Abibitumi Kasa (Black Power Language) Afrikan Language and Liberation Institutes - Oppression of Afrikans Economically http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/ Information on Oppression of Afrikans Economically en Thu, 17 May 2012 12:13:29 GMT vBulletin 60 http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/images/styles/lifeElement/misc/rss.png Abibitumi Kasa (Black Power Language) Afrikan Language and Liberation Institutes - Oppression of Afrikans Economically http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/ Created tastes and desires... http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/oppression-afrikans-economically/47302-created-tastes-desires.html Sun, 13 May 2012 10:00:24 GMT "But he who listens to his stomach belongs to the enemy."
-Ptahhotep

What is the role of tastes and desires created by our eternal enemies in the continued economic oppression of Afrikan people?
What are personal examples in your own life (current or past experiences)? ]]> Oppression of Afrikans Economically Obadele Kambon http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/oppression-afrikans-economically/47302-created-tastes-desires.html Kwame Nkrumah: Capitalism http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/oppression-afrikans-economically/47255-kwame-nkrumah-capitalism.html Sun, 06 May 2012 12:44:01 GMT ”Capitalism is a development by refinement from feudalism, just as feudalism is development by refinement from slavery. Capitalism is but the... ”Capitalism is a development by refinement from feudalism, just as feudalism is development by refinement from slavery. Capitalism is but the gentlemen’s method of slavery.”[Kwame Nkrumah] ]]> Oppression of Afrikans Economically Dukuzumurenyi http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/oppression-afrikans-economically/47255-kwame-nkrumah-capitalism.html Economic Philosophy of Black Nationalism http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/oppression-afrikans-economically/47212-economic-philosophy-black-nationalism.html Mon, 30 Apr 2012 09:29:16 GMT The economic philosophy of black nationalism only means that our people need to be re-educated into the importance of controlling the economy of the... The economic philosophy of black nationalism only means that our people need to be re-educated into the importance of controlling the economy of the community in which we live, which means that we won't have to constantly be involved in picketing and boycotting other people in other communities in order to get jobs. [Malcolm X] ]]> Oppression of Afrikans Economically Dukuzumurenyi http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/oppression-afrikans-economically/47212-economic-philosophy-black-nationalism.html Education in Agriculture: Links with Development in Africa http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/oppression-afrikans-economically/47211-education-agriculture-links-development-africa.html Sun, 29 Apr 2012 14:19:58 GMT Posted July 1996 Education in Agriculture: Links with Development in Africaby W.I. Lindley, L. Van Crowder and N. Doron Agricultural Extension and... Posted July 1996
Education in Agriculture: Links with Development in Africa

by W.I. Lindley, L. Van Crowder and N. Doron
Agricultural Extension and Education Service (SDRE)
FAO Research, Extension and Training Division
Investing in education for development

The improvement of a country's human resource capacity for productivity is a pre-requisite for social and economic development. In the agricultural sector, both formal and non-formal education are essential for improving food security and rural employment and reducing poverty. Formal agricultural education is needed for the production of skilled manpower to serve the agricultural sector through extension, research, entrepreneurship and commerce. Non-formal agricultural education, often provided by both public and private extension services, is needed for training of farmers, farm families and workers and for capacity-building in a wide range of rural organizations and groups.
To meet the challenges of agricultural production and food security facing Africa today and in the 21st century, countries must be willing to invest in their human capital for development. Improving human capital in agriculture is especially important in the low-income, food-deficit countries of Africa where the shortage of trained human resources is a major limiting factor to development.
University-level education in Africa

UNESCO's 1993 World Education Report shows that opportunities for higher (tertiary level) education vary greatly in Africa. They range from enrolments of 1698 per 100,000 inhabitants in Egypt to 16 per 100,000 in Mozambique. In the francophone countries, the range goes from 958 in Morocco to 50 per 100,000 in Rwanda. Not surprisingly, there is a clear correlation between economic development and the number of students enrolled in higher education. There are a number of countries where low levels of education are accompanied by per capita annual incomes of below US$ 500. This includes much of Sub-Saharan Africa.
University education in agriculture in Africa is at a crossroads. Financial constraints are severe and the demand for higher quality education has never been greater. There is a need for greater educational relevance and higher quality graduates. There is an obligation to enrol more women and to produce students who are prepared to go on to positions of leadership. Some progress has been made. A recent FAO study shows that, in the past ten years, the enrolment of women in intermediate and higher level has increased from an average of 15 percent to nearly 25 percent of the total students studying agriculture in Africa. In the French language institutions, the results show an increase from 14 percent to 20 percent. But many problems remain. University graduates are no longer automatically being hired by governments and employers in the private sector are demanding graduates with different, and higher level, skills and knowledge. Education outside the continent, which has been seen as a way to fill the manpower gap, has often proved to be inappropriate to the unique development needs of African countries.
Post-graduate training to provide high-level scientists and researchers is an essential part of quality improvement. It is also critical that institutions of higher education play a developmental role by establishing linkages with relevant private and public agricultural agencies and with farming communities. Curricular revision should include basic foundation courses to be taken by all students, leaving the final portion of the educational cycle for specialized training of subject-matter specialists, research scientists, and those who wish to pursue academic careers.
Curricula should include important topics that are generally missing such as the role of women in agricultural development, farming systems management, agri-business and marketing, environmental protection, and population issues. Gender discrimination in enrolment practices should be eliminated and participation of women at all levels of educational, research and extension systems should be encouraged. A common regional policy for reforming national higher education systems and the creation of centres of excellence should be priority considerations for educational policy makers.
Intermediate-level education

At the intermediate level, student demand does not justify building new colleges and schools. Rather, the need is for competency-based education so students can acquire the skills, knowledge and attitudes that are being demanded by governments and private employers. It is a time for private and public partnerships that lead to curriculum revision and improved practical skills of graduates. The goal should be to produce students who can find jobs because they are well-trained and want to work in agriculture.
It is at the intermediate level that most of Africa's field-level agricultural extension workers are prepared. It is increasingly clear that extension workers need better training in both technical agriculture and in the extension methods needed to disseminate production technologies to the thousands of small-scale farmers who need them. Food security in the low-income, food-deficit countries should be a first priority. The training of extension workers should emphasize skills and knowledge for sustained crop production and strategies for the prevention of food losses during harvest, storage, marketing and processing.
Secondary-level education and below

In East Africa, at the secondary school level, there are several examples where agriculture is an examination subject and, along with other science subjects, is providing the foundation for secondary students who want to study agriculture at the tertiary level. In West Africa, the study of agriculture in regular secondary schools is very limited and is an issue that needs to be addressed as part of national and regional educational policy.
At the elementary level, the study of agriculture is severely limited. In some instances, school gardens have been promoted, but in general agriculture is not taught as a subject at the elementary level. Rural students drop out of school at a very high rate. In many cases, as many as 90 percent do not go beyond elementary school. If they are to study agriculture in a school setting, it will have to be at the elementary level. The farming population comes from rural youth and Africa's food security depends on those farmers.
Agricultural education and development

The total population in West Africa will triple between 1950 and 2000, and urban population levels are growing at an even faster rate. In 1950, the urban/rural population ratio was 1:10, in 1990 it was 1:3.4 and in 2010 it is projected to be 1:2. With the exception of Burkina Faso, per capita food intake is diminishing. Increasing population density and pressure on the land have altered traditional production patterns and sustained agricultural production is being threatened.
The school age population is expected to double in the 20 years between 1990 and 2010. Currently, average primary school enrolment in the region is approximately 40 percent, and that low figure is compounded by a drop-out rate of 40 percent. The risk of increasing the current illiteracy rate of 70 percent seems very great indeed.
A recent study in six francophone countries of the Sahel (Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal and Chad) shows that there are notable differences among the agricultural education systems of the these countries. The following problems were found to be common to all, however:

  • High recurrent costs, especially in relation to the number of persons trained;
  • Low internal efficiency rates (i.e., low output of graduates in relation to student capacity due to high drop-out and failure rates);
  • Low quality of education;
  • Lack of relevance to the national rural development needs; and in some fields
  • An excess of supply over demand of trained personnel.

