Letters to the editor

Far from development

Before the failed world trade talks in Cancún I had actually discussed with some of my colleagues and even made a class presentation about the WTO meeting and the unfair trade going on around the world. It was sad, though, that I read the article by Rainer Engels only after my presentation on the subject. Your article is well articulated.

The main problem that as a young economist I have always fought against is the influx of European and US products that are actually in abundance in the African market. How do we explain the fact that most Africans have cattle (actaully this is a symbol of worth in Africa) but almost all the butter and cheese is imported from Europe. We know the reasons: it is hard for an African farmer first of all to get her products to the West market while it is relatively cheaper for European farmers to dump their products in Africa market.

If we are not going to address such issues we are really far from development.

[ Development cooperation with East Africa,
D+C 2003:7, p. 276 ]

In February 2003 in Rome, the major international development organisations participating in the High-Level Forum on Harmonization stressed once again the importance of packaging development policy tools on the donor side and ensuring that adequate institutional absorptive capacity is available on the recipient side. In Thomas Albert’s welcome stock-take of seven years of finely focused work, not enough attention is paid to the question of whether the administrations of the East African partner countries for which Albert is responsible at the BMZ have adequate capacities at their disposal.

Albert has put the extensive toolbox of German development work to intelligent and innovative use over the years and – on the German side alone – scored some remarkable successes in doing so. This gives him every right to raise his justified demand: hands off the local responsibility of the implementing organisations, confine BMZ’s area of responsibility to networking German development cooperation with strategic partners worldwide.

Whether such a policy has crucially helped ease the burden on partners, however, is a moot point. It is fair to assume that, even in the long term, targeted support is needed to ensure our work with partners is sustained. Vital structures first need to be consolidated before constructive contributions can be developed and implemented for development strategies in countries without international partners.

In that sense it would be nice to be able to support Thomas Albert’s good work or one day carry it forward.

[ Gross National Happiness as a development goal,
D+C 2003: 7, p. 288 ]

Dieter Brauer points to education and health as a fortunate emphasis of the government of Bhutan, but he also points to the lingering doubts what with the urbanisation in the capital and the lack of economic activities bringing employment for the people.

Nauru was a similar case which I had the opportunity to know from first hand – initially as Deputy Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Asia and the Pacific in the 60‘s and early 70‘s, and thereafter as United Nations Regional Director for Asia Pacific until the early 80‘s. During both of these periods I did get to have first hand contact with and experience how in Nauru, based on a single resource (in this case phosphates), massive prosperity and an illusory future were created. The population had themselves been provided by the government with ‘everything’: housing, health services, education, water, electricity – all for free.

The island, a small one which you could motor around in 35 minutes, was being virtually wrenched out from the bowels at its center for the phosphate. In terms of the ‘Gross National Happiness’ the people were distinguished by their obesity, laziness (mistaken by visitors as an idyllic life style), increasing levels of diabetes and other diseases. The real ‘prosperity’ was for them elsewhere, in a future that was being ‘stacked up’. It was in Melbourne where skyscrapers began to come up rapidly which soon even the locals there came to know as the ‘Nauru high-rises’ – bringing returns for now and a permanent haven for the time some years later when the phosphates were no more and Nauru a bare one time memory.

Bhutan is too big and ecologically too difficult for this scenario. But there is no substitute and there are no short cuts for true development.

[ Andreas Predöhl: Economic space, political space
and development, D+C 2003:4, p. 158 ]

I read the article by Wolfgang Hein on Andreas Predöhl with great interest. I referred to Predöhl’s work several articles in the 1980s because, to my mind, he was a pioneer center-periphery theorist from the point of view of the centre and a leading theorist of world economy.