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COPYRIGHT 2003 Plenum Publishing Corporation
Development processes, like the imperial and colonial processes that preceded them, involve both an ideology and a practice to justify investment and the extraction of profit on a worldwide basis. In order to overcome the growing wealth gap between the winners and losers in the process we have to go beyond analyzing and exposing the discourse that promotes inequalities. Ideologies that defend the processes grow like hydra-headed monsters, tangled in the rhetoric of those who would oppose the injustice of unequal exchange. With each inroad made by capital ventures in the remaining semi-subsistence areas of the world, a new ideological format is invented to mask the capitalist premises for reproduction on a global basis. These include the unequal exchange between the developed and undeveloped world, dependency and the subversion of democracy in the periphery, and the shifting of risk to the primary producers. The penetration of capitalist enterprises seeking new sources of oil, minerals, and genetic diversity now threatens to destroy environments that were the reserves of indigenous people.
I will critique three major trends over time in development economics and assess how some theoreticians have provided the ideological rationales for each of them. In the early decades after World War II, development models assumed a unilineal evolution toward industrial capitalist expansion as the unique journey to progress. Investments in capital intensive agriculture and assembly operations proliferated in less developed countries. This trend provided high profit margins to investors in the core industrial countries at the same time that less developed countries experienced a decline in the terms of trade for primary products. The growing dependency of developing countries on global financial and food markets reached a crisis in the 1980s when the second trend in development economics emerged. In this phase, development agencies and the institutional supports provided by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank promoted restructuring programs that shifted the burden of debt to low income producers and service suppliers in the developing economies and to tax payers in metropolitan centers. The critique, especially by anthropologists working at the grassroots level who perceived the impact of unbalanced growth, grew along with a shift in capital from developing countries to financial centers. We are entering a third phase in which neoliberal capitalist expansion appears to be the uncontested force in global development. In this third phase, theoreticians of development who were ignored in the past and new advocates are beginning to take the priorities of indigenous peoples into account. I argue that the course of autonomous development in this third phase not only enhances the life opportunities of indigenous families and communities, but will ensure the future of the environments that they have preserved since primordial times. This can only be achieved in the context of indigenous autonomy within the nation states in which they are situated, and with cooperation from transnational NGOs and a democratic civil society.
Development programs planned from above alienated indigenous people from their lifeways and environment, often destroying household subsistence practices that ensure the survival of families and life itself. I will bring this critique into perspectives raised by programs that indigenous peoples themselves generate. As custodians, indigenous peoples have proven their knowledge and skill in their continuous residence in environments that are havens for a rich diversity of faunal and floral organisms. This knowledge, and even the genetic diversity that women and men have preserved in the environment, are becoming commoditized as drug companies, geologists, and agronomists try to exploit them to their advantage. Aware of the violence and depredation of earlier penetration of capitalist enterprises, indigenous peoples, particularly women, are contesting capitalist development programs such as Plan Puebla Panama as the unique course. Paradoxically the successful integration of indigenous peoples in the global system will depend on their ties with transnational civil society and the communications networks put in place by globalization processes.
Development for Whom?
Development economics began shortly after World War II. In 1957 when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, I was hired by Bert Hoselitz and Richard Woll as a research assistant in one of the first large-scale study projects to look at development investments in Third World countries. Bert made the mistake of going to MIT and bragging about what they were doing, and when he returned and recounted what a great hit he was in Cambridge, I remember Dick jumping on top of a desk and raging "Bert, you just gave away a half million dollars." He was only half right, because MIT got in a proposal for a million dollars just before the Chicago proposal was finalized and sent to Washington. Chicago did get a few hundred thousand to start their research and to launch their journal, ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND CULTURAL CHANGE.