The origins of these problems were found to be diverse in nature and range from too low student/teacher ratios, exorbitant costs for non-teacher salaries (i.e., administrator salaries), high drop-out/failure rates, no-fee and scholarship policies, inadequate facilities and equipment, and the inability of governments to guarantee, as in the past, immediate employment to graduates. The report also points out that a regional policy for agricultural education and training and a regional cooperative approach are not only desirable, but possible to achieve. A major constraint is the relatively low level of funding allocated to education in agriculture.
Furthermore, teaching methods and curricula are not being adjusted to the new requirements and demands for trained manpower in agriculture, especially in the private sector. Government employment of graduates is no longer assured; structural adjustment is having a negative effect not only traditional employment patterns, but on the ability of educational institutions to respond to trained manpower needs.
A critical need at the intermediate level of agricultural education is to raise the internal efficiency of the existing systems so that an increased output of students is obtained from the same facilities. At university-level agricultural education, there is a pressing need for institutions to strengthen links with rural society so as to play a full part in the development efforts of their region or community. Agricultural universities and colleges also need to have closer links with current national research in applied fields. At all levels, there is a need for a critical review of subject-matter content and a judicious replanning of courses to fit employment opportunities and to address the problems and issues of sustainable agricultural production and rural development. Priority attention should be given to upgrading teaching skills and methods with an emphasis on practical, field-oriented student training.
Challenges for agricultural education in Africa

What matters most for economic development in Africa is the capability of rural people to be efficient producers given their natural resource base. There is little doubt that economic and social development, and the benefits that accrue such as improved nutrition and health, require an educated populace. No country has become developed without well-educated people and a strong agricultural base that provides food security. Good educational systems will not solve all of the problems, but they are a prerequisite for sustained agricultural production and economic development.
The mission of agricultural education in Africa in the 21st century is to work toward improved, relevant, and effective teaching, research, and extension. To contribute food security for all, education in agriculture must prepare a critical mass of dedicated, well-trained men and women who are committed to achieving socio-economic improvement for Africa. ]]> Oppression of Afrikans Economically Dukuzumurenyi http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/oppression-afrikans-economically/47211-education-agriculture-links-development-africa.html Ending World Hunger http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/oppression-afrikans-economically/47206-ending-world-hunger.html Sat, 28 Apr 2012 14:57:13 GMT Ending World Hunger Powerpoint Ending World Hunger Powerpoint
Attached Files
]]> Oppression of Afrikans Economically Dukuzumurenyi http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/oppression-afrikans-economically/47206-ending-world-hunger.html <![CDATA[How Guinea's Fish Are Stolen]]> http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/oppression-afrikans-economically/47189-how-guineas-fish-stolen.html Fri, 27 Apr 2012 21:00:49 GMT ]]> Oppression of Afrikans Economically Kala http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/oppression-afrikans-economically/47189-how-guineas-fish-stolen.html West Africa: Monetary union ignores its own slavery http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/oppression-afrikans-economically/47184-west-africa-monetary-union-ignores-its-own-slavery.html Thu, 26 Apr 2012 23:04:21 GMT *West Africa: Monetary union ignores its own slavery* *Union is drafting a new trade code for Chinese investments* *Antoine Roger Lokongo* ... West Africa: Monetary union ignores its own slavery

Union is drafting a new trade code for Chinese investments

Antoine Roger Lokongo

2012-04-26, Issue 582

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/81689




cc M M-JAn analysis of the continuing financial enslavement of West African nations to the French government.

The West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA) is an organization of eight West African states. It was established to promote economic integration among countries that share the Communauté Financière d'Afrique (CFA) franc as a common currency. The currency is issued by the Banque Centrale des États de l'Afrique de l'Ouest (BCEAO), located in Dakar, Senegal, for the members of the UEMOA. The union administers the West African CFA franc, now a Euro-pegged currency that is used in Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo.

UEMOA was created by a Treaty signed in Dakar on 10 January 1994, by the heads of state and governments of Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Niger, Senegal, and Togo. On 2 May 1997, Guinea-Bissau became the organisation’s eighth (and only non-Francophone) member state.

On 20 January 2011, the UEMOA announced that it was drafting a code that will state how member states can negotiate investments with China, as reported by the Dakar-based newspaper Sud Quotidien, citing the union’s commissioner, Joseph Marie Dabré. The report said that the code would require Chinese state companies to receive approval from the Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso-based union before investing in any of the zone’s eight individual states. Mining agreements between China and countries in the union would fall under the terms of the code, according to Sud Quotidien.

However, you do not have to look too far to notice that the UEMOA countries’ French-controlled CFA franc is just slavery and colonialism by another name. It therefore beggars belief that the UEMOA should draft a new trade code for Chinese investments and not for the French ones in the first place!

The former president of the Ivorian National Assembly, former Finance Minister and economist, Professor Mamadou Koulibaly, labeled the French-led CFA franc arrangement as ‘financially repressive, unfair and morally indefensible’, in an interview with the London-based New African Magazine last year.

It has become vital today for the CFA franc to acquire its own existence, free of colonial stranglehold...After the break; the ex-CFA zone must construct its own system based on simple principles. These include: establishing direct access to international markets without having to pass through a tutor [read France]; and without a monetary guide [read France]; establish a simple fiscal system and not complicated tax codes that are incomprehensible; have flexible exchange rates vis-à-vis major currencies.

Professor Koulibaly believes that done within a democratic dispensation, free trade will do the rest for the benefit of Africa.

As it unbelievably exists today, Professor Koulibaly explained that, ‘the foreign reserves of the CFA African states are deposited in the French Treasury, but no African country is capable of telling you exactly how much of this hard-earned foreign reserves belong to them. Only France has the privilege to that information’.

As Professor Koulibaly lamented, francophone Africans have been reduced to ‘taxpayers for France [remember the 65% of hard currencies that the 14 CFA zone states are obliged to deposit yearly in the French Treasury]…Yet our people neither have French nationality nor access to the public goods and services made available to other French taxpayers’.

In the same New African report, Senegalese President Wade was clear and direct: ‘Central bank reserves of member states must be returned to member states in one way or another. I insist on this, and particularly because we have been raising this issue for a long time’. President Wade ‘deplored the fact that close to 1,500 billion CFA francs generated from the surplus of West African states' foreign reserves are placed on the foreign stock markets and out of the reach of the Africans who own the money’.

The CFA franc and its archaic arrangement with the French Treasury in Paris is indeed a slave deal. And this is how the slave deal works as elaborated by the London-based Professor Dr Gary Busch:

The French Treasury is holding billions of dollars owned by the African states of the francophone nations of West and Central Africa in its own accounts and invested in the French Bourse or Stock Exchange. The Africans deposit the equivalent of 85% of their annual reserves in these accounts as a matter of post-colonial agreements and have never been given an accounting for how much the French are holding on their behalf, in what have these funds been invested, and what profit or loss there have been.

The French have been acquiring and holding the national reserves of 14 countries since 1961. Even allowing for losses and expenditures in keeping the CFA franc viable, the French are holding about at least 400 billion dollars of African money, wholly unaccountably to the money’s putative owners, the African states. Even Bernie Madoff couldn’t have constructed a Ponzi scheme that large without being exposed.

