Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet (19 page)

As the sustainability advocate Gianfranco Bologna argued in Wackernagel and colleagues’ first
Footprints of Nations
study:

Western Europe and North America, when entering their period of rapid modernisation after World War II creating a modern consumer economy … contained “only” 440 million people (280 in Europe and 160 in North America). Today Asia—the region from Pakistan eastwards till Japan—has 3.1 billion people, more than half of the world’s population.
⁶⁶

The cornucopian promise of global prosperity needs to be considered in the light of these figures. The US or Australian rate of consumption is not a realistic goal for everyone, suggesting that American and Australian consumption will need to contract. If China alone were to use oil at the per capita rate of the United States, for example, it would require some 82 million barrels a day—only marginally less than the whole world currently uses.
⁶⁷
In the case of paper, Chinese consumption per person at US levels would take more paper than the world produces.
⁶⁸
Even consumption at the more moderate European rate, about half the US or Australian rate, is unlikely to be viable for China, let alone for everyone. When large increases in population are factored in, the idea of generating prosperity for all through accelerating economic growth would seem laughable if it were not the apparent intent of governments and businesses worldwide.

The Garrett Hardin approach, where the rest of humanity is abandoned to starve, is obviously unacceptable. But the consumer route to plenty is also fatally flawed. Strategies other than growth are thus clearly required to address the poverty that still prevails for almost half the world’s people. After a century that saw twentyfold economic growth, billions of people still lead precarious lives, indicating that growth has not been very successful in addressing their needs. Furthermore, if growth at twentieth-century levels and consumption at first world levels is not universally feasible, growth would be a questionable tool, even if it had a more promising record. Contraction on the part of the developed world appears to be an essential aspect of the only option in this as in almost all other issues of consumption and environment.

In the next chapters, I turn from the neoliberal pursuit of growth in the first world to the global south and the history of the application of the growth template to its people. Two interrelated questions loom. First, who has benefited and how successful has development been in addressing the imperative unmet needs of third world people? Second, what has happened to the natural environments on which billions of these people rely?

7

“Development” and Globalization: Exporting Growth

The house economy is based on livelihood; the corporation’s on acquisition.

—Arturo Escobar, 1995

The problem of poverty lies not in poverty but in wealth.

—Wolfgang Sachs, 1999

Colonial Roots

As indicated in the introduction, the world beyond Europe was progressively overtaken by the expansion of the past five hundred years. Unlike many of his disciples of more recent times, Adam Smith was alert to the uneven distribution of benefits from this protracted series of events. A late eighteenth-century witness, aware of the extraordinary commercial success of the colonial enterprise for the metropolitan powers, Smith did not observe any concomitant new-found prosperity among the conquered. Quite the reverse:

The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind.… To the natives, however, both of the East and West Indies, all the commercial benefits which can have resulted from these events have been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes which they have occasioned.… At the particular time when these discoveries were made, the superiority of force happened to be so great on the side of the Europeans, that they were enabled to commit with impunity every sort of injustice in those remote countries.… In the mean time, one of the principal effects of those discoveries has been, to raise the mercantile system to a degree of splendour and glory which it could never otherwise have attained to.
¹

The “misfortunes” occasioned by Europe’s superior force include the horrific fate of the indigenous people of Potosi (now Bolivia), forced to mine silver for Spain in the sixteenth century; the Moluccan Islanders’ spice trees, ripped out by the Dutch to preclude competition in the seventeenth; the depredations of the slave trade, visited on West Africa for several centuries; and Congolese rubber tappers, enslaved into the twentieth century by King Leopold of Belgium, who ordered the amputation of their children’s limbs when they failed to meet quotas of rubber production for the lucrative new bicycle trade.
²

The state of the world and its people today is largely the legacy of that history. Whole continents were appropriated, their natural resources repatriated back to Europe, and regimes of property ownership suitable to European goals and interests were frequently imposed. The newcomers carved out entities to suit themselves, imposing boundaries where none had been, boundaries that often proved inappropriate and irrational when the colonies were launched as nations after World War II. As the world outside Europe was progressively reconfigured to harvest this “splendour and glory” for the rich world and its allies, its indigenous peoples were infected, murdered, enslaved, and dispossessed.

The strategy of promoting increasing consumption has been touted as one that will solve the enduring poverty of the erstwhile colonial world. The notion is popular, as
APEC and the Rise of the Global Middle Class
suggests, even though, as the figures demonstrate, the gross numbers of the (non-middle-class) poor are not predicted to decrease under this plan (discussed in chapter 6). Even before the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, poverty was expected to be reduced only in relative terms and, given the risks built into the market economy, might not be ameliorated at all. The financial crisis, when it came, cut across this optimism. The UN Children’s Fund
³
warned in June 2009 that an extra 100 million people were going hungry in South Asia alone compared to the situation two years earlier. Later that month, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) stated that more than one billion people were going hungry every day for the first time in human history. Although the FAO noted a reduction during 2010, it warned that renewed increases in food prices would reverse this trend and that economic growth alone would not solve the problem. Food prices did rebound in 2010 and, though they have declined again, have not returned to the levels seen before the price upsurge that began in 2007.
⁴

The central strategy offered to the rest of the world by the spokespeople of the rich has been the expansion of the prosperity “pie,” though methods of pie inflation have varied. A bigger pie will do the trick, we have been told for sixty years, with planned development as the method in the first thirty years and a version of free trade in the next thirty. In both scenarios, the poor would ultimately get a decent slice and the rich could expand their opulence. In this approach, the rich need not concern themselves with any call for fairness or redistribution; nor need there be any accounting of the historical debt of the European cultures to the people they colonized.

