Eva Cheng
The world was stunned when the Indian Ocean tsunami hit the shores of Asian countries in December 2004. It killed 300,000 people. But "slow-motion" disasters are unfolding every day with a killing power equal to three such tsunamis every month, resulting in the deaths of around 1200 children every hour in the underdeveloped countries.
Most of these deaths are easily preventable. The root cause of the problem is the institutionalised poverty of most the world's population — a product of centuries of colonial plunder and imperialist exploitation of the "Third World" by the business elites of the rich countries of Western Europe, North America, Japan and Australasia.
The super-rich families that own the big corporations and banks that dominate the world's economy are stepping up their drive to squeeze even more wealth out of the underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America.
In addition to using brute military force to impose pliant governments — as the US capitalist rulers have attempted to do with their invasion and occupation of oil-rich Iraq — the imperialist ruling families and their governments are imposing trade and other policies that are strangling the ability of underdeveloped nations to overcome endemic poverty.
At the same time, the economic and political elites of the rich countries continue to pretend that they are serious about eradicating world poverty. They draw up an endless series of paper plans to supposedly tackle global poverty, but impose policies on the Third World which make these plans unrealisable.
Five years ago, eight "millennium development goals" (MDGs) were agreed upon by the 180 member countries of the United Nations for completion by 2015. Those goals were:
- Halving the proportion of people living on less than US$1 a day and halving malnutrition.
- Achieving universal primary education.
- Eliminating gender disparity in primary and secondary schooling.
- Reducing deaths of children under five by two-thirds.
- Reducing maternal mortality by three-quarters.
- Halting and beginning to reverse the HIV/AIDS pandemic and other deadly diseases.
- Halving the proportion of people who lack sustainable access to safe drinking water and sanitation.
- Reforming aid and trade with special treatment for the poorest countries.
Five years on, how are things faring? The UN's 2005 Human Development Report, released on September 7, assesses: "Most countries are off track for most of the MDGs. Human development is faltering in some key areas, and already deep inequalities are widening. [No diplomatic formulations and polite terminology should] obscure a simple truth: the promise to the world's poor is being broken."
The report goes on to state that "nothing of substance has been achieved. Rich country trade policies continue to deny poor countries and poor people a fair share of global prosperity... [T]here is a real danger that the next 10 years, like the last 15 years, will deliver far less for human development than the new consensus promises."
The UN report observes: "Debates about trends in global income distribution continue to rage. Less open to debate
is the sheer scale of inequality. The world's richest 500 individuals have a combined income greater than that of the poorest 416 million. Beyond these extremes, the 2.5 billion people living on less than $2 a day — 40% of the world's
population — account for 5% of global income. The richest 10%, almost all of whom live in high-income countries, account for 54%."
The UN report measures human wellbeing by a three-dimensional indicator called the "human development index" (HDI), based on income, education and health achievements. Each member country is assessed and given a HDI rating every year.
According to the 2005 HDR, in 2003, 18 countries with a combined population of 460 million achieved a lower HDI than in 1990, emphasising that this reversal was unprecedented: "In the midst of an increasingly prosperous global economy, 10.7 million children every year do not live to see their fifth birthday, and more than 1 billion people survive in abject poverty on less than $1 a day. The HIV/AIDS pandemic has inflicted the single greatest reversal in human development. In 2003 the pandemic claimed 3 million lives and left another 5 million people infected. Millions of children have been orphaned."
Are the rich countries responsible for this disaster? Absolutely — they systematically undermine the poor countries in many ways.
Agricultural subsidies
One of the less visible but forceful means through which this occurs is agricultural subsidies. Led by the US and the European Union (EU), rich countries have actively sabotaged the main means of livelihood and export earnings of most underdeveloped countries through propping up the rich countries' agribusiness industry and capitalist farmers with billions of dollars in subsidies. This provides rich-country producers with an incentive to overproduce and then dump their produce on the world market in order to gobble up market share, knowing full well that this will destroy their mostly small-scale competitors in the poor nations.
