwise. Much of global poverty is imposed and I don't mean by evil "multi-national corporations" or "globalization." Those myths are easily debunked. The real causes of poverty in these nations are not hard to find.
First, however, I'd like to start with what is not the cause of poverty. People in poor nations are not poor because they lack ambition or are lazy.
When I first moved to Africa, I lived in small apartment. Almost immediately upon moving in there was a knock on the door. A woman asked if she could have a job cleaning for me. The idea was foreign to me. I even had negative emotions about people "exploiting" the poor and hiring them at low wages. I declined, but she begged. She insisted she was a hard worker. My dilemma was that I didn't have a lot of money. I told her that. She named a wage that seemed ridiculously low.
I could not pay her what I thought to be a decent wage. Yet, by refusing her services I was sending her away with nothing. Clearly, she did not agree with my evaluation of the situation. I relented and hired her.
When I moved to a house, the same thing happened. A woman with a child appeared at my door looking for work. She had no home and was staying in a small "maid's quarters" with another women she knew. The child was a grandchild that she cared for. I agreed to hire her without a second thought and then she asked if I had a place for her to live. There was a small building behind the house, with storage on the ground level and two rooms above it. I thought it insufficient but it was all I had to offer. She thought it fantastic and started clapping her hands with joy when she looked at it. It was a huge improvement for her.
I regularly had people asking for work, while few asked for hand-outs. These people were willing to work. In the streets of the city, I would pass hundreds of hawkers, with blankets on the ground, or just cardboard. They would have paper plates of tomatoes or potatoes or some other vegetable. Some sold handicrafts. They would sit on the ground from early morning until it was dark, trying to earn what most Westerners would see as small change.
Outside the cities, the industriousness of the poor was more apparent. In rural areas, women would walk long distances for water. Their homes, sometimes barely shelters at all, were built by themselves, as best they could. There were villages I would drive by, with every home built by the people who lived in them. People would plant small gardens to grow food. Some just planted flowers to make the desolation a bit more bearable.
But here is what else I saw. Periodically, the police would sweep through the cities confiscating all the goods hawkers were trying to sell. Hundreds at a time would lose everything they had, because they didn't have permits to sell their goods. Nor did the legal system recognize their property rights. It was not unheard of for governments to send in bulldozers and level entire villages because no land titles were held.
Throughout the continent, farmers were told they had to sell their produce to a central marketing board run by politicians or their families. Farmers would get paid at rates below the market price. The board would resell at full market value, keeping the difference for the politicians and their friends. Farmers who wanted to sell to others were often arrested for it. Many simply resorted to producing what they needed for their families -- nothing more.
In Zimbabwe, the socialist Robert Mugabe made much of "land reform." What this meant in practice was the destruction of hundreds of thousands of jobs. Wealthy farms were confiscated. Most went to the military, police officials, politicians and Mugabe's relatives. A few were turned into "collective" farms, where no single peasant farmer was allowed to own anything. They were moved onto the farms and left there. Anything they produced did not belong to them, so they did the only rational thing available. They plundered every scrap of value they could out of the property and returned to homes where what little they could produce belonged to them.
Throughout the continent, the governments would plunder the people. They created impediments, making it difficult to produce, and then plundered what little was produced anyway. The people had few, if any, property rights; neither in land, nor in their labor and its fruits.
The aid these vampire governments received was used to oppress people, to fund wars or police states. Here and there, a show project would get some funds and the Western media would lap up how beneficial foreign aid was for the poor. But thugs such as Mugabe would use the Land Rovers donated to them by the British government so police could round up dissidents who dared protest his tyranny.
The people were industrious. They worked hard. But without property rights in the fruits of their labor, or the ability to own the homes they built, they were impotent. Between impediments put in their way, and plundering of what wealth they succeeded in producing, the incentives these people had were destroyed.
These were not people born to be poor, nor did they earn their own poverty through choices they made. Poverty was imposed on them by the governments that ruled them. That they were able to produce anything at all is a testament to their industriousness.
