The racist double standards of international development

The claim that we are making 'wonderful progress' against global poverty is a fallacy based on a colonial mindset.

Year after year, the luminaries of international development, from Bill Gates to Jim Kim, Nick Kristof to Steven Pinker, line up to tell us about the wonderful progress that has been made against global poverty. According to the most recent estimates, published by the World Bank, there were "only" 734 million people living on less than $1.90 per day in 2015, down from 1.9 billion people in 1990.

It sounds like wonderful news. But there is a problem with this narrative. Oddly enough, there is no empirical basis for the $1.90 line. It is an arbitrary threshold that has no grounding in actual human needs. Empirical evidence shows that $1.90 per day is not even enough for people to secure decent nutrition, to say nothing of other basic requirements. In fact, at least 3.5 billion people live on more than this, and yet remain trapped in poverty.

It is important to recognise that the international poverty line is adjusted for purchasing power. When we hear $1.90 per day, we commonly assume that this means the equivalent of what an American might be able to buy with that amount of money in, say, Sudan or India. But exactly the opposite is true. It is the equivalent of what $1.90 can buy in the United States. Just think for a moment about what this means. It is virtually nothing.

To get a sense for how low this standard is, the economist David Woodward once calculated that to live on the international poverty line in Britain, in an earlier base year, would be like 35 people trying to survive "on a single minimum wage, with no benefits of any kind, no gifts, borrowing, scavenging, begging or savings to draw on (since these are all included as "income" in poverty calculations)." This goes beyond any definition of "extreme".  

This brings us to an important question. Why is it that the barons of international development judge the lives of people in the global South by $1.90 per day, when everyone agrees - including the World Bank itself - that this standard is far too low for a human being in the global North? For comparison, the poverty line in the US is $15 per day.

There is a clear double standard here, and it does not take much to recognise that it is racist. There is one standard for the (majority white) people of the North, and another standard for the (majority Black and brown) people of the South. It is a colonial logic that remains with us today, and goes unchallenged year after year.

Some try to justify this disparity by saying these are totally separate economies, and so they require separate standards. But this premise - the idea of separation - is simply not true. The economies of the North and South have been integrated into a single global system for at least 500 years, ever since the onset of colonialism.

We know that the rise of the North depended on cheap labour and raw materials extracted from the South during the colonial period. It depended on silver stolen from the Andes, rubber from the Congo, grain extracted from India, as well as sugar and cotton grown by enslaved Africans on land stolen from Indigenous Peoples.  

This might seem like ancient history, but the very same arrangement remains in place today. People in the global South sew the clothes that Steven Pinker wears each day. They assemble Bill Gates' laptops, including the one that Nick Kristof uses to write his columns. They grow and pick the bananas and berries that Jim Kim has for breakfast. And then there is our coffee and tea, the coltan in our gadgets, the oil that fuels our industries, the lithium we need for electric cars … everywhere we look, it is overwhelmingly clear that we live in a single global economy. 

In fact, trade data shows that high-income nations are totally reliant on resources and labour from the South. In 2015, high-income nations appropriated a net total of 10.1 billion tonnes of materials, and 379 billion hours of human labour from the rest of the world. There is an enormous net flow of resources and embodied labour from poor countries to rich countries. 

One cannot have it both ways. You cannot have a single global economy when it suits you to use the labour and resources of the poor, but then insist on separation in order to measure their lives by different standards. That is the logic of apartheid.

Global capitalism depends on resources and labour extracted from the South, and yet the people who render it - including those who work in the factories, mines and plantations of multinational companies - receive but pennies in return. Pinker and Gates tell us to celebrate when workers in the South go from one to two dollars a day. But would we celebrate if we learned that workers in the North were earning two dollars a day, while employed by the biggest brands in the world? No. We would be outraged. Because for workers in the North we apply the standards of morality and justice, yet for workers in the South we apply the standards of bare existence.

The analogy to apartheid is appropriate. South African law required one wage for white people and a much lower wage for Black people. Those who benefitted from this system insisted that it was natural: just how the market works. Economists devised elaborate arguments to explain why Black people's labour was worth less - ignoring, of course, that the economy depended on it.

Similar arguments persist today. Economists say that workers in the South have lower wages because of lower productivity. But it is not true. Keep in mind that in many cases they are working for the same companies with the same technology (say, a GM factory in Mexico, or a Nike sweatshop in Bangladesh). In fact, Southern workers are often more productive than their Northern counterparts, as they work under much more extractive conditions. And yet they are paid as little as 1/30th the amount - for the same work, in the same industries.  

