National Security: The Quest for Stability
&
Sustainable Development
(Part III: Poverty & Western Model of Development)
Adal Isaw
November 13, 2009
As noted in part II of this article, poverty, hunger and disease overlap boundaries. These bedeviling enemies of humanity have found their victims even in the Western world. Hence, to a greater or lesser extent, they’re now surely world-wide phenomenons that subject the lives of many nations to misery. To overcome these miseries, the lumping of poverty, hunger and disease together may not be that important, since a solution to remedy poverty suffices to handle problems associated with hunger and disease. The focus of part III of this article as in part II, therefore, will be on poverty but with emphasis as it relates to our country—Ethiopia.
In many instances, our government has identified poverty as the single most challenging enemies of Ethiopia. The identification is correct and the detailed prognosis about poverty and the needed remedy that should come in the form of our development plan is in place. Hunger and disease are attributable to poverty and this very fact is cogently argued by many academics, think tanks and public policy institutions. And the Ethiopian government is not the first entity to identify it as such.
Cognizant of how poverty is afflicting tragedy in the many lives of cross-national communities, the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, for example, argues that "everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services." Nonetheless, for the billions of people of our interconnected world, these rights have become increasingly inaccessible for reasons that are complex and hard to find a solution—even in the form of aggressive policy interjections. These human needs require many kinds of human resources and more than anything, they require a fair global system of production, distribution and overall international trade practices.
In our inter-connected world, cross-national resources are managed and dictated directly and indirectly by many forces interacting at the same time and in a very orderly fashion. Consider food: Food is not at all in short supply. In fact, food products have never been so abundant. There is enough available food to provide each of the Earth’s inhabitants with at least 2,700 calories a day. But production alone is not enough and the people who need food must be able to buy it. People who are in need of food as a result of natural or human reasons have only two choices—they either have to buy it or get it from donors and there is no going around it. And here is precisely where the problem of poverty is introduced to the equation of food shortage and hunger.
In part II of this article, it’s noted how Ethiopia’s poverty is not peculiar. Facts based on several studies confirm, that poverty has a global nature and no poverty-stricken state lives by itself isolated from the rest of the ever-increasingly interconnected world. Any viable development plan that’s geared to ameliorate and overcome poverty therefore needs to seriously consider the market of international political economy. A native development plan may not sit well with international rules and regulations on trade for which Ethiopia is one of the signatories. It requires a great deal of aptness and in fact shrewdness at times, to have a development plan that benefits Ethiopia more than it benefits its powerful trading partners.
For many years, the Western world has a model of development for underdeveloped countries such us ours—often referred to as the “South,” “Third World” or at times more specifically as “sub-Saharan Africa.” The Western model argues for employing trade as an “engine to growth.” It underscores that Ethiopia would be able to specialize in the production and export of one or more major products. Earnings from such export, supplemented by foreign aid and investment, would also provide Ethiopia the income it needs to invest in industry as it transforms its economy from an agriculture base to an industrial base. The only problem with this model is the fact that it doesn’t work, and, instead of ameliorating the conditions of poverty of the underdeveloped countries, it in fact exacerbates it.
Since its advent in the 1950’s, the Western model of development has been rendered futile in many areas of the world. For example, an entire region of Central America has been the case study to show why such a development model has failed. In fact, the complex political crisis in Central America is traced to have evolved from this precise development model.
By pressure or mere influence, Central American governments have had a long history of pursuing agricultural policies that support the expansion of export crops and livestock production. This led to enclosure of traditional peasant lands for the modernization of agricultural export products—an action that induced the concentration of property in the hands of a small minority. This action in turn created basic structural inequalities as a result of newly formed labor relations—marginalizing and impoverishing the rural population. Not surprisingly, for many families, diminished access to land led to poverty expressed by greater dependence on wages earned seasonally from large farms. This has to be a great lesson to Ethiopia. And to a sizeable degree, this is precisely the route of development that EPRDF is unwilling to take. But critics of our government and others are bent to implement Western model of development if they ever have the chance—to change the central economic policy of EPRDF on land.
To this end, some opposition groups and other critics of the Ethiopian government are openly advocating privatizing land, so that this very Western model of development takes effect to modernize Ethiopia’s agriculture for mass production that may include one or few major products for export. These critics are willing to employ trade as an “engine to growth” after specializing in one or more products for export besides our coffee—with hope to use the earnings from such exports to invest it in industry to transform Ethiopia from an agriculture base to an industrial base.