This ‘bargain’ was made between the African former colonies and the French as part of the Pacte Coloniale which accompanied their independence and controlled through a single currency, the CFA franc. This was largely the work Jacques Foccart, the chief adviser for the government of France on African policy as well as the co-founder of the Gaullist Service d'Action Civique (SAC) in 1959 with Charles Pasqua, which specialised in covert operations in Africa.

It was Foccart ‘the eminence grise’ who negotiated the Pacte Coloniale with the evolving French West African states who achieved their ‘flag independence’ in 1960. Not really having planned for it, de Gaulle had to improvise structures for a collection of small newly independent states, each with a flag, an anthem, and a seat at the UN, but often with precious little else. It was here that Foccart came to play an essential role, that of architect of the series of Cooperation accords with each new state in the sectors of finance and economy, culture, education, and the military.

There were initially 11 countries involved: Mauritania, Senegal, Cote d'Ivoire, Dahomey (now Benin), Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), Niger, Chad, Gabon, Central African Republic, Congo-Brazzaville, and Madagascar. Togo and Cameroon, former UN Trust Territories, were also co-opted into the club. So, too, later on, were Mall and the former Belgian territories (Ruanda-Urundi, now Rwanda and Burundi, and Congo-Kinshasa), some of the ex-Portuguese territories, and Comoros and Djibouti, which had also been under French rule for many years but became independent in the 1970s. The whole ensemble was put under a new Ministry of Cooperation, created in 1961, separate from the Ministry of Overseas Departments and Territories (known as the DOM-TOM) that had previously run them all.

The key to all this was the agreement signed between France and its newly-liberated African colonies which locked these colonies into the economic and military embrace of France. This Colonial Pact not only created the institution of the CFA franc, it created a legal mechanism under which France obtained a special place in the political and economic life of its colonies.

The Pacte Coloniale Agreement enshrined a special preference for France in the political, commercial and defence processes in the African countries. On defence it agreed two types of continuing contact. The first was the open agreement on military co-operation or Technical Military Aid (AMT) agreements, which weren’t legally binding, and could be suspended according to the circumstances. They covered education, training of service personnel and African security forces. The second type, secret and binding, were defence agreements supervised and implemented by the French Ministry of Defence, which served as a legal basis for French interventions. These agreements allowed France to have pre-deployed troops in Africa; in other words, French army units present permanently and by rotation in bases and military facilities in Africa; run entirely by the French (and, incidentally, paid for by the Africans).

In summary, the colonial pact maintained the French control over the economies of the African states; it took possession of their foreign currency reserves; it controlled the strategic raw materials of the country; it stationed troops in the country with the right of free passage; it demanded that all military equipment be acquired from France; it took over the training of the police and army; it required that French businesses be allowed to maintain monopoly enterprises in key areas (water, electricity, ports, transport, energy, etc.). France not only set limits on the imports of a range of items from outside the franc zone but also set minimum quantities of imports from France. These treaties are still in force and operational.

One of the most important influences in the economic and political life of African states which were formerly French colonies is the impact of a common currency. There are actually two separate CFA francs in circulation. The first is that of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) which comprises eight West African countries (Benin, Burkina Faso, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo. The second is that of the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC) which comprises six Central African countries (Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon), This division corresponds to the pre-colonial AOF (Afrique Occidentale Française) and the AEF (Afrique Équatoriale Française), with the exception that Guinea-Bissau was formerly Portuguese and Equatorial Guinea Spanish).

Each of these two groups issues its own CFA franc. The WAEMU CFA franc is issued by the BCEAO and the CEMAC CFA franc is issued by the Banque des Etats de l’Afrique Centrale (BEAC). These currencies were originally both pegged at 100 CFA for each French franc but, after France joined the European Community’s Euro zone at a fixed rate of 6.65957 French francs to one Euro, the CFA rate to the Euro was fixed at CFA 665,957 to each Euro, maintaining the 100 to 1 ratio. It is important to note that it is the responsibility of the French Treasury to guarantee the convertibility of the CFA to the Euro.

The monetary policy governing such a diverse aggregation of countries is uncomplicated for African Central Banks because it is, in fact, operated by the French Treasury, without reference to the central fiscal authorities of any of the WAEMU or the CEMAC. Under the terms of the agreement which set up these banks and the CFA the Central Bank of each African country is obliged to keep at least 65% of its foreign exchange reserves in an ‘operations account’ held at the French Treasury, as well as another 20% to cover financial liabilities.

The CFA central banks also impose a cap on credit extended to each member country equivalent to 20% of that country’s public revenue in the preceding year. Even though the BEAC and the BCEAO have an overdraft facility with the French Treasury, the drawdowns on those overdraft facilities are subject to the consent of the French Treasury. The final say is that of the French Treasury which has invested the foreign reserves of the African countries in its own name on the Paris Bourse.

In short, more than 80% of the foreign reserves of these African countries are deposited in the ‘operations accounts’ controlled by the French Treasury. The two CFA banks are African in name, but have no monetary policies of their own. The countries themselves do not know, nor are they told, how much of the pool of foreign reserves held by the French Treasury belongs to them as a group or individually. The earnings of the investment of these funds in the French Treasury pool are supposed to be added to the pool but no accounting has ever been given to either the banks or the countries of the details of any such changes. The limited group of high officials in the French Treasury who have knowledge of the amounts in the ‘operations accounts’, where these funds are invested; whether there is a profit on these investments; are prohibited from disclosing any of this information to the CFA banks or the central banks of the African states.

This makes it impossible for African members to regulate their own monetary policies. The most inefficient and wasteful countries are able to use the foreign reserves of the more prudent countries without any meaningful intervention by the wealthier and more successful countries. Most importantly, the French Government uses these funds on deposit in France as assets of France. The CFA franc devaluation of 50 per cent against the French franc in January 1994 was a great surprise to several of the African states and caused major problems for them.

The problems for the African states are growing. The coming crisis in the Euro, with the bailouts of Greece, Portugal and others will have a strong effect on the value of the Euro. With the CFA franc pegged to the Euro the value of the CFA will decline with it. The cost of commodities (petroleum products, foodstuffs, etc.) priced in dollars will grow to be a heavier burden on the African economies. Moreover, France itself is in deep financial trouble.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned recently that France will have to carry out more spending cuts to ensure it reaches its deficit reduction commitments amid lower-than-expected growth expectations. While France has predicted 2.25 per cent growth for 2012, the IMF has downgraded this to 1.9 per cent.

The French spent almost US$2 million a day bombing Libya; above the budgeted expenditure in its defence budget. France is very short of money. However, the cost of massacring Ivoirians, using tanks, helicopter gunships and Special Forces were offset against the Ivory Coast money it was holding so didn’t add to the budgetary problems. The killing of Africans in the Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Rwanda, Chad and the Central African Republic have never been the subject of a budget request to the French defence budget as the Office of the President deducts these from the tranche at the Treasury (which is why it has never been debated in the French National Assembly). To add insult to injury the French estimated that the French business community had lost several millions of dollars in the rush to leave Abidjan in 2006 after the French Army massacred 65 unarmed civilians and wounded 1,200 others. The French demanded that the Ouattara government which they had installed paid them compensation for these putative losses. Indeed the Ouattara government paid them twice what they said they had lost in leaving.

Surely the time has come for the francophone governments to ask the French for a proper accounting of the money they are holding. Perhaps the next government in the Ivory Coast will ask the French for an accounting. Wade in Senegal has asked but was never answered. The solution seems simple. Until the French give a proper accounting for Africa’s billions the African states should stop sending more to them. It is bad enough paying their overseer for the cost of his whip used to chastise them. It is wholly unreasonable to continue to do so when there is no upside, only potential losses.


