land grabbing in Africa

I have just been sent this excellent report from the NHK World Service on land grabbing in Africa. It is well worth the 9 minutes it takes to view. Note that the first 8 seconds the screen is blank.

hypocrisy over Haiti

The horrific earthquake that struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital, on Tuesday has apparently destroyed large parts of the city and will result in tens of thousands of deaths: the Haitian Prime Minister is already saying at least 100,000 have died. As communications were restored, the world started to respond: the US, United Kingdom, France, Canada, Germany, China, Mexico and Venezuela all pledged immediate support in terms of personnel, cash and supplies, while the Inter-American Development Bank, the United Nations and the World Bank have all released money to be used for emergency relief.

No one should doubt the extent of Haiti's need in the face of the worst earthquake to rock the country in 200 years. But the reality is that the need has been present in Haiti for decades. The response of the global community to the calamity is necessary: but Haitians have been living in a calamity for years. More to the point, some of the very countries that are rushing to the aid of the country are the ones that are responsible for the systemic calamity that Haitians have had to endure. The hypocrisy in evidence over the Haitian earthquake is breathtaking: the countries and their corporations that have mired Haiti in poverty must now be seen to be 'doing something' because a global media event demands a response. They rush in, having created the very conditions that enabled the earthquake to be so deadly.

Haiti, the first country to overthrow colonial slavery and achieve independence, is the poorest country in the western hemisphere. Two-thirds of its population of 10 million live on less than US$2 a day, and two-thirds of the population still live and work in the countryside. Yet Haiti is a prime example of the fact that poverty is not a naturally-occurring phenomena: it is created, and has been created in Haiti.

Between 1957 and 1986 Haiti was brutally ruled by Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude, or "Baby Doc". Their private militia, the Tontons Macoutes, killed tens of thousands as the country lived in fear. As was common during this period, the United States, which had occupied the country between 1915 and 1934, turned a blind eye to the terror in its backyard, as the Duvaliers were fiercely anti-communist. But there was more to the support of the US than just political ideology: there was also an economic interest at stake, because during the reign of the Duvaliers Haiti set up two tax-free export-processing zones in Port-au-Prince, with, at their peak, 180 factories assembling light manufactures for US transnationals exporting into the US market. So Haiti had a classic 'dual' economy: a small enclave of a manufacturing sector owned and operated by US capital that generated dollars for the Haitian elite, surrounded by a vast agrarian hinterland; beyond the small number of jobs that were generated in the export-processing zone, the linkages between the enclave and the hinterland were minimal. This economic structure became the modern foundation of the extreme inequality that has characterized Haiti since independence and which continues to do so: within the French-speaking minority that constitutes Haiti's ruling class, 1 per cent of the population own nearly half the country's wealth even as the Creole-speaking black majority remains impoverished.

The political instability that has rocked Haiti since the overthrow of the Duvaliers in a military coup in 1986 has its origins in this profound inequality. A vibrant civil society fought it; it was from civil society that Lavalas, a popular movement for social change, emerged, and their candidate, the Roman Catholic priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was elected President in 1990. Yet when Aristide's government started proposing radical reforms that challenged the interests of Haiti's dominant class, the military intervened again in support of the status quo. It was only a US-led intervention that forced a return to constitutional government in 1994, and that intervention came with a price: the restored government of Aristide had to implement an IMF-led structural adjustment program. Radical reform was overthrown, along with the military, by the US intervention. Aristide was de-fanged--he now lives in exile in South Africa--and the former radicals that had confronted the Duvaliers and the military starting scrambling for the crumbs of elected office as the boundaries between political parties and urban gangs faded and the state became increasingly dysfunctional.

One aspect of the structural adjustment program was particularly pernicious: the country had to dramatically reduce import tariffs on rice, the staple food of Haitians. To an uninformed outsider, this might seem sensible--why not import rice that was cheaper than Haitian rice? But the impact of this reform for the bulk of the Haitian population, who were peasant farmers, was nothing short of catastrophic. Even in the late 1980s Haiti was self-sufficient in rice, which meant that Haitian peasants could make a rudimentary living selling their surpluses for urban consumption. Cheap imports undermined Haitian rice farming, and hence peasant livelihoods, and now 2 out of every 3 spoonfuls of rice that are eaten in Haiti are imported.

The wanton destruction of Haitian farming massively contributed to the deforestation that plagues the country and, through the latter's impact on flooding, severely aggravates the destructive impact of the tropical storms that periodically sweep Hispaniola. It forced hundreds of thousands to leave the land to search for non-existant jobs in the cities: a lucky few were able to migrate to the US or Canada, but most ended up unemployed and living in squalid shanties such as Cite Soleil, in wooden or tin shacks, with no running water, no sewage systems, and no electricity. Cite Soleil, the outcome of an economic policy foisted on the country by outsiders, was at the epicenter of the destruction on Tuesday.

Cheap rice imports sustained the perverse inequalities of wealth, power and privilege that define Haiti's ruined political economy. Where did those rice imports come from? The United States. From which countries did the rice trading companies originate? The United States. Structural adjustment may have been a disaster for Haiti's agrarian economy, but, as I argue at length in a chapter in my forthcoming book Hungry for Change? Farmers, Agrarian Questions and the Global Food Crisis, it was a boon for Louisana's rice farmers and trading companies.