Some opposition groups and critics forget that in our interconnected world, a massive global market for international political economy is at work—blindingly favoring the developed world. And less of a reasonable overhaul of this asymmetric global market of international political economy, it will be very hard to solve the causes of poverty in our “Third World” to which Ethiopia is part and parcel. To a greater extent, the development problems of Ethiopia to overcome poverty can be directly attributed to the international structure of trade, which is rigged against underdeveloped countries that Ethiopia is a part.
The terms and conditions of international trade work to the advantage of the developed and powerful nations. For example, prices received by the underdeveloped countries for their exports—foodstuffs, coffee, minerals, copper and other metals, fibers and raw materials—have dwindled for most part since the 1940’s, while the prices paid by the underdeveloped countries for manufactured imports continued to rise to this date. In the mist of it all, these poverty-stricken countries are still being forced to export more of their raw materials at cheaper prices, driving down local wages and subjecting them to unrelenting poverty.
Furthermore, underdeveloped countries often face tariffs and other trade barriers imposed on their agricultural goods, semi processed metal and wood products, and labor-intensive consumer goods. While on the other hand, developed and influential nations implement protectionist trade measures to facilitate the growth of their economies. To this advantageous end, the developed nations don’t work alone but have helping hands like GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and other organizations whose liberal trade policy objectives, regulations, and procedures usually mirrors the interest of its richest and most powerful Northern industrialized nations. These nations use GATT and other organizations along with direct pressure, to bring down underdeveloped nation’s tariff barriers, exposing their young and infantile industries to competition with more mature industries of the developed nations. These are the few hard-core problems faced by nations such as Ethiopia in their quest to sustainable development to overcome poverty once and for all. The question then becomes, how should Ethiopia go about solving the daunting problem of development to overcome poverty?
If Ethiopia is to stay with very limited preferred trade status from many of the developed nations and without a change to the asymmetric international political economic relations, the present alternative development strategy should be pursued with consistency and some degree of clarity. Ethiopia should continue to be hospitable to diverse development and trade partners. A very close development and trade relations with very powerful and influential states should come with few but not serious strings attached to it. Sovereignty should dictate and a serious development and trade partnership with the US for example should come in the form of America giving Ethiopia a unique preferred status. US should see Ethiopia’s partnership as unique for all the strategic interests it has in the entire region, and it has to be willing to allow Ethiopia’s growth continue without forwarding a development plan that promotes the privatization of land.
Land should stay a common asset to all Ethiopians and its usage shouldn’t in any way create the conditions seen in Central America and many other countries. The usage of our land should not primarily focus on expanding the production of export crops, but rather on producing the staples needed for Ethiopian consumption until tangible food security is achieved. Keep in mind; what makes land a common Ethiopian asset is not only the fact it is not saleable, but the very fact that it should primarily and always be used to benefit Ethiopians first and foremost.
If land is used in ways as it is argued by the Western model of development, our endeavor to sustainable development will be hampered by perpetual poverty—the very challenging enemy that we have set ourselves to fight to begin with. In addition, we have to make sure to set-aside some out of the millions of hectares available for agricultural production, to meet our future challenge of a serious demographic change. In few decades, our country is destined to be the populous nation in Africa and millions of hectares leased for 10 decades should not in any way become a waiting time capsule for fresh and acute political, economic and social contradictions. To succinctly and metaphorically put it, Ethiopia’s land usage with respect to our development plan should be treated in the same meticulous manner as a brain surgeon deals with his patient. Land is the only life defining common asset that Ethiopians have and squandering the use of it in ways that’s not helpful to sustain and better the lives of Ethiopians is tantamount to loosing it.
Improper land usage may sway our development plan into a lane that may funnel the wealth of Ethiopians in few hands thereby creating the greatest divide between the haves and the have-nots of our citizens. The only guarantee we have from not having to swim in a lake of such bedeviling scenario is if we have to keep lad and its usage to primarily benefit the majority of our citizenry. The remedy to our abject poverty resides in our zeal to keep land the primary common asset to all Ethiopians, and also on our aptness to use it in efficient manners to produce products that primarily benefit the Ethiopian consumer.