Sunday, January 22, 2006
Two Myths That Keep The World Poor
Excerpt:
Two of the great economic myths of our time allow people to deny this intimate link, and spread misconceptions about what poverty is.Full Article
First, the destruction of nature and of people’s ability to look after themselves are blamed not on industrial growth and economic colonialism, but on poor people themselves. Poverty, it is stated, causes environmental destruction. The disease is then offered as a cure: further economic growth is supposed to solve the very problems of poverty and ecological decline that it gave rise to in the first place. This is the message at the heart of Sachs’ analysis.
The second myth is an assumption that if you consume what you produce, you do not really produce, at least not economically speaking. If I grow my own food, and do not sell it, then it doesn’t contribute to GDP, and therefore does not contribute towards “growth”.
People are perceived as “poor” if they eat food they have grown rather than commercially distributed junk foods sold by global agri-business.