Poverty
could breed
more bin Ladens
By JONATHAN
POWER
January 9, 2002
LONDON - A reader of a column of mine published at
Christmas on the social consequences of abandoned street
children wrote to point out that my prognosis that these
little Lords of the Flies would grow up as the new bin
Ladens, primed to wreck vengeance on established
societies, was mistaken. "Osama bin Laden's anger did not
develop out of poverty," she argued, "but out of a middle
class malaise". Of course. And so did Che Guevara's and
Stokely Carmichael's and that of Marx and Lenin.
But this does not exclude the undisputable,
well-researched, fact that poverty, particularly when it
exists in a society of gross inequalities, breeds
violence, crime and the urge to deal out deadly
punishment on conventional society. The leaders may be
educated; the shock troops often come from the
underclass. Besides, humanity has never confronted before
100 million youngsters growing up on the street, without
parents. Their anger, one day, will surely find a
political channel as well as the inevitable criminal
one.
I think, indeed, the argument can be taken even
further: there are 800 million people living in hunger
without sufficient nourishment. Many exist in a state of
political torpor, barely able to summon the energy to
plant next year's crop. But somewhere in the vast mass
there are those who seethe with anger at their
predicament. These days the mass media is ubiquitous,
reaching even into the poorest villages, telling all.
I'll never forget sitting on an African country bus,
filled with peasants holding their live chickens,
watching French-made videos portraying the most ghastly
violence. Ideas travel. The only surprise is that it is
has taken so long for a bin Laden type to hit us where it
hurts.
Enormous progress has been made since the crucial
World Food Conference in 1974 when it was realized the
world was entering a danger zone with food stocks the
world over perilously low. The U.S. Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger vowed in his speech "by the end of the
century no child should go to bed hungry". And indeed the
number of malnourished has fallen - as a percentage of
the total world's population. It is down from 37% to 18%.
But if it is no longer a billion people - it is 800
million with a good part of them concentrated in the very
poorest 50 or so countries who, while everyone else
prospered in the golden 1990s, fell further into economic
retardation.
Sartaj Aziz, a former minister of finance in Pakistan
and a key player at the World Food Conference recalls the
1970s as a "remarkably creative period ….the UN
system began to elaborate an alternative development
strategy focussed on the basic needs of the population,
poverty reduction, income redistribution and employment.
But before these new concepts could be translated into
actual policies a serious debt crisis struck several
Latin American countries and the International Monetary
Fund and the World Bank relegated these ideas to the back
burner. Privatisation and liberalisation were presented
as the panacea for all economic ills." These days,
concludes Aziz "there is no fiscal space for actually
implementing pro-agriculture and pro-poor policies".
Few development economists question the need for
continued liberalisation and globalisation. But what has
to go hand in hand with that is an awareness that the
richer countries have many of the most important markets
rigged in their favour and that particular effort needs
to be concentrated on the poorest and hungriest with
methods that often supplement or, if necessary, bypass
the market.
The World Trade Organization's policy of liberalizing
trade concentrates on high tech products largely of
interest to the richer countries, a few middle-income
developing countries and the multinational companies. The
simple manufactured products such as textile and leather
goods, which are of greater interest to the developing
countries, remain subject to many protectionist policies.
As for agriculture, in particular, which could open the
widest gate to the poorest countries, the rich countries
are spending $350 billion a year in subsidies, which
works to keep the potential agricultural exports of the
developing countries at bay and often enough sabotages
their internal markets with dumped products. This is
almost six times the total the rich countries spend on
foreign aid, of which, anyway, only about 10% gets spent
on projects that directly help the hungriest.
If one survives to grow up in this environment and by
some means of good fortune learns at least the rudiments
of why one's family and people were neglected, is it not
likely that an anger will burn within that one day might
find its true target? When it does happen we might
wonder, as with bin Laden today, why it has taken so long
for someone to rise up and hit us in the solar
plexus.
There were people who forecast a bin Laden twenty-five
years ago and they were not taken seriously. Both for
them and for us, let us not make the same mistake with
the "wretched of the earth".
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2002 By
JONATHAN POWER
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