* Antoine Roger Lokongo is a journalist and Beijing University PhD candidate from the Democratic Republic of Congo. ]]> Oppression of Afrikans Economically Ajamu http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/oppression-afrikans-economically/47184-west-africa-monetary-union-ignores-its-own-slavery.html Farmer Power: The Continuing Confrontation between Subsistence Farmers and Development Bureaucrats http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/oppression-afrikans-economically/47179-farmer-power-continuing-confrontation-between-subsistence-farmers-development-bureaucrats.html Thu, 26 Apr 2012 17:50:40 GMT Farmer Power: The Continuing Confrontation between Subsistence Farmers and Development Bureaucrats... Farmer Power: The Continuing Confrontation between Subsistence Farmers and Development Bureaucrats

Day by day, the peasants make the economists sigh, the politicians sweat, and the strategists swear, defeating their plans and prophecies all over the world—Moscow and Washington, Peking and Delhi, Cuba and Algeria, the Congo and Vietnam (Shanin 1966:5)

Economists, politicians, and strategists since at least the end of World War II dream of the world’s rural farmers becoming a wealthy, healthy, and modern middle class. Implicit to this dream is peasants moving off the farms of China, India, Africa, and Latin America to staff factories in an ever-wealthier world. When this doesn’t happen, the Ph.D.s do indeed sigh, sweat, and swear not at themselves, but at the peasants that frustrate the models on which their development plans are based. In the process though, they forget one thing: the very nature of the world’s subsistence peasants. Subsistence peasants farm, feed themselves, build their own houses, have children, grow old, while producing little for the world markets that the economists celebrate. In short, peasants resist the siren song of the economists’ models, no matter how effectively it might be packaged by cheerleaders for globalization and free markets including U2 frontman Bono, UN Secretary Generals, US Presidents, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, or economist Jeffrey Sachs.

The Two Great Transitions in Human History

Anthropologists and historians talk about the two great transformations in human organization. The first began 8,000-10,000 years ago when Neolithic farmers emerged from scattered groups of hunter-gatherers. During the following millennia they became clans who as a small unit together tilled the earth, raised animals, built permanent houses invented village life, and even at times created empires. The economists dream though of a second transition begun only about 400 years ago, and continuing today. In this transition, the same farmers—heirs to the Neolithic—are moving into a modern market economy in which tasks are highly specialized, and trade in the global marketplace is key. In this transition there are governments and banks gambling big money that millennia are not needed before a world-straddling market economy emerges. Indeed, economist William Easterly estimates that since World War II over $2.3 trillion was spent to entice these farmers into the new global marketplace by the World Bank, United States Agency for International Development, European Community Humanitarian Organization, and so forth.

So why didn’t such a big investment necessarily work during the five and ten year plans of the economists? Simply put it is because subsistence farmers of the Neolithic are outside the ethic of the economist’s modern marketplace, and relatively immune to its enticements. Subsistence farmers traditionally grow most of what they eat, build the houses they live in from local materials, and make the clothes they wear independently from the marketplace. Their small surpluses go to harvest celebrations, or as tribute to the chief, prince, king, or other leader who provides relief supplies in the event of famine. Indeed, what is produced by subsistence farmers never even has a market price put on it. But life was good for farmers with access to hoes, plows, unclaimed arable land, and rainfall; in good years there was enough food to support a rapidly expanding population. In better years there was something left over that could be traded for minor luxuries, or offered as tribute to a potentially rapacious warlord. And so, across the millennia, values, norms, and culture emerged to justify and accommodate the nature of subsistence farming. First was loyalty to kin, and tribute to a feudal leader who maintained the famine socks and organized defense. The abstract nation-states, citizenship, and market principles of the economists and politicians were yet to be invented as the organizing principle for larger societies.

In short, subsistence peasants, while vulnerable to catastrophe, were more independent of the marketplace than we moderns. If markets failed, life on the farm was more uncomfortable, but there was still food to eat, and a place to live. In the modern market though, market failure means that unpaid workers are evicted from their houses or unable to buy food. Subsistence farmers, when viewed from this perspective, had it quite good as long as land was plentiful and rains came. Indeed, this is why Karl Marx when dreaming of world revolution, compared France’s unrevolutionary nineteenth century subsistence peasants to an inert sackful of potatoes. Marx complained that like potatoes in a sack, no peasant household was much different from any other. The French peasants contributed little to the efficient globalized markets emerging in Europe’s cities: a potato was always just a potato, each pretty much like the other.

Nineteenth century European factories initiated this transition by hiring masses of former peasants to work in textile mills, meat packing plants, mono-crop agriculture, and the other specialized assembly lines of the Industrial Revolution in which skilled workers do a single simplified task, but do it efficiently. This transition is what development agencies like the World Bank call ‘development’. Given that this is such a massive project, it is perhaps surprising that it occurred in many countries in only a matter of decades or a century, rather than the millennia of the first transition from hunter-gatherers to settled agrarian populations. Nevertheless, this transition is not yet over. It is continuing in the third world today, as the subsistence peasants continue to defeat the plans and prophecies of hyper-educated economists, politicians, and planners.

The Long Successful Run of the World’s Peasants

The world’s subsistence peasants had a long and successful run. Emerging out of scattered hunter-gatherer communities 8,000-10,000 years ago, they settled down in fertile river valleys where they raised more human food per hectare than nature had ever produced for their forbearers. As hoe wielding farmers cleared the land, rapid population growth resulted from the increases in food production. Surpluses, though small by modern standards, still eventually supported great empires in places like Ancient Egypt, Rome, China, Europe, and the Americas. True, a “terrible compromise” in which freedom and liberty were traded for the protection of a tribute-seeking King often emerged. But life and culture were similar for the vast majority who remained on the farm, growing and consuming what they needed to eat, building housing, producing clothing, and having children. In this context, rarely did more than ten or twenty percent of all production enter the marketplace—the bulk of consumption remained on-farm where peasant families, each doing the same thing as the other, continued to resemble that unrevolutionary sack of potatoes which so frustrated Marx.
Take a potato out of the sack, and the bag is still a sack of potatoes, just a little lighter. Take a smaller specialized piece out of a specialized machine, and not only is the machine only a little lighter, but it also might not work. This is why peasantries are so resilient when compared to a system of differentiated economy organized by Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” and the principles of supply and demand. The problem is that from the retrospective and comfortable position of today’s economists, this change appears magical and painless in societies celebrating individual achievement, and the accumulation of capital. But it is not painless for the peasant whose old way of life is slowly destroyed, family loyalties dissipated, land appropriated, clans disrupted, and replaced too often with life in the urban slums of modern industrial cities.

Scotland’s subsistence peasantry is a good example. Scotland’s clans from time immemorial occupied the hills and glens where they farmed, raised livestock, built stone houses, and paid in-kind tribute to patron clan chiefs. However, following English military victories in 1748, a new way of looking at the land emerged. Clan chiefs siding with the British were granted personal title to the clan lands, while at the same time new factories demanded wool, flax, and labor. The Scottish highlands provided an excellent place to graze sheep and raise fields of inedible flax for the textile mills of the growing cities, and Scotland’s peasantry provided laborers who could work in the newly industrialized economy as wage laborers. In modern words it was a “win-win” for the “Clan Chiefs” who could now sell or rent “their” personal lands in the free land market, and the expanding industrialist class which needed cheap labor. But left out of course were the peasants who lost uncommodified traditional rights and privilege to use the land their ancestors had, the right to the famine stocks kept by the clan chief, who now preferred the global market’s measure of productivity, i.e. hard cold cash.