Development economics became a lucrative pursuit in its first decade from 1950 to mid-1960s, as academics invented the ideological base for promoting capitalist development throughout the world. The discourse of modernization presumed that Third World countries (those not aligned with the superpowers in the "Cold War") would, with the right combination of investment and disengagement from traditional pursuits, evolve in the same way as "advanced" capitalist countries. The objective was phrased as a benefit to countries in need of growth, never the need for new sites of investment to maintain the level of return to capital, or the urgency of seeking new consumers and cheap labor for industries in the metropolis. Buttressed with the rhetoric of the Cold War against communism, no alternatives to capitalist enterprise were admitted in policy-making circles where the needs and interests of the countries to be developed were ignored. Progress was defined unilaterally as industrialization in capital intensive enterprises measured in gross national product (GNP). This meant that only products that reached the market were accounted for since GNP did not measure the domestic production of goods and services for subsistence. As a result, women's work for their families was devalued, and women who persisted in household production of goods and services for their families with limited exchanges were categorized as unemployed. Measurement of growth in development economics was uniquely related to market sales, and unless products reached a market and were exchanged for money, they were not counted. This kind of thinking did not take into account improvements in the human conditions. In Mexico, for example, when President Lazaro Cardenas implemented the land reform act of the 1917 constitution in the 1930s, it was often treated as a failure since overall production in the country dropped. The fact that peasants are more and had more leisure time since they did not have to sell their labor on the plantations was not taken into consideration by most development experts. (1)
Walter W. Rostow set the pace for overseas development in 1960 with his book STAGES OF ECONOMIC GROWTH, A NON-COMMUNIST MANIFESTO. Inspired by the Cold War with Russia, it brooked no alternatives to capitalist development. Self sufficient household production was not even a reference point for progress since it was assumed that it would collapse of its own inertia. During this decade capitalist expansion into agroindustrial enterprises began to threaten the household production of food for autoconsumption, as petrochemical inputs in fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides were used to increase outputs in the so-called Green Revolution. In Asia, food supplies increased, but not all of the benefits went to poor families. As Joan Mencher (1978) and other feminist critics of development showed, the net negative impact was greatest on women who constituted the major work force in small-scale farms. Their jobs were replaced with technology--huge gas-guzzling tractors, cultivators, and reapers that drove out most small-scale producers and led to a concentration of land ownership. In Latin America the Green Revolution was delayed by land reform programs that were enacted in several countries. Mexico began to promote capital intensive agricultural production in the 1970s when Pemex, the national oil company, developed petrochemical production. The government then promoted the use of pesticides, fertilizers, and herbicides by offering low interest credit to campesinos. It took more than two decades for the small plot cultivators to realize the long term destruction to soils and the environment caused by chemical fertilizers. By that time the balanced traditional rural subsistence cultivation and artisan production was upset, and self-sufficiency in food production of Third World countries was seriously undermined.
It was also during the 1960s that the era of globalization was fueled by OPEC control over oil supplies and increase in energy costs. A dual discourse about development was initiated, with conservationists warning the major consumers of energy that sources of nonrenewable resources were limited, while financial advisers promoted direct export investment. The rapid movement of goods and people around the globe intensified as investors sought low-wage producers in countries with low tax rates and no environmental protection laws. Ecological issues became part of the discourse, if not the practice, of governments that still thought in terms of national advantages rather than global urgency. In subsequent decades two measurements (direct foreign investment and the terms of trade between core centers and the periphery) that were devised to show global integration also showed the deterioration of Third World economies. The former, that is direct foreign investments from core developed economies, were increasing exponentially, while the latter, that is terms of trade, were declining in Third World countries for the primary products they sold on the world market. For women who were trying to feed their families on the diminishing cash returns for their surpluses, the impact became a matter of life and death.
Theodore Schultz (1964) was one of the few mainstream dissidents in economics to challenge development from above and to reevaluate semisubsistence household production. Drawing from Sol Tax's (1950) careful demonstration of the rational allocation of productive efforts by Guatemalan indigenous farmers in his book, PENNY CAPITALISM, Schultz (1964) advocated their incorporation into modernization programs on their own terms. His stress on the need for a dialogue with the population being developed was ignored because of priorities that promoted U.S. enterprises in the world market. I recall one U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) official who was fired from his job in Guatemala in the 1960s when he succeeded in developing a native grain that substituted for the costly American grains required for highly bred pigs.
Despite the caveats of these far-sighted development critics, direct foreign investments (DFI) in highly capitalized enterprises such as hydroelectric dams and super highways multiplied exponentially as OPEC dollars washed up on the shores of developed capitalist centers. In contrast to earlier development cycles, accumulation of capital increasingly derived from this low-wage sector in assembly operations. Since women constituted a major proportion of the labor force drawn in to these operations, feminist scholarship became crucial in understanding the new arenas of capital accumulation. I will say more of that below.
Failure of Trickle Down Effect and the Critique of Development in the 1970s and 1980s
The development euphoria of the 1960s began to fade in the following decades as the assumptions based on the trickle down effect of capitalist accumulation proved inadequate to explain the persistent impoverishment of much of the population in countries that were experiencing "development" as measured by the GNP. This led to the second phase of development theory and practice in the 1970s that began with the growing problems in those countries targeted for development and surged with the feminist critique of development studies.
Ever more sophisticated rationales of the same inadequate data base held that a highly unequal income distribution is necessary to facilitate investment. Economic development "experts," who consistently left women and...
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