elissasmith.ca

My friend Emmanuel Prinet wrote this a few months ago in an email. It sums up what I have been thinking lately in accessible language.

“A lot of “economists” and “development thinkers”, having studied neoclassical economics, are programmed to think “economy” in whatever they do. So if there’s a problem with the “environment” (ie. over consumption of natural resources or ecosystem degradation), they suggest these be internalized into the economy so that suddenly they are taken into account (and this is also a way to get economic growth, since the GDP will increase). If people are hungry, they think it’s because they have no money and can’t buy food, so the idea is to widen the economic sphere to include these people in the formal economy, when actually what they need is access to land and water to grow food. A lot of relations in low-income countries are non-economic, ie. they do not involve money transactions. Family and community members help each other out, and the work undertaken by women (such as fetching water) is unaccounted for in the GDP, yet these are essential!

The “market” logic has clear limits, and it’s actually a threat when people want to expand the market to include everything such as health, education, meeting basic needs, etc., because basically, if you can’t pay, you get nothing. That’s why we have to fight the WTO, and that’s why NGOs always talk about the ‘rights-based approach’–because all the basic necessities are basic Human Rights, and as such, governments have the prime responsibility to ensure that all their citizens can have access to these things.”