In this context, expropriation of Scottish peasant lands occurred by hook and by crook across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Threats of famine pushed former peasants into factory towns where they became the new urban working class. When the bright lights of the labor market were not alluring enough, sheriffs and military often played a prominent role. And as the survivors gained market skills needed in the rough urban environment, they lost subsistence skills and the old way of life: No longer could they grow their own food, or build their own stone houses even had they been so inclined. The lucky survivors after a few generations were though able to serve the needs of the world-straddling labor market, and become the middle class consumers which today’s economists celebrate. But this was not the only strategy of Europe’s eighteenth and nineteenth century peasants.

For a time Europe’s subsistence farmers had another strategy to deal with the disruptions coming with the transformation to market society: They could flee to places like North America where arable land was available after the native population died from European contact. And so when the European peasants arrived in North America in the eighteenth century, many left for the nearby forest where it appeared they might resume life as a subsistence peasantry. In fact in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not only the Scottish peasantry fled to the North American forest, but also English, German, French, and others displaced European peasants. Hacking, clearing, hunting, and fighting their way across the North American continent, Europe’s subsistence peasantry peopled the land east of the Mississippi between about 1750 and 1850. The expansion was one rooted in the conservative subsistence peasantry’s greatest traditional strengths, especially the ability to have many children, organize social life around clan-based loyalties, and a penchant to clear land for new farms. This happened across decades (rather than millennia), as the United States and Quebec experienced one of the highest population growth rates ever-recorded: Populations of North America’s subsistence farmers doubled every 20-30 years.

A paradigmatic example of the consequences of such rapid demographic growth is the frontiersman Daniel Boone. In his long life (1734-1820), Boone hunted, and cleared farms across Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Missouri along with his 13 siblings, 10 children, and more than 60 grandchildren. For a time of course, subsistence farmers like Boone even made it in the rough land markets of Kentucky where he settled in the 1770s. But like millions of other rural peasants dabbling in the unfamiliar impersonal marketplace with its emphasis on cash rather than the handshakes, Boone was conned by land speculators from the city. Fortunately for him, there was still land left further west in Spanish Missouri, to where he moved his clan in 1799.

Neither Daniel Boone, his extraordinary clan, nor Europe’s peasants prospered for more than a few decades whilst hacking, clearing, and hunting—the modern industrial world was too close. And as in Scotland, the actual profits, and the land itself, slowly but surely made its way into the hands of the newly emerging investors who controlled the government, banks, law firms, and land offices. So in a slow but recurrent fashion, the United States’ Northwest, settled by prolific hunters and farmers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, passed into the modern global land market. Most dramatically, what was in 1830 a remote trading village for hunters—Chicago—by 1870 was a large modern industrial town, coordinating the production of maize, wheat, lumber, cattle, and hogs across several states. Just like in Scotland, in North America the peasants were slowly but surely moved onward—into factories, production for the market, or further west. As in Scotland, the movement was facilitated by urban market power in the form of land speculators and bankers—whose eviction notices were backed up by the sheriff. And so, North America’s subsistence peasantry faded into history as the land they cleared passed out of their hands whether violently, or through the maneuverings of mortgage bankers.

It will be no surprise to readers of Current Intelligence that markets are enormously successful in concentrating and increasing economic productivity. But I doubt that any of Current Intelligence’s readers, myself included, can raise what they eat, build their own house, and make their own clothing like Daniel Boone, a Scottish clan, or an African subsistence farmer today. We are very much part of the finely-tuned world in which labor is specialized, and worldwide trade is critical. But even Bono, Thomas Friedman, and Jeffrey Sachs likely have ancestors who in the recent past were such self-sufficient farmers.

In place of subsistence farms are the large corporate and government bureaucracies who use the invisible hand of the marketplace to produce for the world. But to say that this happened, is not to say the process was just, nor came without suffering. Nor was it necessarily welcomed by the world’s peasants whose passive resistance to market incentives still throw askew econometric forecasts. And if more evidence is needed of this conflict, one need look no further than Africa today, where vast numbers of subsistence peasants continue to live, farm, and resist government attempts to exclude them from lands reserved for cash-generating timber reserves, hunting blocks, plantations, or national parks even as promises of cash for wage labor entice them into the cities.

Africa’s Peasants Confront Markets and Its Bureaucrats

In pockets of Asia, Latin America and especially Africa peasant clans are still often like those Marx compared to a bag of potatoes: similar to each other, and not particularly suited to a fine division of labor. Perhaps all that is particularly new is that they have access to clothing purchased from the bales of the wealthy world’s cast-offs. But like the peasants in Scotland or even Daniel Boone, they resist with the tools of the subsistence peasant: high birth rates, clearing land, reliance on clan loyalty, and demands for relief commodities when crops fail.

The problem is that few development bureaucrats or businessmen see Africa in terms familiar to its subsistence peasantry, i.e. as a conservative, well-tested, and secure way of life. Rather they see it in terms of its incapacity to produce for a global marketplace in which land and labor are capital. Thus African development programs are typically about the tools and measures of the marketplace, like trade balances, currency stability, mineral production, agricultural extension, clothing manufacture, and oil. Unseen in such analyses are the subsistence peasants who are effectively invisible because they primarily produce outside the global market. In this context, they will always frustrate the highest ideals of the development agencies. The way they frustrate the modern marketplace is through the same messiness seen in eighteenth century Scotland, and nineteenth century North America. They have babies who as young men and women eventually push into forest reserves, national parks, and other cash-producing concessions only lightly policed by the central government. And when these traditional strategies no longer work, the survivors demand relief supplies from their patrons, just as surely as Scottish peasants asserted rights to famine relief from patron clan chiefs in the eighteenth century Highlands. And perhaps most threatening, when land does indeed run out, the peasantry creates vast numbers of youth who no longer have access to land for a subsistence life, and few market skills of interest in urban labor markets. And ominously, these displaced youth are the targets of extremists seeking to create the militias needed for the type of revolution Marx dreamed of. Or in a post Cold War world, they are susceptible to the ethnic ideologies found in places like Rwanda, Congo, Colombia, Afghanistan, The Middle East, and elsewhere.

The Limits of Modern Economics for Understanding Peasant Life

There are of course advantages to modern neo-classical economic models: They do predict how people embedded in the marketplace respond to incentives. Today though, the trick is knowing which farmer is embedded in the marketplace, and which in older persistent ways of thinking about economic life. The former will respond to incentives in manners development bureaucrats will understand. But for those still embedded in older subsistence ethics, the bureaucrats encounter people who do not remain at factory benches consistently, hire based on clan loyalties, appeal to personal relationships in the awarding (and repayment) of loans, lose their land to hucksters, and withdraw from confrontation when working conditions become onerous. Most frustrating for the bureaucrats are the emphases on the age-old method of resistance; especially having more children than the development bureaucrats think economically wise. And of course when food shortage looms, they look to the new patrons in the aid bureaucracies for relief supplies.

Such techniques, whether called peasant stubbornness, resistance, weapons of the weak, or simple laziness are in fact the old means used to resist the intrusion of the outside world into the older world of the subsistence peasant. But after $2.3 trillion spent in development assistance to change the peasantry into the finely tuned producer in a market economy directed by the guiding spirit of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, you would think something else might be tried. There are rational reasons the world’s subsistence peasants avoid capture by the world market—and unless these reasons are evaluated, not even another $2.3 trillion will provide the alchemy needed to transform Marx’s bag of potatoes into a finely tuned watch. And as long as this happens, the sighing of the economists, and sweating of the politicians will continue.

