The INTAF Conference
So, that conference I went to yesterday (which is still going on, actually. There’s the plenary session today, but I’m unable to make that).
First, it was good to see Mukat Singh and his wife Jyoti, directors of the project (both of whom were delighted to hear about Tracy’s pregnancy) and a couple of people I had either exhanged emails with or met at other occasions (it turns out that a couple of the IVCS crowd read my APK blog, so I had a bit of “you’re the John Heron guy”, which was nice). Hari Dhanoo was there, a gentleman from Trinidad who had stayed for two weeks in India in the room next door to me and Paul along with his friend Raj Panday. Hari was as genial as ever, and we talked for a while. I was very sorry to hear that Raj had died in January, and I offered my sincerest sympathies to Hari, who now has the job of sorting Raj’s estate, because he died intestate.
Anyway, the conference. My notes are a lot scrappier than I thought they were, and I may be misrepresenting the speakers, but see what you make of it (full account beneath the cut).
Lib dem peer Lord Dholakia gave the first address, about rural poverty and its cost. He presented the opinion that extreme poverty is a denial of basic human rights.
Gareth Thomas, MP for West Harrow and Minister for International Development gave an optimistic address about the British Government’s commitment to overseas aid. We know that the Government is pushing the Millennium Development Goals. Mr Thomas said that goals in debt relief and aid were achievable; the future for the goals for trade, however, was “unclear”. £800 million was to go to aid for Asia and next week, the government is to announce £250 million to be set aside for dealing with the problem of maternal mortality. He said that universal primary education in India was possible by 2008.
Interestingly, Mr. Thomas also said that while NGOs were valuable, it was the place of government to effect change, and that really, they only tried to work in direct partnership with NGOs when they were forced to because of local governments too corrupt to work with (in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, for example). Obviously, people took issue with this, but Mr. Thomas stuck to his guns. He said that NGOs were vital, but that they couldn’t really effect change because they weren’t government. More - and he said he was being provocative - he said that he’d never come across an NGO that had really tried to tackle this problem. he was ignored. A shame - I would have liked to see some of the NGO workers there tackle that.
Andrew Sumner and Meera Tiwari (from South Bank University and UEL, respectively) gave a presentation giving the official statistics on rural poverty in India (saying that while these were bad, the truth was far worse). 75% of India’s poor people (as in, below the poverty line) live in rural areas. Rural illiteracy in India stands at 41% (59% women, 29% male); rural access to water is 24%; the rural infant mortality rate is three times that of the urban areas of India; only 16% of farmers (trhe welathy ones, duh) own over 60% of the land.
There was a bit of confloption because, due to a language barrier, one delegate thought that Dr. Tiwari was defending corruption as normative, when in fact she was doing precisely the opposite. It got really heated and went on at great length. However, in the end, I found it pretty informative.
One guy stood up, an Indian now living in the UK and working in further education, and said that he’d used to be a software developer working for a government department in India dealing with development, and that the package they’d created had a backdoor built into it specifically to allow the manipulation of figures for the benefit of the workers in the department. I was stunned by that.
Last speaker in the morning session was Mukat Singh, head of INTAF, who gave another, quite emotive, overview of the problems the rural poor faced. He was pretty gloomy. One thing that particularly interested me was this: some economists suggest that investing in the rural poor of developing countries is, in the long view, good business practice for Western multinationals, since, if they cease to become poor, they become consumers.
Some people took issue with that, and it was qualified (Dr. Tiwari, backing up Mr. Singh, said that consumerism in developing countries needs an indigenous context), but, well, I don’t know what to think of that. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
The afternoon session had a lot of discussion about health and investment, but mainly about education. Mr. Singh’s view of Indian education is quite bleak, and his response to Gareth Thomas’s earlier statement that universal primary education was possible in India by 2008 was that this was no good if the teachers didn’t turn up.
I’m glad I went. It was good to see people again (even if some of the news was sad) and it was good to show some solidarity with people from India, Madagascar and Bangladesh, even if for me as a rich Westerner, this was only an illusion.
July 4th, 2005 at 9:08 pm
This is really interesting (and not just because you used my favourite word - confloption -for the sixth time making it officially enough to qualify for inclusion in the OED.
But anyway, the whole ‘if we get them out of poverty they’ll become consumers’ issue. Very interesting. I saw a similar thing recently - an article by Shell in the financial section of one of the broadsheets reassuring us how wonderful it was that they’re working to make poor countries richer by giving them industry and the cynical part of me went ‘yes, but at what cost…?’ But then it’s easy for me as a liberal rich westerner to say such things. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that simply being a consumer is not necessarily a bad thing, but the selfish greed that so often accompanies consumerism is.
To quote the Dalai Lama:
Llack of contentment - or greed - sows the seed of envy and aggressive competitiveness, and leads to a culture of excessive consumerism. The negative atmosphere this creates becomes the context for all kinds of social ills which bring suffering to members of that community.’
Or to quote St Paul: Llove of money is the root of all evil’.
Or am I being over-simplistic and naive again?
July 4th, 2005 at 11:22 pm
You’re quite right that simply being a consumer is not a bad thing. I really get fed up when - as you say ‘liberal rich westerners’ - tend to assume that people in pre-industrial societies have some kind of inherent quality that we in post-industrial welfare states have so tragically lost.
Anyone who has visited a ‘poor’ country I doubt will be able to say that on the whole, the people there do not lust after wealth, nor do they have social ills as we do etc. Pre-industrial society is nothing to write home about. It has as many social problems as we do, and on top of that it has the incredible poverty and associated societal ills as well. The factors that people might lose as a result of growing consumerism (often cited are notions of community, spirituality etc - tell that to the millions of girls from developing countries who are sold into the slave trade) are nothing compared to the gains (good health, improved education, potential political stability and - most importantly to some -rights).
The Dalai Lama is a good example. He understands that consumerism can corrupt, but he will also often state that so can ignorance, and ignorance is too often a side-affect of poverty. The Dalai Lama is an entreprenuer of the highest order - he is the architect of the most affluent refugee community in the world.
Consumerism drives everything. It can be truly awful, but ironically it is the only thing (or the only system we yet have) that can provide the environment in which good things - NHS, universal education, political and social mobility - can happen. You only get an NHS because a country produces enough capital to pay for it; you only get political reform when a sector of society is educated enough to know their rights, and development paves the way for education; you only get the technologies that can help to preserve the environment when you’re society is technologically progressive, and its people have enough free time away from the daily grind with which to even contemplate preserving the environment.
There’s no such thing as a free meal. With consumerism, we get overwhelmingly good things, but we also get bad things. Nothing is the history of the world has ever been entirely good, never having had side-effects. That’s not the way things happen. Tenzin and Paul have got the key to it all: consumerism is not inherently good, and it ain’t inherently bad. Our attitude towards it is. When we’ve had a philanthropic attitude towards its use, we’ve obtained the most wonderful things about our society; yet when we’ve fallen towards the dark side, overwhelmingly bad things have resulted. Maybe even George Lucas was right…
To leave Africa without the option to even grasp at the opportunity to realise the benefits of consumerism, simply because there will be side-effects, is no excuse to allow mass poverty and societal disorder to continue.
July 5th, 2005 at 8:34 am
Mike’s right, again (except for the part about George Lucas, obviously).
Got to say, in the Indian village I was in, loads of the young people wanted to be consumers. They aspired to having Nike trainers, DVD players, Pepsi, Lays Crisps and expensive mobile phones. They just didn’t have the money to get any of the stuff.