Two Myths that Keep the World Poor

Vandana Shiva has an unusually good grasp of the origins of poverty. I encourage you to read the whole article on the Awakened Woman site, but I'll post some of the relevant sections here.

Of Jeffrey Sachs prescriptions for ending poverty:

"He simply doesn't understand where poverty comes from. He seems to view it as the original sin. "A few generations ago, almost everybody was poor," he writes, then adding: "The Industrial Revolution led to new riches, but much of the world was left far behind."

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."[emphasis mine]

This is important. The dominant culture would have us believe that it was the "natural superiority" of European/Aryan culture that led to the settling of the West and the accumulation of wealth. There is nothing "superior" about savagery, and that is what has created the great wealth concentrated in Europe and North America. All of the "old money" in the world was created through slavery, rape, and genocide. And no, we aren't going to "get over it" and "deal with the current situation" because until white people OWN IT, and CHANGE IT, poverty will persist. No one is entitled to more than anyone else, especially not by birth.

"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'."[emphasis mine]

Again, we see someone claiming to be concerned with ending poverty, actually prescribing the things that create it. Our current market system is based on a fallacy - that there is not enough, and that there must be continual growth. All things in life, whether people, environmental elements and crops or markets and economies, are cyclical. Linear continual growth is impossible. Acting as if it is creates huge imbalances. Acting as if this should be our goal is what has created outsourcing of jobs to nations without labor protection, environmental laws and human rights enforcement.

"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.

Yet sustenance living, which the wealthy West perceives as poverty, does not necessarily mean a low quality of life. On the contrary, by their very nature economies based on sustenance ensure a high quality of life -- when measured in terms of access to good food and water, opportunities for sustainable livelihoods, robust social and cultural identity, and a sense of meaning in people's lives . Because these poor don't share in the perceived benefits of economic growth, however, they are portrayed as those "left behind".[emphasis mine]

In fact, sustenance living should be our goal. Even industrialized areas can participate in this effort by putting people ahead of profit, the environment ahead of expediency, and get to the heart of what it is to be human. People in the West have been raised to glorify the concept of "bigger, better, faster, more" and to assume that greed and selfishness are natural , normal parts of human behavior. We could not be more wrong.

There is nothing natural about greed, yet we glorify those who will lie, cheat or steal to get what they need. We exalt competition and scoff at cooperation, though through most of human history, we have lived in cooperative social groups. These groups only break down because of colonialism, racism, and ethnocentrism. If we are going to end poverty, we will have to embrace tribal values - living in harmony with our environment, using sustainable sources of energy, making peace and abundance rather than war and scarcity the organizing principles of our culture.

"Modern concepts of economic development, which Sachs sees as the "cure" for poverty, have been in place for only a tiny portion of human history. For centuries, the principles of sustenance allowed societies all over the planet to survive and even thrive. Limits in nature were respected in these societies and guided the limits of human consumption. When society's relationship with nature is based on sustenance, nature exists as a form of common wealth. It is redefined as a "resource" only when profit becomes the organising principle of society and sets off a financial imperative for the development and destruction of these resources for the market.

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.

A system like the economic growth model we know today creates trillions of dollars of super profits for corporations while condemning billions of people to poverty. Poverty is not, as Sachs suggests, an initial state of human progress from which to escape. It is a final state people fall into when one-sided development destroys the ecological and social systems that have maintained the life, health and sustenance of people and the planet for ages. The reality is that people do not die for lack of income. They die for lack of access to the wealth of the commons. Here, too, Sachs is wrong when he says: "In a world of plenty, 1 billion people are so poor their lives are in danger." The indigenous people in the Amazon, the mountain communities in the Himalayas, peasants anywhere whose land has not been appropriated and whose water and biodiversity have not been destroyed by debt-creating industrial agriculture are ecologically rich, even though they earn less than a dollar a day."[emphasis mine]

Keep in mind that even unspoiled environments are becoming polluted by the spread of genetically modified foods. We should never have allowed corporations to have rights to new life forms, and we need to be aware that many gm and hybrid foods do not produce viable seed. It is a mistake to give corporations such control of the food supply. Similarly, water is about to become a precious commodity, not only because of industrial and agricultural pollution, but because corporations are increasingly attempting to privatize access to water. This has to be opposed in every form if we are to prevent reducing the world into a feudal system controlled by only a few companies. Yes, we are approaching that now, but the people have to power to stop it if we all band together. Solidarity is the key to survival in the face of global conglomerates.

Shiva concludes:

If we are serious about ending poverty, we have to be serious about ending the systems that create poverty by robbing the poor of their common wealth, livelihoods and incomes. Before we can make poverty history, we need to get the history of poverty right. It's not about how much wealthy nations can give, so much as how much less they can take.

Business as usual will create poverty as usual. We need wide scale reforms, stronger environmental protections and a greater sense of fairness and harmony. It is all possible. We have the technology and the communication systems to enter a golden age of peace and abundance. The only thing lacking is the will to make it happen. Once we decide that it must be done, we will refuse to participate in systems that create poverty and deplete the environment. Nothing is worth the misery that uncontrolled greed is creating in the world. I'm not willing to let a few wealthy people become wealthier at the cost of the whole world - are you?