Agricultural exports remain vital for most underdeveloped countries, even though a small number of them have increased their manufacturing activities and related exports in recent years. While underdeveloped countries as a whole increased their contribution in manufacturing value added at more than 5% a year — double the rate of the developed capitalist countries — in the two decades to 2000, the increase came almost entirely from east Asia. The developed capitalist countries still dominate manufacturing value added globally, with a 70%-plus share.
Some 50 underdeveloped countries depend on agriculture for at least 25% of their export earnings. Many of them, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, further depend on a very narrow range of commodities.
Manipulated by the dominant imperialist producers, prices for these commodities, except for short-term rises for isolated items, were locked into a downward spiral relative to manufactured goods. This seriously undermines the terms of trade and critical export earnings of many underdeveloped countries. In the five years to 2001, the combined price index for all primary commodities, in real terms, plunged by 53%.
Sugar is an example. According to the 2005 HDR, the EU pays its farmers and processors 400% of the world price for sugar, creating a 4-million-tonne surplus which is then dumped onto the world market, backed by $1 billion-plus in export subsidies.
The report points out: "The result: Europe is the world's second largest exporter of a product in which it has no comparative advantage... Subsidized EU sugar exports lower world prices by about one-third... [F]ar more efficient sugar exporters in developing countries suffer foreign exchange losses estimated at $494 million for Brazil, $151 million for South Africa and $60 million for Thailand — countries with more than 60 million people living on less than $2 a day."
Rice is another example. In 2003, the US government paid out $1.3 billion to US rice farmers, allowing them to export rice at $274 a tonne, a heavy discount from its production cost of $415 a tonne.
This has led to rich farmers in poor countries such as Ghana and Haiti being pushed out of the domestic market by cheap US rice imports. To rub salt to the wound, the International Monetary Fund disallowed the affected countries from using tariffs to restrict the flood of cheap rice imports, on the grounds that, as the 2005 HDR states, "there is no evidence of unfair competition"!
With these sorts of practices dominating the world market, is it any wonder that since 1980 the developed capitalist countries have been exporters of two-thirds of global agricultural commodities?
'Locked in depression'
According to the 2005 HDR, rich-country subsidies and import barriers are estimated to inflict $24 billion a year of lost income on underdeveloped countries. The report notes that "millions of primary commodity producers are locked in a depression more severe than that of the 1930s".
The imperialist countries — led by the US — not only refuse to reduce their farm and export subsidies in real terms, they are planning to increase them under various disguises from their current level of $350 billion a year.
As a result, the Doha Round of world trade-rule negotiations under the auspices of the World Trade Organisation, which has dragged on for four years, is deadlocked. The 2005 HDR observes: "The problem at the heart of the Doha Round negotiations can be summarised in three words: rich country subsidies."
Meanwhile, the imperialist countries have increasingly used bilateral trade agreements to force one poor country after another to accept terms even harsher than those proposed 0by the WTO, or to open their domestic markets up faster to rich-country corporations.
But the rich countries do not reciprocate by opening their market to poor-country exports. The rich countries slap much higher tariffs on imported Third World goods than those from other rich countries.
Rich countries also slap much higher tariffs on intermediate or final products than on raw materials (the main exports of poor countries).
"This tariff structure", observes the 2005 HDR, "prevents developing countries from adding value to their exports. Tariff escalation is designed to transfer value from producers in poor countries to agricultural processors and retailers in rich ones — and it works.
"It helps to explain why 90% of the world's cocoa beans are grown in developing countries while only 44% of cocoa liquor and 29% of cocoa powder exports originate in those countries... Germany is the world's largest exporter of processed cocoa, and European companies capture the bulk of the final [much multiplied] value of Africa's cocoa production."
Can anyone seriously believe that the death of 1200 children every hour from poverty-related causes isn't a systematic result of the imperialist countries' cold-blooded drive to maximise their corporations' profits?
From Green Left Weekly, November 9, 2005.
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