Read Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet Online
Authors: Kerryn Higgs
Tags: #Environmental Economics, #Econometrics, #Environmental Science, #Environmental Policy
Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet (25 page)
Figure 9.1
Malnourished Children Younger Than Age 5, India.
The growth path to the “greater good” has left immense numbers of India’s people behind, forfeiting the poor to the ambitions of India’s elites. A belief in harsh remedies and the idea that “progress” can involve the sacrifice of some for the benefit of others, or of one generation for the benefit of the next, are part of the myth of inevitable ascent and serve to justify brutal measures. Milton Friedman in his television series,
Free to Choose
, talks about his eastern European forebears working long hours in the late nineteenth-century sweatshops of New York City:
They are not going to stay here very long or forever. On the contrary, they and their children will make a better life for themselves as they take advantage of the opportunities that a free market provides to them.
The irony is that this place violates many of the standards that we now regard as every worker’s right. It is poorly ventilated, it is overcrowded, the workers accept less than union rate—it breaks every rule in the book. But if it were closed down, who would benefit? Certainly not the people here. Their life may seem pretty tough compared to our own, but that is only because our parents or grandparents went through that stage for us.
22
Friedman did not mention people who
actually died
“for the sake of the next generation,” as was the case with five-year-old chimney sweeps in nineteenth century Britain; or the 1,127 garment workers caught in the 2013 Bangladesh factory collapse (they were ordered to work that day even though an engineer had ruled the place unsafe); or, indeed, the 146 garment workers, most of them eastern European immigrant girls, who were burned to death in New York City in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 where they had been locked in—Friedman’s mother presumably not among them.
The Urban Future
Urbanization has been a hallmark of the economic growth of an industrializing economy. In the early twenty-first century, half the world’s population lives in cities for the first time in history. Between 1950 and 2001, the number of cities with more than one million people grew from 86 to 400 and is expected to be 550 or more by 2015.
23
Megacities of more than 10 million people have multiplied by ten between 1950 and 2005, from two to twenty,
24
and, alongside the swelling numbers of smaller cities, “hypercities” of 20 million have begun to emerge, with some commentators predicting “a continuous urban corridor stretching from Japan/North Korea to West Java.”
25
Mainstream economists regard poverty as primarily a rural phenomenon, typical of premodern societies. The UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN/DESA), for example, believes that the urban poor of the current era usually do better than their rural counterparts and counsels against viewing urbanization as a negative phenomenon: “Cities are … engines of economic, social, political and cultural change. Urbanization can thus be viewed as an indicator of development, with higher urban levels generally associated with more industrialized and technologically advanced economies.”
26
This judgment is in line with the postwar development agenda already outlined, which gave industry, technology, and economic growth the task of human social improvement; mainstream economists remain confident that a largely urbanized world population of nine or ten billion can be supported.
Mainstream economics, however, has rarely considered land reform as a possible path to rural well-being. The UN/DESA report quoted above does not examine the relationship between rural poverty and landlessness and consequently ignores the influence of the distribution of land on rural poverty and the possibility that people given access to land may be able to support themselves with at least as much and probably more security and dignity than is possible in the slums and
favelas
. The theory of “greater good,” however, sees the ongoing dispossession of peasants and indigenous peoples as a necessary price to be paid, along the same lines as those put forward by Rostow and Lewis in the 1950s.
If humans are to be as heavily urbanized as P. Chidambaram desires and most demographers predict, then very few of us will be involved in growing food; an adequate supply will have to be mass-produced along the lines of industrial agriculture, which has shown itself able to produce food (or foodlike substances) with very few workers. However, despite the cheery optimism of Chowdry and Chidambaram, there is little sign of what livelihoods will absorb the billions of people in the families of peasants still farming today, nor is there any persuasive rationale for ignoring the most abundant resource of countries such as India or Ethiopia—their people—in order to make a tiny regiment of mechanized farmers more “productive.” While agricultural productivity measured as output per person has steadily expanded in the capitalist era (box 9.2), actual people have frequently been rendered as destitute as the husbandmen observed by Sir Thomas More in 1516.
Box 9.2
Agricultural Productivity
Agricultural productivity, measured as output per worker, has been the benchmark of progress in capitalist farming, and it is commonly argued that the productivity of industrial agriculture is the only alternative to feed a world of seven billion people. This argument is advanced against proponents of a more organically based agriculture that would minimize fossil fuel inputs and restore the natural fertility of living soil. It is also pressed against those who advocate supporting small farmers in their traditional settings rather than taking their land for the mass production of food and consigning the farmers to slums. However, output per hectare of land is far more crucial to farmers with access to a piece of land than is output per worker.
The capitalist definition takes for granted the multiple inputs of energy, fertilizer, pesticide, and irrigation water and ignores the losses of topsoil and fertility and the pollution of streams and groundwater that are involved in its practices; many of the social and ecological losses of industrial agriculture are unpriced, so market price is often unrealistically low. Capitalist enterprise has shown itself to be reluctant to accept the inclusion of such hidden costs in its budget. This reluctance is illustrated by the resistance of Australia’s fossil-fuel-dependent industries to government attempts to put a price on carbon, however gradualist and partial.
a
For peasant cultivators, by contrast, the essential input is human labor, and where labor is plentiful, the crucial criterion of productivity is the yield per hectare of land and unit of water, and its adequacy to feed the family or community working it. Success cannot be measured with reference to output per worker. Labor is not a limiting factor when populations are large. The availability of water or options for fertilizer are more important in many contexts. Peasant farmers use local resources such as manures to fertilize their crops and the intercropping of grains with legumes to provide nitrogen. Moreover, as fossil fuel becomes more expensive and more polluting, and given the significant contribution of industrial agriculture to global warming, alternative forms of agriculture are well worth exploring.