For 500 years, capital has relied on the devaluation of lives in the global South, whether it be through colonisation, dispossession, genocide and slavery, or, more recently, through structural adjustment programmes, free trade agreements and corporate land grabs that depress the costs of Southern labour and resources. The $1.90 line is the legacy of this long history. It is part of a colonial ideology that sees people of colour as cheap.

In the 21st century, in the era of Black Lives Matter, we can no longer accept the racist double standards of international development. We must reject the logic of apartheid. If we are going to live in a single global economy, then we must demand a single standard for all human lives: that all people receive fair wages for their labour and fair prices for their resources. This is the principle that international development must demand, if it is to have any moral standing. This is what real progress looks like. 

 Dr Jason Hickel.

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/racist-double-standards-international-development-200707082924882.html

Extreme poverty in Brazil

Sao Paulo, Brazil - Marcos Alves da Silva stands in the kitchen of his home where he lives with his wife Maria de Lourdes, their seven children and four grandchildren.

They live on Morro da Mutuca, a hillside community of red brick homes, flanked by Atlantic Forest, with unpaved streets that turn to thick mud when it rains, in Parelheiros, a poor semi-rural district on the far-flung outskirts of Sao Paulo.

Since Brazil plunged into a deep recession three years ago, 40-year-old Marcos finds work increasingly scarce. The informal day jobs he does as a bricklayer or handyman pay less than they used to and he often ends up going to the streets to collect scrap and recyclables to sell.

"In the past if I earned 100 Brazilian real [about $24], it would be enough to buy lots of things at the supermarket," he says. But these days he'll work for just 30 real (less than $7.50).

The family's kitchen cupboard contains just half a bag of rice, some flour and salt. The fridge is broken. Inside are some bottles of water and a plastic bag filled with small chunks of pink meat.

"These are the leftover fatty bits, we ask the butcher shop to give them to us," he tells Al Jazeera.

In less than two weeks, Brazilians will head to the polls to elect new president and representatives, but voters here in Parelheiros have little faith in politicians, with extreme poverty and hunger on the rise. Experts blame high unemploymen from the recession and falling incomes, coupled with deep austerity measures. 

High unemployment, extreme poverty

In the run-up to Brazil's last elections in 2014 unemployment was at a record low and the country was removed from the UN Hunger Map.

Exact figures on how much extreme poverty has risen since then are hard to come by. 

According to one study undertaken by Action Aid Brazil and Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analysis (Ibase), extreme poverty rose from 5.2 million people in 2014 to 11.9 million in 2017, based on the July 2017 definition of extreme poverty, which includes those living on less than 102.44 real (about $25) a month. 

For Sao Paulo's LCA Consultancy, using data from Brazil's Continuous National Household Sample Survey (PNAD), extreme poverty rose from 13.3 million in 2016 to 14.8 million in 2017, using the World Bank's definition of living on $1.90 or less a day.

Unemployment remains stubbornly high at 12.3 percent or 12.8 million people, according to Brazil's Institute of Geography and Statistics, a scant recovery since its 13.7 percent peak in early 2017.

Experts say unemployment rates will continue to recover slowly, with most the qualified the first to benefit and the poorest last.

"Any initial economic recovery will not reach people in extreme poverty," says Cosmo Donato, an economist at LCA. "They are historically disadvantaged."Marcos's wife Maria has been unemployed for two years and does odd cleaning jobs when she can.

"Thank god, something small appears for me every now and again but it's really difficult," 43-year-old Maria says.

Native people in the United States: discrimination and poverty

In the United States the most serious discrimination against Native Americans starts in schools, and pervades all aspects of a Native American's life as time goes on.

Native American children attend dilapidated, below-standard schools, some of which date from the Great Depression era. The government is supposed to look after the federally-financed schools, but this task is seemingly beyond their ability, or just beyond their ability to care. 

In addition to 81 students, Little Singer Community School is also home to asbestos, mold and scores of mice. Students have to carry their seats from class to class, presumably because the school can't afford chairs for each classroom.

"We have little to work with, but we make do with what we have," Verna Yazzie, a school board member, told the Associated Press. Yazzie's school, Little Singer Community School, is located in the Navajo Nation. 