Tony Waters

Chico, California ]]> Oppression of Afrikans Economically Dukuzumurenyi http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/oppression-afrikans-economically/47179-farmer-power-continuing-confrontation-between-subsistence-farmers-development-bureaucrats.html Farmer Power: The Continuing Confrontation between Subsistence Farmers and Development Bureaucrats http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/oppression-afrikans-economically/47178-farmer-power-continuing-confrontation-between-subsistence-farmers-development-bureaucrats.html Thu, 26 Apr 2012 17:45:12 GMT Farmer Power: The Continuing Confrontation between Subsistence Farmers and Development Bureaucrats... Farmer Power: The Continuing Confrontation between Subsistence Farmers and Development Bureaucrats

Day by day, the peasants make the economists sigh, the politicians sweat, and the strategists swear, defeating their plans and prophecies all over the world—Moscow and Washington, Peking and Delhi, Cuba and Algeria, the Congo and Vietnam (Shanin 1966:5)

Economists, politicians, and strategists since at least the end of World War II dream of the world’s rural farmers becoming a wealthy, healthy, and modern middle class. Implicit to this dream is peasants moving off the farms of China, India, Africa, and Latin America to staff factories in an ever-wealthier world. When this doesn’t happen, the Ph.D.s do indeed sigh, sweat, and swear not at themselves, but at the peasants that frustrate the models on which their development plans are based. In the process though, they forget one thing: the very nature of the world’s subsistence peasants. Subsistence peasants farm, feed themselves, build their own houses, have children, grow old, while producing little for the world markets that the economists celebrate. In short, peasants resist the siren song of the economists’ models, no matter how effectively it might be packaged by cheerleaders for globalization and free markets including U2 frontman Bono, UN Secretary Generals, US Presidents, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, or economist Jeffrey Sachs.

The Two Great Transitions in Human History

Anthropologists and historians talk about the two great transformations in human organization. The first began 8,000-10,000 years ago when Neolithic farmers emerged from scattered groups of hunter-gatherers. During the following millennia they became clans who as a small unit together tilled the earth, raised animals, built permanent houses invented village life, and even at times created empires. The economists dream though of a second transition begun only about 400 years ago, and continuing today. In this transition, the same farmers—heirs to the Neolithic—are moving into a modern market economy in which tasks are highly specialized, and trade in the global marketplace is key. In this transition there are governments and banks gambling big money that millennia are not needed before a world-straddling market economy emerges. Indeed, economist William Easterly estimates that since World War II over $2.3 trillion was spent to entice these farmers into the new global marketplace by the World Bank, United States Agency for International Development, European Community Humanitarian Organization, and so forth.

So why didn’t such a big investment necessarily work during the five and ten year plans of the economists? Simply put it is because subsistence farmers of the Neolithic are outside the ethic of the economist’s modern marketplace, and relatively immune to its enticements. Subsistence farmers traditionally grow most of what they eat, build the houses they live in from local materials, and make the clothes they wear independently from the marketplace. Their small surpluses go to harvest celebrations, or as tribute to the chief, prince, king, or other leader who provides relief supplies in the event of famine. Indeed, what is produced by subsistence farmers never even has a market price put on it. But life was good for farmers with access to hoes, plows, unclaimed arable land, and rainfall; in good years there was enough food to support a rapidly expanding population. In better years there was something left over that could be traded for minor luxuries, or offered as tribute to a potentially rapacious warlord. And so, across the millennia, values, norms, and culture emerged to justify and accommodate the nature of subsistence farming. First was loyalty to kin, and tribute to a feudal leader who maintained the famine socks and organized defense. The abstract nation-states, citizenship, and market principles of the economists and politicians were yet to be invented as the organizing principle for larger societies.

In short, subsistence peasants, while vulnerable to catastrophe, were more independent of the marketplace than we moderns. If markets failed, life on the farm was more uncomfortable, but there was still food to eat, and a place to live. In the modern market though, market failure means that unpaid workers are evicted from their houses or unable to buy food. Subsistence farmers, when viewed from this perspective, had it quite good as long as land was plentiful and rains came. Indeed, this is why Karl Marx when dreaming of world revolution, compared France’s unrevolutionary nineteenth century subsistence peasants to an inert sackful of potatoes. Marx complained that like potatoes in a sack, no peasant household was much different from any other. The French peasants contributed little to the efficient globalized markets emerging in Europe’s cities: a potato was always just a potato, each pretty much like the other.

Nineteenth century European factories initiated this transition by hiring masses of former peasants to work in textile mills, meat packing plants, mono-crop agriculture, and the other specialized assembly lines of the Industrial Revolution in which skilled workers do a single simplified task, but do it efficiently. This transition is what development agencies like the World Bank call ‘development’. Given that this is such a massive project, it is perhaps surprising that it occurred in many countries in only a matter of decades or a century, rather than the millennia of the first transition from hunter-gatherers to settled agrarian populations. Nevertheless, this transition is not yet over. It is continuing in the third world today, as the subsistence peasants continue to defeat the plans and prophecies of hyper-educated economists, politicians, and planners.

The Long Successful Run of the World’s Peasants

The world’s subsistence peasants had a long and successful run. Emerging out of scattered hunter-gatherer communities 8,000-10,000 years ago, they settled down in fertile river valleys where they raised more human food per hectare than nature had ever produced for their forbearers. As hoe wielding farmers cleared the land, rapid population growth resulted from the increases in food production. Surpluses, though small by modern standards, still eventually supported great empires in places like Ancient Egypt, Rome, China, Europe, and the Americas. True, a “terrible compromise” in which freedom and liberty were traded for the protection of a tribute-seeking King often emerged. But life and culture were similar for the vast majority who remained on the farm, growing and consuming what they needed to eat, building housing, producing clothing, and having children. In this context, rarely did more than ten or twenty percent of all production enter the marketplace—the bulk of consumption remained on-farm where peasant families, each doing the same thing as the other, continued to resemble that unrevolutionary sack of potatoes which so frustrated Marx.
Take a potato out of the sack, and the bag is still a sack of potatoes, just a little lighter. Take a smaller specialized piece out of a specialized machine, and not only is the machine only a little lighter, but it also might not work. This is why peasantries are so resilient when compared to a system of differentiated economy organized by Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” and the principles of supply and demand. The problem is that from the retrospective and comfortable position of today’s economists, this change appears magical and painless in societies celebrating individual achievement, and the accumulation of capital. But it is not painless for the peasant whose old way of life is slowly destroyed, family loyalties dissipated, land appropriated, clans disrupted, and replaced too often with life in the urban slums of modern industrial cities.

Scotland’s subsistence peasantry is a good example. Scotland’s clans from time immemorial occupied the hills and glens where they farmed, raised livestock, built stone houses, and paid in-kind tribute to patron clan chiefs. However, following English military victories in 1748, a new way of looking at the land emerged. Clan chiefs siding with the British were granted personal title to the clan lands, while at the same time new factories demanded wool, flax, and labor. The Scottish highlands provided an excellent place to graze sheep and raise fields of inedible flax for the textile mills of the growing cities, and Scotland’s peasantry provided laborers who could work in the newly industrialized economy as wage laborers. In modern words it was a “win-win” for the “Clan Chiefs” who could now sell or rent “their” personal lands in the free land market, and the expanding industrialist class which needed cheap labor. But left out of course were the peasants who lost uncommodified traditional rights and privilege to use the land their ancestors had, the right to the famine stocks kept by the clan chief, who now preferred the global market’s measure of productivity, i.e. hard cold cash.

