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The Army of the Poor Continues to Grow
By Chakravarthi Raghavan
Poverty is demeaning, depressing, dehumanising. And for the poor it is a dead-end, a state from which neither they nor their children can escape. The poor aren't poor because some god or fate so ordained it, but because they are like those at the bottom of a sand-pit: the more they struggle to get out, the more they dig themselves in .
Gandhi in 1919 went into Champaran, a village in Bihar state of India, to inquire and take up the problems of tenant farmers of British plantation landlords who were locked into growing indigo plants.
He went to one tenant-farmer, and insisted on meeting the women in the house (a hut) to learn first-hand. Three women came out of the hut in turns to see him, and he was puzzled and irritated until he found, the three shared one sari in that household and only one could appear at a time before him clothed.
This led him to his movement to free the country from the British rule, and his swadeshi movement and for village self-sufficiency of basic needs, for hand-spun and handwoven cloth, village industries etc and dignity of labour - a process of production and distribution with built-in egalitarianism .
There are two indisputable facts of current reality. Firstly, poverty and inequality within and among countries have grown; the number of the poor has grown in the world, in the South and in the North. And in the South the poor are in the majority. Secondly, issues of poverty and inequality, have provided work to a growing army of institutions, governmental and non-governmental - a whole army of economists, statisticians and policy advisors and advocates.
And poverty keeps growing, along with inequality .
Every institution now brings out reports on poverty and gender, and economists keep writing papers, without really adding anything new to our knowledge of the causes of poverty and how to eliminate it .
Gunnar Myrdal tackled this question in a book he published in 1970: 'The Challenge of World Poverty: A World Anti-poverty Programme in Outline,' and many of the things he said there, and identified as the causes of poverty and inequality (and its growth) are true today .
And the chapters in his book on trade, aid and aid fatigue, are as relevant now as then. He identified international trade and trade theory as creating inequality and poverty in the under-developed world .
He said of the theory of international trade (the classical Ricardian theories, the subsequent factor price equalisation theories and the Hechscher-Ohlin theories and models), "...this imposing structure of abstract reasoning implicitly had almost the opposite purpose, that of EXPLAINING AWAY THE INTERNATIONAL EQUALITY PROBLEM." Myrdal says the biased approach of the theory is due to unrealistic assumptions of stable equlibrium, and a number of other assumptions related to that. Even later writings of international trade theory, he notes, had been retained more tenaciously than in other parts of economic theory. Another unrealistic assumption of theory is the notion that 'economic factors' as elements of social reality can be abstracted from all other factors to analyse international trade .
This 'strange direction of theoretical interest', and the almost total lack of interest among economic theoreticians in the field of international trade to explain existing and growing inequalities in the world is "A BIAS OPPORTUNE TO PEOPLE IN DEVELOPED COUNTRIES." "The easily observable fact," he says, "is that governments and people in general in developed countries feel so much less of a bad conscience in the trade field than in regard to aid has undoubtedly much of its explanation in the unrealistic and biased theory of international trade, established as of old. The fact is that, contrary to theory, INTERNATIONAL TRADE - AND CAPITAL MOVEMENTS - WILL GENERALLY TEND TO BREED INEQUALITY AND WILL DO SO MORE STRONGLY WHEN SUBSTANTIAL INEQUALITIES ARE ALREADY ESTABLISHED." The emphasis in the quotations are Myrdal's own .
The exponents of free trade and neo-liberal economics keep bringing out studies and econometric data, claiming to show that the poor are benefitting from trade and that if the cake keeps growing, poverty will be reduced. But the cake has been growing for decades, and the poor keeps increasing. Long-term historical data and projections cited by neo-liberal economists (as in the recent WTO study 'Trade, Income Disparity and Poverty', far from showing trade or growth by itself reduce poverty or inequality through convergence in incomes, show in fact that these took place during the era of the welfare state and state intervention, but inequalities are increasing in the new Market order.
And the IMF, World Bank and the WTO by their pamphlets, glossy publications and long-term projections are only fooling themselves, and fast eroding their legitimacy. No one believes these studies or politicians citing them. The army of the poor is growing, and the poor knows the reality .
As Gandhi said in India, soon after Champaran: "Even God dare not appear before these hungry people, except in the form of food."
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