Development and social destruction

Population

Another reason why development cannot help combat malnutrition and famine is that it must inevitably give rise to population growth. The experience has been the same everywhere. As soon as a traditional society embarks on the path of economic development, its population simply explodes. It happened in Britain where the population was under 8 million when the industrial revolution began and where. it increased by more than 7 times before it eventually stabilised. It is happening to-day wherever economic development occurs throughout the Third World.

The populations of traditional societies, we tend to forget, were stable for centuries, if not millennia. They had to be, in order to preserve their social structure and their physical environment. The reasons for population stability were clear. To begin with they exploited all sorts of strategies that were built into their cultural patterns – such as taboos against sexual activity during lactation, and during the first years of widowhood, the prohibition against widow remarriage among certain casts in India, and many more, including abortion.

As a society’s social structure and cultural pattern are destroyed by development such population control strategies are no longer operative which means that the population in question is now out of control. Needless to say that the adoption of ‘hardware solutions’ to the population problem is very convenient to the development industry. If it was really adopted it would unquestionably stimulate considerable economic activity.

Indeed, according to Brown (1985), the World Bank estimates that to achieve “a rapid fertility decline ‘goal’ in Sub-Saharan Africa would mean increasing the amount of money spent on ‘family planning’ by 20 times – by the end of the century”. Think of the massive increase in the export of pills, condoms, IUCs and other forms of anti-birth gadgetry.

Interestingly enough, one of the official explanations of the population explosions is that, with development, food production increases, which means that more food is available to the local population which, in a true Malthusian manner, can be counted upon to breed up to the available food supplies. The opposite, however, seems to be true.

Let us look to the case of Ireland. During the 18th and early 19th centuries, the population exploded from 2 to 8 million. During that same period much of the arable land was taken away from the peasants by the big estates. That is why the peasants had to rely on the potato, the only crop that could feed a family from the small area of degraded land that remained at its disposal. During the course of the 19th century, an increasing proportion of food production was exported to England, and the exports were in no way reduced during the famine which killed something like 2 million people and forced another 2 million to seek refuge overseas.

The truth seems to be that, in an atomised society at least, the population explodes, not because it has more food to eat as conventional wisdom tells us, but because, on the contrary, it has less food to eat.

Of course we are assured that development will provide people with a new form of security, one provided by membership of the growing formal economy. As people become more secure, we are told, they will then have fewer children, as has happened in the West. What the development industry does not tell us however is that it is economic development that created the insecurity in the first place.

That the ‘demographic transition’ will occur in the Third World is in any case a pure act of faith. To begin with we are not at all sure why the population rate has fallen in the West. Is it in fact increased security, or are other factors implicated such as the fear of the future which looks ever grimmer or even the serious pollution of human spermatozoa, that has radically reduced the sperm count of young males in the western world and made a considerable proportion of them ‘functionally sterile’?

Anyhow, the economy of Third World countries is not expanding fast enough to absorb the growing hordes of unemployed in the cities and is never likely to, hence the security that participation in the formal economy could provide is available to an even smaller proportion of the population. The Third World can never conceivably attain the level of material prosperity we know at present in the West and which has indeed been associated however superficially with a reduction in fertility.

What is certain is that this ‘demographic transition’ is not occurring in the Third World today. If the rate of population growth has fallen very slightly in the dry tropics today, it is probably because of an increased death rate from famine, malnutrition and the diseases to which underfed people are particularly vulnerable. It is only by such a crude mechanism that development can help control the population explosion that it has itself brought about.

Development – a dead end

To pretend that the Third World can become developed like the West is both callous and cynical, as Ehrlich comments,

“It is perfectly clear that development of the underdeveloped countries into industrialised countries modelled on today’s overdeveloped countries is impossible.” [Ehrlich & Harriman, 1971]

One can draw up a veritable catalogue of reasons why this must be so. Let us consider but a few.

1. The historical experience shows that practically all the industrial countries of today have financed their industry with funds obtained from agriculture. It is no coincidence that Britain’s Industrial Revolution was preceded, in the 18th century, by an agricultural revolution which vastly increased food production.Unfortunately, however, such a surplus cannot be achieved in the tropics today. The important reason for this is that ecological and climatic conditions in the tropics would never permit the achievement of the required surplus.To begin with, rainfall patterns do not favour it, nor do the soils which are usually thin and low in organic content and thus very vulnerable to erosion by wind and water. [Biswas, 1979] Climatic conditions also favour thriving pest populations which are often almost impossible to control. [Wood, 1976] Livestock too is afflicted by a wide variety of internal parasites which seriously reduce yields, which are typically as much as four time slower than in temperate areas. [Biswas, 1979]Partly because of the long hot nights, net photosynthesis (photosynthesis minus respiration) is much lower than in temperate areas. [Gates, 1971] It means, as Chang points out, that
   

   “environmental constraints make it impossible for the tropics to compete economically with the temperate zone, and this goes a long way towards explaining why all the developed nations lie outside the tropics.” [Chang, 1977]

   What makes matters worse, is that conditions in the tropics are becoming still less favourable for sustained agricultural production:

   • rainfall patterns are changing, and for the worse, in part because of global deforestation and the chemical contamination of the atmosphere;
   • massive deforestation is leading to the drying up of streams and springs, while aquifers are depleted through over-exploitation;
   • erosion, desertification, water-logging and the salinisation of once fertile land are further reducing the ability of Third World countries to feed themselves, let alone achieve the agricultural surplus required to finance their economic development;
   • even where there is a surplus – for example, sugar or palm-oil – the market has collapsed. [Gott, 1985]

   The IMF admits that these trends are likely to continue with regard to most of the crops and indeed for most raw materials exported from the Third World. Many experts consider that these trends are not of a cyclical nature but are the results of structural changes that must permanently reduce the world market price of many food crops and, even more so of raw materials.