The school, AP notes, is "marked by remoteness, extreme poverty and few construction dollars." The government added it to a priority replacement list a decade ago, but cut the school budget in 2013. Under such conditions, it's no wonder the quality of education suffers. In 2013, fewer than 25% of Little Singer Community School's students were proficient in reading and math.

This isn't an isolated incident. The federal government is responsible for 183 native American schools across 23 states. Little Singer wasn't the only one to perform poorly. As the Atlantic reported, Native American students received much lower marks than their white peers in reading and math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Underfunded schooling leads to a decreasing high school graduation rate. Their dropout rate is two times the national average.

This is a systemic problem that has lifelong implications for Native Americans and is just another chapter in a sordid history of discrimination and prejudice — and no, the Navajo Nation winning a lawsuit against the U.S. Government for $554 won't magically solve the problems overnight (though it is encouraging).

It's not a stretch to think the lackluster education leads the followint statistics from the New York Times:

The country's 310 Indian reservations have violent crime rates that are more than two and a half times higher than the national average, according to data compiled by the Justice Department. American Indian women are 10 times as likely to be murdered than other Americans. They are raped or sexually assaulted at a rate four times the national average, with more than one in three having either been raped or experienced an attempted rape.

Maybe it's also the reason why 1 en 4 Native Americans live in poverty and why they continually face double digit unemployment rates. They also lack access  to healthcare and have a lower life expectancy than average.

In the United States the most serious discrimination against Native Americans starts in schools, and pervades all aspects of a Native American's life as time goes on.

Native American children attend dilapidated, below-standard schools, some of which date from the Great Depression era. The government is supposed to look after the federally-financed schools, but this task is seemingly beyond their ability, or just beyond their ability to care. 

In addition to 81 students, Little Singer Community School is also home to asbestos, mold and scores of mice. Students have to carry their seats from class to class, presumably because the school can't afford chairs for each classroom.

"We have little to work with, but we make do with what we have," Verna Yazzie, a school board member, told the Associated Press. Yazzie's school, Little Singer Community School, is located in the Navajo Nation. 

The school, AP notes, is "marked by remoteness, extreme poverty and few construction dollars." The government added it to a priority replacement list a decade ago, but cut the school budget in 2013. Under such conditions, it's no wonder the quality of education suffers. In 2013, fewer than 25% of Little Singer Community School's students were proficient in reading and math.

This isn't an isolated incident. The federal government is responsible for 183 native American schools across 23 states. Little Singer wasn't the only one to perform poorly. As the Atlantic reported, Native American students received much lower marks than their white peers in reading and math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Underfunded schooling leads to a decreasing high school graduation rate. Their dropout rate is two times the national average.

This is a systemic problem that has lifelong implications for Native Americans and is just another chapter in a sordid history of discrimination and prejudice — and no, the Navajo Nation winning a lawsuit against the U.S. Government for $554 won't magically solve the problems overnight (though it is encouraging).

It's not a stretch to think the lackluster education leads the followint statistics from the New York Times:

The country's 310 Indian reservations have violent crime rates that are more than two and a half times higher than the national average, according to data compiled by the Justice Department. American Indian women are 10 times as likely to be murdered than other Americans. They are raped or sexually assaulted at a rate four times the national average, with more than one in three having either been raped or experienced an attempted rape.

Maybe it's also the reason why 1 en 4 Native Americans live in poverty and why they continually face double digit unemployment rates. They also lack access  to healthcare and have a lower life expectancy than average.

Let us not forget the Lakota people

Danilo Anton

The Lakota of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota are extremely poor. Unemployment is 80-90%. Their income is US$ 4,000 per capita. The vast majority live below the poverty line. Life expectancy is among the lowest in the world; 48 years for men and 52 for men. Alcoholism is widespread. The Lakota language is disappearing. Of the 120,000 Lakota, only 20,000 speak their language. Without identity and future young people are killing themselves.
However, the Lakota or Sioux were among the most dynamic and prosperous towns in North America. They were farmers and buffalo hunters in their ancestral territory of more than 200,000 km2.
From 1870 to 1882 buffalo were exterminated. The government of the United States through its army and professional hunters managed to kill 20 million in 12 years, which were the food supply of the Lakota communities. Then, the United States took their land. Today we conserve less than 10% of their original lands and only in the less fertile and less productive areas.
The United States have forgotten the Lakota and still worse they do not care.
But we should not forget them.