Progress and the Development Discourse

Although the idea of Western-style economic development for poor countries is taken to be natural, inevitable, and the self-evident solution to poverty in 2013, this was by no means obvious as World War II drew to a close. Indeed, during the preceding centuries of colonial rule, the metropolitan powers tended to suppress any competition their colonies might offer, and the European rulers of much of the planet were not particularly distraught about the poverty of the ruled. Australian economist H. W. Arndt’s semantic history of the concept “economic development” suggests it made only scattered appearances in public debate through the early twentieth century. “Material progress” and “economic progress” were much commoner terms; these did not imply intentional pursuit but, rather, were expected to flow naturally from profit-making activities.
⁵
Only after the war did “economic development” gain ground, with the stated agenda of raising the per capita income and the national welfare of entire populations. By 1960, a whole new academic field of development economics had defined people’s well-being in terms of economic growth and the exploitation of resources.

President Truman’s inauguration speech in January 1949 marked the point where the United States signaled its intention to extend modern industrial production to every corner of the earth:

More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate, they are victims of disease.… For the first time in history humanity possesses the knowledge and the skill to relieve the suffering of these peoples.… I believe we should make available … the benefits of our store of technical knowledge in order to help them realise their aspirations for a better life.… What we envisage is a program of development based on the concepts of democratic fair dealing … Greater production is the key to prosperity and peace. And the key to greater production is a wider and more vigorous application of modern scientific and technical knowledge.
⁶

The new development economists
⁷
pursued the Truman vision and regarded technology and capital accumulation as the major elements of human progress. Prominent among them were Yale graduate and high-level government adviser Walt Rostow and Caribbean-born W. Arthur Lewis, who spent much of his academic career at Princeton and shared the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1979.

In
The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto
, published in 1960, Rostow described five stages of economic growth, with apparent confidence in their inevitability. Stage one societies— traditional “pre-Newtonian” societies—lack science and technology, which sets a ceiling on productivity. The second stage prepares societies for “take-off” as modern technique is applied and the centralized nation-state is established. In stage three, when the nation “takes off,” savings and investment surge and “growth becomes its normal condition.” Take-off is followed by stage four, a longer period of consolidation, as investment and savings increase and the new surge in profits is reinvested. In the fifth stage the economy graduates to “the age of high mass-consumption,” considered by Rostow to be the hallmark of economic maturity.
⁸
Curiously, Rostow never mentioned coal or oil—or any kind of fossil energy—as the driver of the growth he regarded as the ultimate stage of history, preferring human-generated “science and technology” for that role. Nor did he or any of his colleagues question whether the template of the past could be automatically applied to the present.

Lewis’s influential ideas were summarized in his 1954 essay, “Economic Development with Unlimited Supply of Labour.” He saw the “underdeveloped countries” as composed of two worlds, split between a “primitive” sea of economic darkness and rare islands of urban light where the Westernized men of the future had already embraced suits, European languages, Beethoven, and philosophers like Mill. The gradual displacement of traditional cultures and subsistence livelihoods by the industrial money economy was both necessary and inevitable. “Take-off” demanded increased savings as the first step toward the accumulation of the capital on which all progress depended; these savings could occur only within the elite:

We are interested not in the people in general, but only say in the 10 percent of them with the largest incomes, who in countries with surplus labour receive up to 40 percent of the national income … the remaining 90 percent of the people never manage to save.… The central fact of economic development is that the distribution of incomes is altered in favour of the saving class.
⁹

This argument, suggesting that income must be concentrated in the elite classes, contradicts Truman’s supposed objective of bringing solace to the mass of the people “living in misery”; as for “democratic fair dealing,” there was certainly no plan to ask
them
what they thought or wanted. Equally problematic, the home-based savings effort envisaged by Lewis occurred only rarely, and whatever take-off materialized relied on foreign investment and borrowing from Western banks. It was transnational corporations that accumulated most of the capital rather than the local people.

Arturo Escobar, a Colombian anthropologist and critic of these development theories, quotes a 1951 UN committee on which Lewis served:

There is a sense in which rapid economic progress is impossible without painful adjustments. Ancient philosophies have to be scrapped; old social institutions have to disintegrate; bonds of caste, creed and race have to burst; and large numbers of persons who cannot keep up with progress have to have their expectations of a comfortable life frustrated. Very few communities are willing to pay the full price of economic progress.
¹⁰

The World Bank and various UN development agencies were centrally involved in drawing up plans for numerous countries, often without input from the people. Escobar, who witnessed the bank’s first big plan for Colombia, noted how little say Colombians had in the process.

The theories of development on which almost all the interventions were based harbored two key assumptions. In the first place, economic growth was regarded as an inevitable stage of human civilization, a natural and linear progression from more “primitive” social forms to modernity, with European history providing a universal template. Second, economic growth was seen as a process of indefinite duration, with no limits in space or time.

For the descendants of the Europeans (me among them), modernity has been a considerable blessing. Women, certainly, have more rights to independence and fairness than in most other stages of known history. Both men and women in Western countries have been progressively freed from the threat of famine and starvation that recurred through feudal times in Europe, and the majority of first world people have enjoyed some measure of material security during most periods since the early twentieth century.