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From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Wed Aug 03 2011 - 09:08:13 EDT
http://www.wdm.org.uk/blog/we-should-learn-more-different-development-models
We should learn more from different development models
3 August 2011
*Gordon Peters, WDM Edinburgh group*
Sustainability has become a rather slippery term. In fact looking at donor
aid agency agendas it seems as if sustainability is the nice, ecologically
well-meaning dressing up of policies which continue to accelerate market
penetration of southern livelihoods. They spend more underscoring the
capacities of big corporate entities, from Cargill to Cadbury Schweppes and
Monsanto, to dictate basic necessities of life from land use and seed
provision to indebtedness and consumption. WDM has indeed had some success
in trying to get at least one donor - DFID - to think again on water
privatisation <http://www.wdm.org.uk/water-campaign>, but the determination
to commodify the very sources of life across the globe, to take away common
rights to land, water and even air keeps rolling on.
In the past two to three years I have been in two very different countries,
about both of which one hears very little in the discourses of development.
One is Paraguay, now governed by a reformist, 'liberation theologist'
president, Lugo, whose adminstration is seeking to establish land reform and
the means of self-sustainability for the peasant and landless population
while the oligarchy which has always [since the Spanish conquest] owned the
land and run the system remains.
Yet minor gains in restoring land and creating locally responsive markets
are in great danger of being overwhelmed by overseas sovereign funds as well
as corporations buying up huge tracts of land for mono-cropping and export
to feed populations elsewhere. And land where local rights cannot be
formulated to legal satisfaction is just grabbed and put into a new legal
format by powerful vested interests. The same interests which often receive
donor aid for work they are carrying out, particularly infrastructure.
The other country is Eritrea where the philosophy and practice of
self-sustainability is being put in place country-wide, in semi-arid terrain
in the Horn of Africa, following a brutal civil war with Ethiopia [and an
unresolved border truce policed by the UN], and, significantly, without
donor aid. Eritrea's current one party state [but with some evident
participatory democracy] clearly does not fit with the geopolitical aims of
the developed world governments, and at least as much the Eritrean
government has said 'no thanks' to donor aid and dependency.
But the point is that in a region of Africa where millions are again
starving and donor aid is large and 'complicated' in its distribution, and
its onward value and re-direction, there is a country managing to restore
its terraced agricultural land, to re-forest, to help returnees set up land
holdings, to educate children and give women an equal say in economy and
society - and to extract something like 6% of profits from mining companies
for social development.
I think the aid models we are wedded to are themselves part of the problem.
The two very different countries I mention may be 'peripheral' and seem
isolated, but we could learn more, and there is indeed a Living Well, or
'Buen Vivir', movement which helps express some of that - partly inspired by
the Cochabamba conference in
Bolivia<http://www.wdm.org.uk/blog/bolivia-blog>- and which offers
more learning on common goods and self-sustainability
than the World Bank's Voice of the Poor or DFID's and others promotion of
the Paris Principles ever will.
*Gordon Peters is a member of the WDM Edinburgh
group<http://groups.wdm.org.uk/edinburghandlothians/>and has worked as
an international consultant in health and social
development for DFID, the World Bank, the EU and Unicef over the last twenty
years. He was recently in Eritrea advising the Ministry of Labour and Human
Welfare.*
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