In this context, expropriation of Scottish peasant lands occurred by hook and by crook across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Threats of famine pushed former peasants into factory towns where they became the new urban working class. When the bright lights of the labor market were not alluring enough, sheriffs and military often played a prominent role. And as the survivors gained market skills needed in the rough urban environment, they lost subsistence skills and the old way of life: No longer could they grow their own food, or build their own stone houses even had they been so inclined. The lucky survivors after a few generations were though able to serve the needs of the world-straddling labor market, and become the middle class consumers which today’s economists celebrate. But this was not the only strategy of Europe’s eighteenth and nineteenth century peasants.

For a time Europe’s subsistence farmers had another strategy to deal with the disruptions coming with the transformation to market society: They could flee to places like North America where arable land was available after the native population died from European contact. And so when the European peasants arrived in North America in the eighteenth century, many left for the nearby forest where it appeared they might resume life as a subsistence peasantry. In fact in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not only the Scottish peasantry fled to the North American forest, but also English, German, French, and others displaced European peasants. Hacking, clearing, hunting, and fighting their way across the North American continent, Europe’s subsistence peasantry peopled the land east of the Mississippi between about 1750 and 1850. The expansion was one rooted in the conservative subsistence peasantry’s greatest traditional strengths, especially the ability to have many children, organize social life around clan-based loyalties, and a penchant to clear land for new farms. This happened across decades (rather than millennia), as the United States and Quebec experienced one of the highest population growth rates ever-recorded: Populations of North America’s subsistence farmers doubled every 20-30 years.

A paradigmatic example of the consequences of such rapid demographic growth is the frontiersman Daniel Boone. In his long life (1734-1820), Boone hunted, and cleared farms across Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Missouri along with his 13 siblings, 10 children, and more than 60 grandchildren. For a time of course, subsistence farmers like Boone even made it in the rough land markets of Kentucky where he settled in the 1770s. But like millions of other rural peasants dabbling in the unfamiliar impersonal marketplace with its emphasis on cash rather than the handshakes, Boone was conned by land speculators from the city. Fortunately for him, there was still land left further west in Spanish Missouri, to where he moved his clan in 1799.

Neither Daniel Boone, his extraordinary clan, nor Europe’s peasants prospered for more than a few decades whilst hacking, clearing, and hunting—the modern industrial world was too close. And as in Scotland, the actual profits, and the land itself, slowly but surely made its way into the hands of the newly emerging investors who controlled the government, banks, law firms, and land offices. So in a slow but recurrent fashion, the United States’ Northwest, settled by prolific hunters and farmers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, passed into the modern global land market. Most dramatically, what was in 1830 a remote trading village for hunters—Chicago—by 1870 was a large modern industrial town, coordinating the production of maize, wheat, lumber, cattle, and hogs across several states. Just like in Scotland, in North America the peasants were slowly but surely moved onward—into factories, production for the market, or further west. As in Scotland, the movement was facilitated by urban market power in the form of land speculators and bankers—whose eviction notices were backed up by the sheriff. And so, North America’s subsistence peasantry faded into history as the land they cleared passed out of their hands whether violently, or through the maneuverings of mortgage bankers.

It will be no surprise to readers of Current Intelligence that markets are enormously successful in concentrating and increasing economic productivity. But I doubt that any of Current Intelligence’s readers, myself included, can raise what they eat, build their own house, and make their own clothing like Daniel Boone, a Scottish clan, or an African subsistence farmer today. We are very much part of the finely-tuned world in which labor is specialized, and worldwide trade is critical. But even Bono, Thomas Friedman, and Jeffrey Sachs likely have ancestors who in the recent past were such self-sufficient farmers.

In place of subsistence farms are the large corporate and government bureaucracies who use the invisible hand of the marketplace to produce for the world. But to say that this happened, is not to say the process was just, nor came without suffering. Nor was it necessarily welcomed by the world’s peasants whose passive resistance to market incentives still throw askew econometric forecasts. And if more evidence is needed of this conflict, one need look no further than Africa today, where vast numbers of subsistence peasants continue to live, farm, and resist government attempts to exclude them from lands reserved for cash-generating timber reserves, hunting blocks, plantations, or national parks even as promises of cash for wage labor entice them into the cities.

Africa’s Peasants Confront Markets and Its Bureaucrats

In pockets of Asia, Latin America and especially Africa peasant clans are still often like those Marx compared to a bag of potatoes: similar to each other, and not particularly suited to a fine division of labor. Perhaps all that is particularly new is that they have access to clothing purchased from the bales of the wealthy world’s cast-offs. But like the peasants in Scotland or even Daniel Boone, they resist with the tools of the subsistence peasant: high birth rates, clearing land, reliance on clan loyalty, and demands for relief commodities when crops fail.

The problem is that few development bureaucrats or businessmen see Africa in terms familiar to its subsistence peasantry, i.e. as a conservative, well-tested, and secure way of life. Rather they see it in terms of its incapacity to produce for a global marketplace in which land and labor are capital. Thus African development programs are typically about the tools and measures of the marketplace, like trade balances, currency stability, mineral production, agricultural extension, clothing manufacture, and oil. Unseen in such analyses are the subsistence peasants who are effectively invisible because they primarily produce outside the global market. In this context, they will always frustrate the highest ideals of the development agencies. The way they frustrate the modern marketplace is through the same messiness seen in eighteenth century Scotland, and nineteenth century North America. They have babies who as young men and women eventually push into forest reserves, national parks, and other cash-producing concessions only lightly policed by the central government. And when these traditional strategies no longer work, the survivors demand relief supplies from their patrons, just as surely as Scottish peasants asserted rights to famine relief from patron clan chiefs in the eighteenth century Highlands. And perhaps most threatening, when land does indeed run out, the peasantry creates vast numbers of youth who no longer have access to land for a subsistence life, and few market skills of interest in urban labor markets. And ominously, these displaced youth are the targets of extremists seeking to create the militias needed for the type of revolution Marx dreamed of. Or in a post Cold War world, they are susceptible to the ethnic ideologies found in places like Rwanda, Congo, Colombia, Afghanistan, The Middle East, and elsewhere.

The Limits of Modern Economics for Understanding Peasant Life

There are of course advantages to modern neo-classical economic models: They do predict how people embedded in the marketplace respond to incentives. Today though, the trick is knowing which farmer is embedded in the marketplace, and which in older persistent ways of thinking about economic life. The former will respond to incentives in manners development bureaucrats will understand. But for those still embedded in older subsistence ethics, the bureaucrats encounter people who do not remain at factory benches consistently, hire based on clan loyalties, appeal to personal relationships in the awarding (and repayment) of loans, lose their land to hucksters, and withdraw from confrontation when working conditions become onerous. Most frustrating for the bureaucrats are the emphases on the age-old method of resistance; especially having more children than the development bureaucrats think economically wise. And of course when food shortage looms, they look to the new patrons in the aid bureaucracies for relief supplies.

Such techniques, whether called peasant stubbornness, resistance, weapons of the weak, or simple laziness are in fact the old means used to resist the intrusion of the outside world into the older world of the subsistence peasant. But after $2.3 trillion spent in development assistance to change the peasantry into the finely tuned producer in a market economy directed by the guiding spirit of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, you would think something else might be tried. There are rational reasons the world’s subsistence peasants avoid capture by the world market—and unless these reasons are evaluated, not even another $2.3 trillion will provide the alchemy needed to transform Marx’s bag of potatoes into a finely tuned watch. And as long as this happens, the sighing of the economists, and sweating of the politicians will continue.

