International Development – Who benefits?
The task of development is often seen as linking up those living in traditional economies to the economic mainstream. Around 2 billion people still live outside this or at its fringes. The mainstream has driven the once dependable, if limited, economies of millions of people to ruin. These economies are invisible to planners and treated as though they do not exist. The 1 billion people who supposedly live on less than $1 a day are dependent on their environment for water, fuel, food, fodder, housing materials and medicinal plants. When these are taken away, the enormous disadvantages to these people are never recorded as they are not based on money. They do not exist in standard economic analysis. The consequence to these people is rising social stress, although difficult to assess as figures for street children, prostitution, child labour, trafficking, forced displacement, early marriage, informal trading, casual employment and marginal incomes are elusive and unreliable. National state population averages for any indicator obscure localized downward trends and discrepancies amongst populations. This helps reduce the visibility of many disadvantaged groups and and allows false assumptions to be made about their lives. One of the most shocking characteristics of livelihood shrinkage is the way it leads to increased codification of females’ nurturing, childbearing and sexual capacities – resources at the bottom of the barrel when there is nothing else left to scrape.
Globalisation of the world’s economy has concentrated opportunities and rewards amongst certain groups while marginalizing others. The effects of corporate decisions reverberate all the way down to the alley, huts and shanties where poor people live. Their resource base is reduced, the prices they can get for produce and labour stagnate or decline, while those they pay for essentials rise and services that used to be free now have to be paid for. Yet, economic development is central to any significant advance in social wellbeing and there can be no release from poverty without economic growth. This at least, remains the central orthodoxy. However, if as presently constructed it actually prevents people form living productive, dignified lives then something needs to change. Instead of reducing gaps between North and South, rich and poor, development has caused them to widen.
A dedicated development process would be one that helped bring about and empathetic transition from a traditional way of life to one in which choice and opportunity are expanded and health and productivity improved. Much more investment should therefore be put into micro-development planning and implementation at a local level which builds bridges between informal and traditional economies and the modern domestic economy. If that means countries cannot pay off their debts, then debts should be adjusted or written off. The whole aid and development industry should redesign its machinery to respect hat what happens in the local context is central, rather than ornamental to the great national plan. Marginalised people are not passive victims. Their success at coping in the face of almost insuperable odds is evidence of resourcefulness. The vast majority live in an informal, and in some cases, invisible economy that needs to be supported, not eclipsed. Destroying the economy in the name of poverty reduction is the worst form of development hypocrisy.
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