The fact that you are reading this makes you one of the lucky ones. There are many, many people – consciousnesses like yours and mine, behind eyes like ours – who do not have the leisure to sit down to read a book; the money to buy the book in the first place (or the means to borrow it); or the education to learn how to decypher the code of black symbols in which the book is written. They don’t even enjoy a respite from the pangs of hunger which is necessary to concentrate on anything except finding the next meal.
We’ll never meet these people. They live in countries we’ve never been to and never will go to and we only have the faintest idea about their lives through reading newspapers and watching television. We’ve reclassified their countries from ‘third world’ to ‘underdeveloped’ to ‘developing’ but the terms amount to the same: human societies which aren’t doing materially as well as ours. Whatever name it goes by, this ‘other’ world is hard to think about. For one thing, it seems unreal. How can anyone be starving when the local supermarket now sells fresh saffron-scented pasta? As Bob Geldof puts it, “to die of want in a world of surplus [is] not only intellectually absurd but equally morally repulsive.” And then, the scale of the problem is just so massive. How can you visualise a billion people in a hundred different countries? News correspondents do their best to show us case histories to represent the faceless masses but does that help us understand the problem and its necessary solutions?
Which leaves us feeling vaguely sorry for those less fortunate than ourselves; vaguely guilty for the way we live; and probably a little indignant on behalf of those who suffer towards those we perceive as causing or exacerbating the problem: corrupt elites, repressive regimes, greedy multinationals or whoever.
Primed with compassion, you can do your bit. If you give a little of your time and money, change your consumer habits and buy fair trade produce, you will certainly be able to mildly improve half a dozen lifestyles elsewhere on the globe without causing much of a dent in your own. But if humanity wants to make an impression on the big kahuna of world poverty, it is going to need something more than individual voluntary effort. So, the optimist must ask several questions: are we, as a human race, doing enough? Are things getting better? Are underdeveloped countries developing? More importantly: are lives being improved?
To answer these questions it is necessary to make several mental adjustments to our perception of the problem:
Mental adjustments
1. Rather than bandy about global statistics we need to have a sense of how these break down into national, local and individual experiences of life and be aware that statistics are never static – there are always rates of change to take into account. 2. To talk about ‘the developing world’ as a whole is
meaningless. The ‘developing world’ is not one thing but many countries developing at different
rates. More than that, it is many regions, many communities, many families, many individuals all balancing tradition and change as best they can. If we imagine the developing world as one enveloping blanket of seamless misery we do everyone in it a disservice.
3. The word ‘developing’ may be well-meant but it is slightly loaded in that it implies that all countries should head in a particular direction of progress. 4. It is easy for isolated but all too frequent events like
wars and famines to obscure our view of the developing world. What we see on the news does not necessarily reflect the long-term situation. 5. We are connected to ‘them’; we share the same
world. This is becoming ever more evident with the growth of the internet and it is not just a platitude. Ultimately, our well-being is tied with theirs. The economist Jeffrey Sachs advises us to pay attention to ‘the weakest links’ if only for our own selfish good.
“In an interconnected world, all parts of the world are affected by what happens in all other parts of the world, and sometimes surprisingly so. And we are learning to treat them with respect rather than our patronage.” The best example of this interconnectedness is economic migration: if we feel our health, welfare and education systems are overburdened by immigration our best recourse is to create employment in the countries of origin of the migrants. Says Sachs:
“The way of solving problems requires one fundamental change, a big one, and that is learning that the challenges of our generation are not us versus them… we are living in a cloud of confusion, where we have been told that the greatest challenge on the planet is us versus them, a throwback to a tribalism that we must escape for our own survival.”
6. Charity begins at home. It is a mistake to think that all social problems are far away and that we can help other countries without helping our own poor and disadvantaged.
“Five countries of Northern Europe have long met the 0.7 percent of GNP commitment.” Jeffrey Sachs points out.
“These are: Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. The striking thing about the aid performance is the very strong correlation between a country's international aid and its care for the poor at home. Countries that take care of their own poor also tend to help the world's poor. Countries that neglect their own poor tend to walk away from their international responsibilities as well. In brief, the social welfare model of Northern Europe helps the poor both at home and abroad.”
7. Our aim should not be to give people in developing countries what we think they need but to empower
them. “You cannot develop people,” said Julius Nyerere, first president of Tanzania. “You must allow people to develop themselves.”
This is a potentially revolutionary thought as they may not choose to use the power we give them in ways that we like. They may, for instance, reject free market policies and democracy or cling to a religion we consider repressive. But would we want to be told how to run our affairs by some central African country? According to Bob Geldof –
“The countries that succeed, sometimes admirably, do so by ignoring all the advice of ‘the experts’ and finding their own culturally appropriate model.”
Good development replaces a vicious downward spiral with a virtuous upward spiral, in which all elements work together: healthier people with an increased life expectancy means more workers to build the economy.
8. Money is important but it is not just about money. Sometimes it is about imagination. Says Sachs:
“One of the odd things about this world I've found in my twenty-five years of work on economic development, is that the war and peace community, so called, and the development community, almost never speak. There are no links between them. If there's a conflict, call in the generals, never call in the hydrologist.”
Taking all these provisos into account, it is possible to conclude that things are getting better. According to Indur Goklany, American economist, former delegate to UN intergovernmental panel on climate change, and author of The Improving State of the World (Cato Institute, 2007) every objective measure of the human condition is improving even if world population is rising (see ‘Poverty’ and ‘Life expectancy’). And as countries get richer, Goklany claims, they get cleaner, healthier and more environmentally responsible.
It is always necessary and possible for the developed world to do more for the developing world and we must strive for an ‘instable equilibrium’ whereby we demand more of ourselves but acknowledge what we are doing and what has been done. The future for developing countries is not as good as it could and should be, but is not as bad as it once was.
Sources
The Rough Guide to a Better World, by Martin Wroe and