Western measures of productivity not only stress yield per worker but are reckoned using only one crop at a time, and overlook the complex mosaics of edibles produced in traditional agriculture, such as the rice paddy where fish and leafy greens coexist with the rice harvest, or the many different intercropping systems described by Shiva in India. It is argued by agroecosystem farmers that the yield per hectare is greater than the tonnage of the principal crop and rivals or betters monocultural outputs per hectare, if not per person. Shiva provides detailed statistics suggesting yields from multiple cropping systems perform significantly better per hectare than monocultural maize or millet,
b
a claim supported by studies of the “home garden” of many small farming cultures, most highly developed and productive in Java.
c
While industrial farming produces commodities that are only available to those with the money to pay, the “Java garden” grows food for direct local use rather than for a global market, so that distributional problems are minimized. Small-scale organic farming in Cuba after Soviet support collapsed has had similar benefits.
Average “productivity” in the Western system of vast, highly mechanized single-crop farms is 1,000 to 2,000 tonnes of grain per farmer per year. Some 40 to 50 million such farmers worldwide produce colossal quantities of grain. This “productivity” is now orders of magnitude greater than a yield per person of about one tonne of grain for traditional peasants and up to 50 tonnes for those using Green Revolution techniques such as high yielding varieties and some associated extra inputs of water and fertilizer.
d
Western techniques rely, however, on massive inputs rather than labor and, if generalized to world agriculture, can be expected to make some three billion people from peasant farming families redundant. In the twenty-first century, few will have the option of destinations in “empty lands” far away, such as the Irish or eastern Europeans enjoyed in previous centuries. Survivors of the urbanization of the third world have little or no choice but to aggregate in the already massive conurbations of their own countries.
Notes
a
Gittins 2008; Kohler 2009; Symons-Brown 2009.
b
Shiva 2008, 115–118.
c
Soemarwoto and Conway 1992.
d
Amin 2003, 32.
Calls from the corporate mainstream, in response to the food crisis of 2008, emphasized technical and investment assistance to facilitate productivity growth and “market participation in agriculture.”
27
Whether industrial agriculture is a feasible solution to feeding the projected urban masses of the future depends heavily on the continuing availability of sufficient topsoil and adequate inputs of water, petroleum, and phosphate, as well as on the capacity of the surrounding countryside and watercourses to absorb the wastes. All these elements are under challenge, as noted in chapter 1. Just as important, if commodity production of food is to feed the world, the burgeoning urban masses will need to have a capacity to pay, something sorely missing in many places during the 2008 food crisis; although there was often enough food available—in Haiti, for example—the urban poor were unable to pay the escalating market price.
28
In the absence of large social expenditures on facilities in the overcrowded cities, optimism about the urban future seems misplaced. Much of modern urban life is lived in slums. The UN Human Settlements Program (UN-Habitat) made a study of slums worldwide in 2003; it found that 924 million people were already living in slums in 2001 and predicted that the figure would reach two billion by 2035. The report was cautious about the prospects for urban improvement and found that, while rural poverty is generally assumed to be far greater in both extent and intensity than urban need, “the locus of poverty is moving to cities. … Depending on the individual countries and cities, between 40 and 80 percent of urban dwellers in the world are living in poverty, with very little or absolutely no access to shelter, basic urban services and social amenities.”
29
UN-Habitat also found increasing urban unemployment and increasing inequality in third world cities in the last two or three decades. It argues that the great range of improvements needed by the urban poor requires not only “robust growth” in the national economies but also equitable policies, both national and international: “Instead of being a focus for growth and prosperity, the cities have become a dumping ground for a surplus population working in unskilled, unprotected and low-wage informal service industries.”
30
These “dumping grounds” are already swelling rapidly in cities that will need to accommodate
billions
more if demographic predictions are correct and the industrialization of agriculture continues. Few of these third world cities have water or sanitation, and governments are reluctant to provide these, especially where the tenure is informal. Kinshasa, with a population approaching ten million, has no sewage system at all; only 10 percent of Manila has sanitation; and “flying toilets” are prevalent in such cities as Nairobi—these are plastic bags thrown on roofs, which burst or decay in the sun and rain.
31
Women, burdened with expectations of modesty, are especially oppressed by such circumstances.
It has been argued that slums that are allowed to mature, such as Dharavi in Mumbai, where the film
Slumdog Millionaire
is set, do produce a self-sustaining economy and gradually become less poor
32
—but this is not a guaranteed outcome. Plans to redevelop Dharavi will raze the shanties and build high-rise apartment buildings. While these new structures will have sanitation, and there are plans to provide town facilities, the residents will lack the community structure that supports the economic resilience of the so-called mature slum, where business is conducted from home, close to the street.
33
All informal settlements are vulnerable to this fate as real estate in the cities becomes hot property for developers: the Bassac River shantytown in Phnom Penh, for example, was demolished in 2006 to make way for luxury apartments and shopping centers; its residents were evicted.
34
Several other Phnom Penh slums burned down five years earlier, in fires probably deliberately lit, leaving thousands homeless.
35