In much of Africa, corrupt governments rule in collusion with the resource extraction industries (mining and oil companies) and foreign governments looking out for their corporations. So it's not an either/or situation, there's plenty of blame to spread around. Mugabe seems like an exception to this situation -- just as greedy, but in opposition to the West rather than in collusion. I don't see how you can generalize from Mugabe to all of Africa.
The IMF and World Bank also applaud a government for confiscating land from local landholders in order to build some large "development" project with borrowed funds. And in a prime example of denying local property rights, agricultural companies are making deals with African governments to secure access to arable land, reducing the actual small landholders to tenants or just kicking them off. There's plenty of blame to go around.
i disagree. its fairly straightforward, the same problems there are the same problems here, the difference is largely in what their gov'ts can get away with - and the margin between them and us is narrowing rapidly - and the orders of magnitude of the problems experienced.
here in canada we have people living in third world conditions, a large chunk of the population living in poverty. is it better here than there? sure, for some, but the difference is largely illusionary.
we have access to better services - theoretically - and a more constant supply of goods, yet we pay substantially more, and are taxed more, as well.
bottom line, we're all getting poorer, and for the same reason, the deck is stacked against us, and the owner class is printing funny money to buy up real assets, and leave us all in the gutter.
If you think poor Canadians like in "third world conditions," you need to actually travel around the third world a bit. Absolute poverty, like the kind that exists in much of the third world, is unbelievable terrible to our pampered Western minds. The relative poverty in developed countries would be like heaven to many of them.
the strategy thus far has been to make housing so ridiculously unaffordable that we all pile into communities and couch-surf, thus making the problem "disappear". reality is, poverty is alive and well in canada, and its being intentionally fomented by those in a position of power, utilizing their power to profit.
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1089015--northern-ontario-reserve-begging-for-evacuation#.Tsg0M_oS8CT.facebook
just an example. more exist, and are readily available if you're interested in actually reading them.
Colonialism may be over, but the colonialists created the lingering dynamics. Everything from the Cold War to aid packages has had non Africans deciding many issues since.
The contracts and bribes from multinational companies that encourage denial of property rights so resource extraction could continue is not the fault of Africans beyond the corrupt leaders.
The money and weapons we, the West, Russia and now China, give the corrupt to keep them in power and undermine elections cannot be ignored.
I can stick a feather in my hat and call myself an eagle, but it does not make it so. Likewise, an objective analysis shows Mugabe to be a corrupt crony capitalist no matter how he labels himself.
The land distribution as you describe it in the post does not match a definition of socialism.
The blame for the current state of affairs in Africa is shared.
Excusing the roles of the multinationals and calling it a myth is the part that is demonstrably inaccurate.
None of this is to say that no multi-national corporation has ever done anything evil. Businesses, like NGOs, can be corrupted when they access to state power and the use of state power will normally be grabbed by those who are rich and powerful for their own good. But multi-nationals have little presence in Africa and are only a very tiny percentage of the problem there.
The author dismissing their involvement is factually incorrect.
Denial of property rights was not an African idea. But then, any describing a dictator like Mugabe as a socialist and then defending the European colonialists who stole the best native lands and denied locals their property rights may not be a fair source of information.
I read many critiques that multinationals invest little in Africa and have little presence there. So which is it? Are they there too much or not enough?
And Mugabe has been quite open in describing himself as a socialist since before he took power in 1980.
Also, the International Society for Individual Liberty is working hard. See isil.org. They understand this.
So glad this article appeared...thank you!
All the other factors are other ways poverty is imposed on poor countries—particularly I think agricultural subsidies in the US and Europe and trade protectionism. Both those policies are very destructive, along with ethanol subsidies pushing up world corn prices making it harder for the poor to buy food.
Thanks so much for that article! I believe you are 100% right.
I suggest you touch base with the International Society for Individual Liberty at isil.org.
Thanks for your insight.