Tony Waters

Chico, California ]]> Oppression of Afrikans Economically Dukuzumurenyi http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/oppression-afrikans-economically/47178-farmer-power-continuing-confrontation-between-subsistence-farmers-development-bureaucrats.html SAINT, COMMUNIST/TERRORIST? http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/oppression-afrikans-economically/47177-saint-communist-terrorist.html Thu, 26 Apr 2012 17:32:32 GMT "WHEN I FEED THE POOR AND HUNGRY, THEY CALL ME A SAINT, WHEN I ASK WHY ARE THEY POOR AND HUNGRY, THE CALL ME A COMMUNIST." [DOM HELDER CAMARA] ]]> Oppression of Afrikans Economically Dukuzumurenyi http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/oppression-afrikans-economically/47177-saint-communist-terrorist.html Using U.S. Dollars, Zimbabwe Finds a Problem: No Change http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/oppression-afrikans-economically/47162-using-u-s-dollars-zimbabwe-finds-problem-no-change.html Wed, 25 Apr 2012 13:13:15 GMT Using U.S. Dollars, Zimbabwe Finds a Problem: No Change...]]> Using U.S. Dollars, Zimbabwe Finds a Problem: No Change

By LYDIA POLGREEN

HARARE, Zimbabwe — When Zimbabweans say they are waiting for change, they are usually talking about politics. After all, the country has had the same leader since 1980.

But these days, Robson Madzumbara spends a lot of time quite literally waiting around for change. Pocket change, that is. He waits for it at supermarkets, on the bus, at the vegetable stall he runs and just about anywhere he buys or sells anything.

“We never have enough change,” he said, manning the vegetable stall he has run for the past two decades. “Change is a big problem in Zimbabwe.”

For years, Zimbabwe was infamous for the opposite problem: mind-boggling inflation. Trips to the supermarket required ridiculous boxloads of cash. By January 2009, the country was churning out bills worth 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollars, which were soon so worthless they would not buy a loaf of bread (the notes now circulate on eBay, as gag gifts).

But since Zimbabwe started using the United States dollar as its currency in 2009, it has run into a surprising quandary. Once worth too little, money in Zimbabwe is now worth too much.

“For your average Zimbabwean, a dollar is a lot of money,” said Tony Hawkins, an economist at the University of Zimbabwe.

Zimbabweans call it “the coin problem.” Simply put, the country hardly has any. Coins are heavy, making them expensive to ship here. But in a nation where millions of people live on a dollar or two a day, trying to get every transaction to add up to a whole dollar has proved a national headache.

Still, the new predicament is an improvement. By virtually wiping out inflation, analysts say, use of the United States dollar saved Zimbabwe from total economic collapse and brought the country back from the brink. The country’s political future remains deeply unsettled since the disputed 2008 election gave way to a shaky power-sharing government. But its economy is growing, if from a very low base.

Zimbabweans have devised a variety of solutions to get around the change problem, none of them entirely satisfactory. At supermarkets, impulse purchases have become almost compulsory. When the total is less than a dollar, the customer is offered candy, a pen or matches to make up the difference. Some shops offer credit slips, a kind of scrip that has begun to circulate here.

But for small merchants who sell handfuls of tomatoes, onions and lemons to poor people, customers may not always have the luxury of buying a dollar’s worth of merchandise.

Christine Mhalanga, 27, a hospital orderly, went to buy tomatoes from Evelyn Chikandiwa, who runs another vegetable stall. She selected a stack of tomatoes and some onions for stew. Mercifully, her purchase was exactly a dollar because Ms. Chikandiwa had no coins in her gingham apron to break any bills.

“I already had to buy clothespins I don’t need today,” Ms. Mhalanga said. “A dollar is a lot of money for me. I need every bit of it. Trust me.”

According to the United States Federal Reserve, at least five countries have officially adopted the United States dollar as their currency. Several more, like Zimbabwe, use it almost exclusively but hold on to a national currency, even if it is not in circulation.

But United States coins seldom circulate more than 100 miles beyond the country’s borders because of their weight and high shipping costs.

Most countries that use the dollar get around this problem by minting local coins: Ecuador uses the dollar as legal tender but mints centavo coins. The government guarantees that anyone who wants to exchange 100 Ecuadorean centavos for a genuine United States dollar can do so.

But that requires confidence in the local government, something that is in even shorter supply here than coins. Zimbabweans say they want no legal tender issued by their government.

“I won’t accept any Zimbabwean money,” said Ms. Chikandiwa, the vegetable seller, who saw her life savings wiped out by hyperinflation. Back then, the value of the currency dropped so fast that prices for milk, cigarettes, sugar and flour would change by the hour, if not the minute. These days, Ms. Chikandiwa keeps all her earnings in cash, not trusting her precious dollars to the bank. “We can’t trust these people,” she said, referring to the government.

Many Zimbabweans use coins from neighboring South Africa. But that presents its own difficulties. South African coins — the currency is the rand — are in short supply. Complicating matters, the rand, like most currencies, fluctuates against the dollar, making prices tough to fix.

Tendai Biti, Zimbabwe’s finance minister and a senior politician in the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, said that he had tried, to no avail, to find a solution.

“We have been seeking help from the Fed in the States, but we haven’t got a lot of joy,” he said, an edge of frustration seeping into his voice.

Supermarket cashiers are frustrated, too, and they devise their own ways to defuse the tension. Every transaction is a miniature drama of anticipation, annoyance and negotiation. The shopper tries to add up purchases to avoid needing change. And at the register, shoppers must make up their minds on how to compensate for failure.

As Lydia Zhuwawu worked the cash register at the Classic Supermarket in Harare during the evening rush this week, she tried to size up her customers to guess what they might accept in lieu of change.

A basket full of tomatoes and onions comes to $2.80. Ms. Zhuwawu has two well-worn singles for the $5 note, but no nickels or dimes.

“Sorry, no change,” Ms. Zhuwawu said, waving a hand at her assortment of wares.

The customer chooses a packet of four aspirin, 5 cents apiece.

Next up: a customer with $3.90 worth of groceries. Ms. Zhuwawu offers up a steel bottle opener.
“This is for 10 cents?” the customer asks, wearily. She takes it.

With single dollar bills in heavy rotation, they tend to suffer a lot of wear and tear. Many are filthy — almost black. Ms. Zhuwawu takes note of the cleanliness of the legal tender each customer hands her. Two-dollar bills, rare in the United States, circulate widely here.

Most people, she said, have a sense of humor about the problem. After all that Zimbabwe has been through, it is not that big a burden, she said. It is a give-and-take.

A man comes in to buy staples. A box is 30 cents; he has only a dollar. Her change drawer is empty.

“Just take it,” Ms. Zhuwawu said. “It’s your lucky day. Nothing is free in Zimbabwe.”

 ]]> Oppression of Afrikans Economically Yaw Asare Aboagye http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/oppression-afrikans-economically/47162-using-u-s-dollars-zimbabwe-finds-problem-no-change.html <![CDATA[RADIO SHOW- MWANANCHI NA MAENDELEO [CITIZENSHIP AND DEVELOPMENT]]]> http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/oppression-afrikans-economically/47096-radio-show-mwananchi-na-maendeleo-citizenship-development.html Thu, 19 Apr 2012 06:52:36 GMT I AM GOING TO BE DOIN A RADIO SHOW HERE BROADCAST FROM THE HIGHLANDS OF SOUTHERN TANZANIA. NAME OF SHOW IS MWANANCHI NA MAENDELEO [CITIZENSHIP AND DEVELOPMENT] CURRENTLY LAYING OUT SHOW TOPICS. THE SHOW WILL AIR ONCE A WEEK ON THURSDAYS ON 96.7 FM REDIO FURAHA BROADCASTING FROM IRINGA, UNITED REPUBLIC OF TANZANIA.

ANY SHOW TOPIC SUGGESTIONS? ]]> Oppression of Afrikans Economically Dukuzumurenyi http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/oppression-afrikans-economically/47096-radio-show-mwananchi-na-maendeleo-citizenship-development.html