More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Resettlement schemes on frontiers, including forests, were typically financed by the World Bank, especially in Indonesia, Brazil, Malaysia, and India, and they usually privileged males as household heads—“one of the principal mechanisms of exclusion of women as direct beneficiaries.”69
Outcomes included leakage of credit funds to more powerful rural operators, displacement of hundreds of millions of peasants, and the incorporation of surviving peasant smallholders via credit into commercial cropping at the expense of basic food farming.71
In this way, the global consumer and the global labor force became mutually dependent.
Concessions to firms employing Mexican labor at a fraction of US wages and paying minimal taxes and import duties to the Mexican government were part of a competitive world factory strategy.
“Free trade zones … mean more freedom for business and less freedom for people.”
Simplification deskills assembly work, anticipating the global assembly line. As
This produced a bifurcation of the global labor force, with skilled labor concentrating in the First World and unskilled labor concentrating in the Third World.
The PRSPs are a form of crisis management, marking a new phase of IFI management of the global South.
Poverty governance also involves coordinating international NGOs with access to information and resources, enabling them to leverage initiatives within states.
policy is driven by a financial rather than a social/civic logic.
Poverty governance enhances institutional legitimacy at the same time it subjects societies to the market calculus and erodes the social contract. This has been the central impact of the neoliberal globalization project.
Coalition of Immokalee Workers in the tomato fields of Florida,
Above-world market prices are guaranteed.
“social premium”
cite this!
Displacement begins with depeasantization, even though agriculture is the main source of food and income for the majority of the world’s poor. While about 3.4 billion people across the world directly depend on the agricultural sector, more than half of the South’s population is agrarian, rising to 85 percent in some of the poorest countries.
Agriculture is also of great social, cultural, and environmental significance for rural communities. It tends to be particularly important for women, who have the main responsibilities for feeding their families and are estimated to produce 60–80% of food grown in most developing countries.56
The difference today is the feminization of global migration: 75 percent of refugees and displaced persons are women and children.
Migrant workers must surrender their passports on arrival;
For example, revival of subsistence farming may improve living standards over working as a rural laborer or existing on the urban fringe, as long as land is available.
relation between the “productive economy” and the “reproductive economy.”
the culture of informality, serving as a survival mechanism for the poor, was redefined by the World Bank as an economic resource, as social capital to be targeted by microlending.
“One hundred million people are moving to cities in the next 10 years, and it’s important that these 100 million are absorbed into second-tier cities instead of showing up in Delhi or Mumbai.”
Most Africans didn’t understand or relate to the nation-states created for them by the colonial powers; they understood, related to, and remained attached to the physical and psychological boundaries of their micro-nations.
“Close to $1.4 trillion were drained out of Africa” during the era of neoliberalism, far in excess of the total inflow of foreign aid, investments, and remittances.
As the Pope might claim, “This is a moral problem, which demands a moral solution, a turn away from the … problem of unrestrained appetite.”36
In neoliberal terms, then, unemployment is a matter of individual responsibility: “People came to be regarded as more or less ‘employable’ and the answer was to make them more employable, upgrading their ‘skills’ or reforming their ‘habits’ and ‘attitudes’.”38
Microfinance performs three tasks at once: providing credit to the poor as an entrepreneurial “leg up,” deepening market relations, and enlarging financial opportunity in the form of legitimacy repair.
Working through the NGO community in dispensing and monitoring credit and its repayment, microfinance simultaneously empowers and disciplines its recipients—an
Greece’s debt was amplified by first, concealment of prior debt loads (enabled by Wall Street banks), and second, irresponsible lending reminiscent of bank loans to Third World states in the 1970s.
groaning with indigestion.
But for most Indians, this was not a cause for nationalist celebration: “At stake is the livelihood security of 12 million small shopkeepers, 40 million hawkers and at least 200 million (of the 600 million) small farmers.”92 Such tension symbolizes the distinct worlds in play—that of small-scale Indian family enterprises versus the reach of the global market as its agents create new, selective high-growth markets. Meanwhile, 90 percent of India’s workforce toils in the “informal” sector.93
“The whole issue of development appears to be so simple, logical and commonsensical. And yet, to millions of Indians, development is a dreadful and hateful word that is aimed at denying them even the source of their sustenance.”
While affluent consumers are more likely to have access to healthy (organic) diets, the structuring of the food regime distributes highly processed high-calorie foods to poorer populations.115
50 percent of the world’s population) suffer from malnutrition.
A reason for not reducing the value of ecosystems to market prices is that their processes and elements are not independent units.
The wealth generated by Prudhoe Bay and the other fields on the North Slope since 1977 is worth more than all the fish ever caught, all the furs ever trapped, all the trees chopped down; throw in all the copper, whalebone, natural gas, tin, silver, platinum, and anything else ever extracted from Alaska, too.21
documentary
conventional development lens and are thereby easily marginalized; yet these environmental and social resources are central to ecosystem resilience.
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA),
The MEA
Two important lessons of this report were that the conventional development model has not understood the social and environmental significance of its ecological base (sources and sinks); and the interdependence of common pool resources (ecosystems) are understood and managed by precisely those populations often deemed “poor” by development agencies that then discount these forms of local
Complementing the substantial literature now on the greater overall productivity—and sustainability—of small-scale farming, an IAASTD contributor noted that a “half-hectare plot in Thailand can grow 70 species of vegetables, fruits, and herbs, providing far better nutrition and feeding more people than a half-hectare plot of high-yielding rice.”
Human Development Index (HDI),
If governments and the dominant sectors of society recognize the desire of individuals to belong and fulfill their ambitions even if they seem different from other sectors of society, and if they make spaces for individuals to pursue their personal ambitions in their own way, and at the same time give them the support they need, then there is a strong motivation and incentive to integrate into the rest of society.
(seen by activists as engaging in an urban “land grab”).
Gross National Happiness (GNH)
index of sustainable economic welfare (ISEW) or the genuine progress indicator (GPI).
“we have to change our values. We need to replace egoism with altruism, competition with cooperation and obsessive performance with leisure. But values are systemic … without a radical questioning of the system, the value change will remain limited.”
She notes much of women’s work and nature’s services are undervalued and unpaid, generally
somewhere much better to live than our current alienated consumer culture based on greed, war, and the myth of perpetual growth.
Bretton Woods: the founding site of the international economic system established in 1944, to disperse long-term World Bank development project loans and short-term International Monetary Fund monies to correct national imbalances of payments,