That the United States and other advanced capitalist countries, which propped up the Duvaliers in return for cheap manufactures and then not only neutered radical reform but indeed destroyed the livelihoods of Haiti's peasantry, should now express dismay at the destruction of Port-au-Prince compounds the depth of the tragedy on Tuesday: to the social wreckage wrought by decades of foreign tutelage and about which we did very little there now lies physical wreckage, to which we will respond.

Jeffrey Sachs: back to the future

Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs is now one of the most internationally respected development economists. He is the head of the Earth Institute at Columbia, which is responsible for the UN's 'Millenium Villages', where efforts to co-ordinate and concentrate activities and interventions to achieve the Millenium Development Goals within a feasible time span are undertaken. In doing this work, Sachs has recently written about the need for state intervention in the development process, drawing upon the example of Malawi.

Malawi has a long history of food insecurity and shortages during the 'hungry season'. To combat this, the government has introduced a farm input subsidy scheme. For a cost of US$5 per Malawian, or US$60 million in total, seed and fertilizer are provided to farmers at less than the cost on the market. Farmers can buy up to 2 50 kilo bags of fertilizer at subsidized prices. High yielding maize seeds are also available. The results of this intervention has been a huge increase in farm production, with good crops being helped by unseasonably good rain. Yields too have soared. The result is that Malawi has, for the first time in years, a grain surplus of around a million tonnes. The country is planning to export some grain.

That subsidizing seeds and fertilizer increases farm production and farm productivity could only be surprising in a neoliberal world. Enabling poor farmers to improve their livelihoods has always required working against markets, rather than working with markets, as markets do not respect the asset-poor, they respect the asset-rich, who can affect the terms and conditions by which market activities take place.

What is surprising about this welcome change of course in Malawi--would that it were replicated across sub-Saharan Africa--is the way in which Sachs has learnt the lesson that this 'investment in famine prevention' demonstrates how intervening in markets can generate improvements in food security for millions. This is surprising because Sachs was, in an earlier life, the godfather of structural adjustment in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It was Sachs that advocated the 'big bang' approach to transition, in which all prices were liberalized as quickly as possible, assets privatized, and markets created, in order to rapidly build capitalism. It took eastern Europe years to recover from Sachs' 'shock therapy'. Yet Sachs now seems to believe that the very things that he did not advocate in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union should be applied to sub-Saharan Africa. It is all very peculiar. I only wish Sachs had learnt this lesson a long time ago. Countless lives would not have been ruined by him.

the end of the peasantry?

I have spent most of my professional life working in an area that, within the political economy of international development, is called 'the agrarian question'. Simply stated, it is an approach to rural change that tries to understand how changes in rural life do or do not contribute to the development of capitalism, both in the rural economy and more widely.

For the past 10 years or more, there has been a debate within agrarian political economy concerning the relevance of the agrarian question in an era of globalization. The proposition is straightforward: that as a consequence of globalization, the current form of imperialism, the development of capitalism in the rural economy is simply irrelevant to transnational capital. Capital is formed globally, and national capitalisms are now not relevant to its transformative 'project'. This debate is explored at length in my next book, Political Economy, Rural Transformation and the Agrarian Question: Globalization and Peasant Livelihoods.

Does agriculture matter any more, in today's globalized economy? Is the peasantry finished, a relic from an age that does not exist anymore? I have been thinking about this over the past month, both in Europe and in Canada, and it has struck me that this kind of thinking is predicated on a particularly modernist reading of change and development.

We live in an age where an ideology of progress holds firm. In other words, we believe, in our very soul, that human history is a constant movement forward, as problems are solved and our species slowly and fitfully 'progresses'. This motion is highly modernist: that we live in a times where science and technology propel change that will eventually be beneficial. Marx held to this notion; so did Adam Smith; and so does the World Bank.

The problem is that history shows us that progress is not inevitable. In the 10000 years since the human race began settled agriculture, and the 4000 years since 'civilization' emerged, ironically, in the modern day hell that is Sadr City, there have been many instances in which, rather than moving forward, societies have come to a halt, and indeed, regressed. Where progress has given way to retrogression. With retrogression has come technological collapse, and a loss of abilities to solve problems that had already been solved. In other words, human history is marked by periods of retreat, not progress. Invariably, this retreat is always associated with some kind of agricultural collapse, and the consequent inability of civilizations to feed themselves, allowing a degeneration of social order into conflict and death.

Our ideology of progress is so firmly rooted in us that we cannot imagine the idea of an agricultural collapse--although many parts of the world live it, day in and day out. Nonetheless, agricultural collapse may--and I hedge my bets here, and stress may--be staring us in the face. The median predictions of climate change that are currently accepted by those more knowledgeable than I suggest that the increase in planetary temperature in the next 40 years or so will result in end of wheat production in the second biggest wheat producer in the world--India. Of course, Indian wheat collapse will be partially offset by wheat production elsewhere--but that offset will only be partial. With this, and with the consequent possible collapse of grain production in many other parts of the world over the next half century (Argentina? Ukraine?), the idea that progress has rendered agriculture redundant to international development seems a non-starter. So it is. Indeed, it is probable that rather than facing the end of the peasantry, the death of the peasantry, we will soon be living in a world where a peasant's ability to feed themselves will be, once more, fought over by those who cannot or will not feed themselves and who have the resources and coercive power to take what they want.