“Who knows? Not me. We never lost control…”
Looking over a list of the foreign loans that the Government of Malawi is currently paying off, and it really is striking how uncoordinated it all seems to be. Fragmentation of donor agencies and government ministries has led to a proliferation of useful projects without much thought as to what combination of activities will have the greatest impact when taken as a package.
Part of the problem is that while we know what outcomes we want to achieve, we don’t have a clear visualisation of what changes the economy and society will have to go through to achieve them. We all know we’re after ‘development’, and we want life expectancy to increase, infant mortality to decrease, and quality of life generally to improve. We know we want food security, and higher literacy. What we haven’t asked is what kind of society and economy will be most adept at achieving these ends. At the moment, the development community is operating on the assumption that the basic economic and social structure doesn’t need to change: if we privatise or improve access to credit, and build more schools, things will improve.
Is this really the case? What good will microfinance do in a region where everyone owns a small plot of land? They’ll be able to purchase fertiliser, but can farmers mechanise when their plots are too small to make a tractor worth the cost of upkeep? How can they rotate crops or diversify in a farm only large enough to support one crop? And when smallholder farming predominates there isn’t much potential employment for the young men who don’t inherit land. They instead move to the cities, where worklessness is already a big problem. It might be that the only way to generate the potential for growth is a move to large scale commercialised agriculture. This wouldn’t be a painless process, but pretty much every developed country has gone through it. Until we’re willing to look at patterns of inheritance and the social and economic barriers to accumulating land, we can’t begin to understand whether this process would help Malawi.
Similarly, it’s assumed that the economy already operates as a functioning capitalism, so simply removing those barriers that prevent capitalist economies from flourishing can stimulate growth. Leaving aside our imperfect understanding of what those barriers are, the premise may well be flawed. The majority of employment in urban areas seems to be family-based, rather than making use of a pool of unattached labour. Of course some industries do unambiguously conform to the capitalist model with its division of asset rich owners and asset poor labourers, with the former paying wages and using mechanised processes to generate profits that increase at a faster rate than wages. What we need to understand is how extensive this model of production is, because our macroeconomic policies assume that it is pervasive. It’s clearly not dominant in agriculture, and if isn’t pervasive in urban areas we need to think about how to make it so, because history has shown it is by far the most dynamic form of economic organisation. If we accept that the economy needs restructuring, we also need to look at what social changes will facilitate these changes and result from them.
I’m not suggesting that these are easy questions to answer, or even to ask. Malawi is a unique country, and the changes we will need to go through won’t be the same as those experienced elsewhere. Nonetheless, until we start asking questions like this, we’re sailing without a compass.
* * *
Another Hoopoe in the Ministry gardens yesterday. Apparently they’re daily visitors, but not visible from my window.
* * *
On the weekend I went to a bottle store (bar) with one of the Ministry drivers to watch the traditional dancing, and saw what can only be described as a reverse minstrel show. After some hours of fantastic performance, the dancers dressed up in white and began to move in unnatural and uncoordinated spasms, unrelated to the beat from the drums. Through the hysterics Cantona explained to me that they were imitating mzungus (white people) dancing. I nearly died laughing.
I’ve also found a school run in one of the poorer parts of Lilongwe that I’ll hopefully be able to help out with on weekends. Last week I ran training session for those students interested in football (i.e. all of them). By the end of the year, one of them will be in the national side, just you wait…
Part of the problem is that while we know what outcomes we want to achieve, we don’t have a clear visualisation of what changes the economy and society will have to go through to achieve them. We all know we’re after ‘development’, and we want life expectancy to increase, infant mortality to decrease, and quality of life generally to improve. We know we want food security, and higher literacy. What we haven’t asked is what kind of society and economy will be most adept at achieving these ends. At the moment, the development community is operating on the assumption that the basic economic and social structure doesn’t need to change: if we privatise or improve access to credit, and build more schools, things will improve.
Is this really the case? What good will microfinance do in a region where everyone owns a small plot of land? They’ll be able to purchase fertiliser, but can farmers mechanise when their plots are too small to make a tractor worth the cost of upkeep? How can they rotate crops or diversify in a farm only large enough to support one crop? And when smallholder farming predominates there isn’t much potential employment for the young men who don’t inherit land. They instead move to the cities, where worklessness is already a big problem. It might be that the only way to generate the potential for growth is a move to large scale commercialised agriculture. This wouldn’t be a painless process, but pretty much every developed country has gone through it. Until we’re willing to look at patterns of inheritance and the social and economic barriers to accumulating land, we can’t begin to understand whether this process would help Malawi.
Similarly, it’s assumed that the economy already operates as a functioning capitalism, so simply removing those barriers that prevent capitalist economies from flourishing can stimulate growth. Leaving aside our imperfect understanding of what those barriers are, the premise may well be flawed. The majority of employment in urban areas seems to be family-based, rather than making use of a pool of unattached labour. Of course some industries do unambiguously conform to the capitalist model with its division of asset rich owners and asset poor labourers, with the former paying wages and using mechanised processes to generate profits that increase at a faster rate than wages. What we need to understand is how extensive this model of production is, because our macroeconomic policies assume that it is pervasive. It’s clearly not dominant in agriculture, and if isn’t pervasive in urban areas we need to think about how to make it so, because history has shown it is by far the most dynamic form of economic organisation. If we accept that the economy needs restructuring, we also need to look at what social changes will facilitate these changes and result from them.
I’m not suggesting that these are easy questions to answer, or even to ask. Malawi is a unique country, and the changes we will need to go through won’t be the same as those experienced elsewhere. Nonetheless, until we start asking questions like this, we’re sailing without a compass.
* * *
Another Hoopoe in the Ministry gardens yesterday. Apparently they’re daily visitors, but not visible from my window.
* * *
On the weekend I went to a bottle store (bar) with one of the Ministry drivers to watch the traditional dancing, and saw what can only be described as a reverse minstrel show. After some hours of fantastic performance, the dancers dressed up in white and began to move in unnatural and uncoordinated spasms, unrelated to the beat from the drums. Through the hysterics Cantona explained to me that they were imitating mzungus (white people) dancing. I nearly died laughing.
I’ve also found a school run in one of the poorer parts of Lilongwe that I’ll hopefully be able to help out with on weekends. Last week I ran training session for those students interested in football (i.e. all of them). By the end of the year, one of them will be in the national side, just you wait…
posted by the Maradona of Malawi at 8:54 PM
