Why Africa Can’t Handle Ebola: the Destruction of the 3rd World

[Karmadillo]

http://www.ianwelsh.net/why-africa-cant-handle-ebola-the-destruction-of-the-3rd-world/

Why Africa Can’t Handle Ebola: the Destruction of the 3rd World
2014 OCTOBER 10
by Ian Welsh

In my recent post on Ebola I mentioned that the turn off point for Africa being able to handle an epidemic was in the 70s and 80s. That’s worth a full post on its own. The first thing to understand is this: 3rd world GDP growth in the post-war liberal period (roughly 46-68 or so), was good. It was above population growth in most cases. That changed around about the time OPEC grabbed the West by short and curlies, squeezed and wound up with tons of money they didn’t know what to do with. This is an act in three parts:

ACT 1: Banks Loan Money to Third World Countries

Lots and lots of it. The pitch is this: we know how to develop countries. You’ll borrow this money, invest in development and have more than enough money to pay off the loans. Except that they didn’t know how to develop countries and even those countries in which the leaders didn’t steal the money, the loans grew faster than the tax base, leaving governments less and less able to administer their own countries.

ACT II: Money, Money, Money and Cash Crops

So, you need $. Foreign dollars. How do you get them? You could do what Japan, Korea, the United States and Britain all did, and develop real industry behind trade barriers, of course, but that’s not what the experts are telling you to do. What they’re saying is “you have a competitive advantage in certain commodities: cash crops and maybe minerals. You should work on that.”

Most cash crops are best grown on plantations, so if you want to move your economy to cash crops, you have to move the subsistence farmers off their land. That means they will go to the cities and need food that you no longer grow (since you’re growing cash crops to sell to Westerners.) But hey, that’s ok, because with all the foreign currency you’ll be getting from bananas, coffee and so on, you’ll be able to buy that food from Europe and America and Canada. Right? Right!

Except that everyone is getting this advice, and everyone is growing more cash crops, and the price drops through the floor and you have a thirty year commodities depression. You can’t feed the people you’ve shoved off the land without taking more loans; there are no jobs for those people, so now instead of self-supporting peasants you’ve got a huge amount of people in slums. But, on the bright side, while not enough hard currency has been created to develop, or even stay ahead of your loans, enough exists so that the leaders can get rich; the West can sell grain to you; and you can buy overpriced military gear from the West. Win! For everyone except about 90% of your population.

more...

[JCMach1]

1. I love how Africa is always 'one' thing in this type of reporting... it completely ignores

the fact that East Africa (Uganda and Kenya) stopped an Ebola outbreak in its tracks just two years back.

And seriously, there are far more people freaking out here over one case then Kenya was at the time (I was there for during that time)...

[malaise]

3. Nigeria and Senegal as well

but Africa is presented as one country not the second largest continent with many countries.

It is a deliberate racist narrative.

[Igel]

6. It's self-serving.

Don't know about "racist." Can be, but it's so widespread I'm not even sure that's the default way of describing them.

Europe is often presented as one coherent whole, even when it makes the entire narrative collapse. That's not because of racism. It's because of some perceived commonality--perhaps skin color, perhaps geography. Or just possibly because of distance. Hard to worry about the difference between Albanian, Basque, Sorb, and Romansch language and culture when you live 4000 miles away.

And in the US there's a strong tendency on the part of some to think of Africa as "a" homeland, or "a" culture. So we have "African culture" and "African music" or "African religion." I have no idea what the hell any of those are--Berber, San, Turkana, Zulu, Ibibio, Madagascan? Because they aren't very similar. Some even want to make all Egyptians sub-Saharan instead of Semitic, effacing a ethno-racial distinction between upper and lower Egypt that the Egyptians themselves insisted on making.

This kind of thinking is as common among whites as blacks, some out of ignorance, some out of a desire to make advocacy easier (or harder), and others out of a desire to favor shallow versus deep thinking.

We do the same for "Asian." Once I had a talk with a guy who insisted on being called Pilipino and not Filipino. This was years ago. I then found out his parents were Cebuano, not Tagalog-speaking. The "F" in "Filipino" was precisely the way they got around having once-warmed-over Tagalog obviously made the Philippines' national language, a sop to languages and ethnicities that were linguistically and politically oppressed by the politically and economically dominant Tagalog-speaking. It took him a few minutes to realize he was the child of an oppressed minority insisting that an outsider use the preferred name of his ethnicity's oppressors to describe himself instead of the name adopted to at least give token empowerment to the oppressed. This distressed him until he was assured that Tagalog and Cebuano really were the same thing, and resisting the white oppressor--me--trumped anything else. Meh.

I've even met Africans who, in the face of a radically different culture and set of attitudes in Houston, tend to see Africa as a whole, and set themselves apart in a group (whether they're Nigerian or Kenyan), or tend to see African-American and African "cultures" as constituting an organic whole contrasting with "white culture" in Texas. All these boundary lines and groupings are simplistic to the point of indicating severe cognitive impairment, but they happen. They see skin color, they see demarcations by water or desert, and stop thinking. Esp. when it serves some personal end.

The existence and occasional pronouncements by the African Union, or calls for African solidarity, also don't help cement the distinctiveness of the 50+ countries in Africa, or the hundreds of ethnicities and languages spoken on the continent.

[malaise]

7. Nice post

[SidDithers]

4. And Nigeria this one...

Edit: oops, malaise beat me to it.



Sid

[JI7]

8. i have been reading about some african countries, mainly towards the east and want to visit there

if i had the chance to do it now i would do it without any worries about ebola . there are some things you have to worry about depending on which country you go to but ebola is not one of them.

mainly i was looking to ethiopia and kenya .

[JCMach1]

9. 1 million times more likely to be a crime victim, or catch malaria

[hedda_foil]

2. Wow! Thank you for posting this terrific piece.

I was so impressed by this article that I read his "about" page to learn more about him.

About

Ian Welsh has been blogging since 2003. He was the Managing Editor of FireDogLake and the Agonist. His work has also appeared at Huffington Post, Alternet, and Truthout, as well as the now defunct Blogging of the President (BOPNews). In Canada his work has appeared in Pogge.ca and BlogsCanada. He is an editor, writer and social media consultant who currently lives in Toronto.

I don't know how I could have missed him before.

[jwirr]

5. Exactly. What they have forgotten is that we did not develop our country that way and neither did

Last edited Sat Oct 11, 2014, 12:31 PM - Edit history (1)

any of the rest of the developed nations. We started out as those small farms who supported themselves and sold a little excess on the side. We started as home based businesses making small things that our neighbors needed. We did not move to crowded cities and starve because no one could produce enough for us to eat. History is an excellent teacher we should use it.

Where money came in was in the government working with the cooperatives to create the REA program and give people a tool to use to create things that would be consumed by all the people of this country. I think it would be interesting to look at when and how we started exporting more than we used nationally.

I don't think that it is too late to let these countries develop on their own with just some tools from us if they need them. Tools would include a people based energy system like the REA but based on alternatives. It would also include clean water programs that help the people and small low interest loans for small farmers and businesses only. But I do not see this happening as long as we are using them to provide cheap labor, scamming them in loan deals that bankrupt them and letting our corporations run rough shod over them.