   In the words of Drucker (1986) “the primary products economy has come uncoupled from the industrial economy”. This is one of the major changes to have occurred in the world economy in the last decade.

2. Trainer (1985) notes that if Third World countries were to develop to that point at which their level of consumption was similar to that of Western countries, the impact of their activities on the environment would be 10 to 14 times greater. Indeed, to develop a country means, amongst other things, to increase its consumption of material goods. To pay for this means increasing production which in the Third World, largely means production from the land. As a result, the land is already being progressively eroded and desertified, a process that can only be reversed by reducing rather than increasing this impact. This means that in order to combat desertification and other forms of environmental degradation and hence to ensure the survival of Third World people, their consumption of material goods must decrease, not increase.Even if the world’s environment, by some astonishing miracle, were capable of supporting this increased impact, where would all the resources required for such development come from? Trainer (1985) calculates that if the world population by the year 2050 which is officially (though unrealistically) estimated to be 10-11 billion people, were to use as much energy as the average Australian does today, then:
   

   “world energy consumption would be ten times what it is, and at that rate recoverable resources of consumable fuels would be exhausted in 20 years. While 10 of the basic 24 minerals items . . . would be exhausted in about 35 years time.”

3. Efforts to develop Third World countries have so far failed, as we have all seen, in spite of the incredible sums of money invested in development. Why should they prove more successful today, in conditions that are incomparably less propitious? If the conventional growth-maximising approach to development could not do the trick for the Third World in the boom years 1950-1970, what are we to expect from here on when no one believes similar conditions will return for many years, if at all? What is more, Third World governments still have to pay for the unsuccessful development methods of the last decades. Even if they never actually repay the capital they have borrowed for this purpose, they must in order to obtain further loans which they badly require for financing further development, continue to pay the annual interests on these loans. Yet interest payments already absorb anything up to 80 percent of their foreign earnings, which means that there is practically no surplus left to finance further development.Significantly, no solution has been found to this problem. All that is being done is to put off the repayment of interest whenever a serious crisis occurs. But what good will this do in the long run? Why should countries who cannot meet their interest payments today be able to do so in the future? On the contrary, since most of their foreign earnings are derived from selling the produce of the soil and the soil is everywhere deteriorating to the point where yields are beginning to fall, it is only realistic to expect reduced not increased foreign exchange earnings with the consequent reduction in their ability to pay interests on loans.
4. The financial position of Third World countries is worsening for other reasons. At the same time political instability in the Third World leads businessmen and companies, both local and foreign, to transfer their profits to the safe haven that is the USA and Europe. Trainer (1985) considers that:
   

   “at least $35 billion passes every year from the South to the rich North through the adverse terms of trade, repatriation of profits. . . the brain drain, and interest payments. This is two and a half times what the West spends on aid.”

   Tinbergen (1976) considers when all factors are taken into account, $50-100 billion flow from the Third World to the rich every year.

5. There is a further factor which our economists do not appear to have even considered. One of the reasons why Western countries have been able to develop is that they obtained access to captive Third World markets and to cheap labour and raw materials from the Third World. Would they have been able to develop otherwise? It is extremely unlikely. This is one of the reasons why Mahatma Gandhi (1925) considered that India could never industrialise. He wrote,
   

   “to make India like England and America, is to find some other races and places of the earth for exploitation. So far it appears that the Western rations have divided all the known races outside Europe for exploitation and that there are no new worlds to discover.”

   Harle (1978) makes the same point. In general, he writes:

   “it has been found that the two separate worlds (the industrial and non-industrial worlds) are just different sides of the same coin. One side is on the top largely because the other side is on the bottom.”

Conclusion

There are many other reasons why the so-called developing countries could never become developed. There is no place to consider them here. The important point is that the Third World is being literally pillaged, forests annihilated, soils eroded, salinised, desertified, rivers dammed and polluted with industrial and agricultural chemicals, ground water reserves depleted and contaminated, societies destroyed and their inhabitants transformed into landless labourers and slum dwellers.

What is more, all this is being done in the name of ‘development’ – a goal, whose desirability has never been established and which in any case, can never conceivably be achieved, but which unfortunately satisfies the squalid short-term interests of the politicians, industrialists, businessmen, bankers and bureaucrats that make up the development industry.

References

The Foundation for Eco-development

The Foundation for Eco-development (Stichfing Mondiaal Alternatief/SMA) was founded by Ernst Bartels and Fanny Rosenzweig in 1972. It promotes the worldwide social and ecological need for a conservation strategy for the entire biosphere, and publishes the periodical Ecoscript. It is not linked with any political or religious organization.

Website: www.mondiaalalternatief.nl

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