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07/12/2004:

"Planet of Slums"

A devastating article.

by Mike Davis New Left Review
Future history of the Third World’s post-industrial megacities. A billion-strong global proletariat ejected from the formal economy, with Islam and Pentecostalism as songs of the dispossessed.

...The evolution of the new urban poverty has been a non-linear historical process. The slow accretion of shanty towns to the shell of the city is punctuated by storms of poverty and sudden explosions of slum-building. In his collection of stories, Adjusted Lives, the Nigerian writer Fidelis Balogun describes the coming of the IMF-mandated Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) in the mid-1980s as the equivalent of a great natural catastrophe, destroying forever the old soul of Lagos and ‘re-enslaving’ urban Nigerians.

The weird logic of this economic programme seemed to be that to restore life to the dying economy, every juice had first to be sapped out of the underprivileged majority of the citizens. The middle class rapidly disappeared, and the garbage heaps of the increasingly rich few became the food table of the multiplied population of abjectly poor. The brain drain to the oil-rich Arab countries and to the Western world became a flood. [52]

Balogun’s complaint about ‘privatizing in full steam and getting more hungry by the day’, or his enumeration of SAP’s malevolent consequences, would be instantly familiar to survivors, not only of the other 30 African SAPs, but also to hundreds of millions of Asians and Latin Americans. The 1980s, when the IMF and World Bank used the leverage of debt to restructure the economies of most of the Third World, are the years when slums became an implacable future, not just for poor rural migrants, but also for millions of traditional urbanites, displaced or immiserated by the violence of ‘adjustment’.

As Slums [a UN report] emphasizes, SAPs were ‘deliberately anti-urban in nature’ and designed to reverse any ‘urban bias’ that previously existed in welfare policies, fiscal structure or government investment. [53] Everywhere the IMF—acting as bailiff for the big banks and backed by the Reagan and Bush administrations—offered poor countries the same poisoned chalice of devaluation, privatization, removal of import controls and food subsidies, enforced cost-recovery in health and education, and ruthless downsizing of the public sector. (An infamous 1985 telegram from Treasury Secretary George Shultz to overseas usaid officials commanded: ‘in most cases, public sector firms should be privatized’.) [54] At the same time, SAPs devastated rural smallholders by eliminating subsidies and pushing them out, ‘sink or swim’, into global commodity markets dominated by First World agribusiness. [55]

As Ha-Joon Chang points out, SAPs hypocritically ‘kicked away the ladder’ (i.e., protectionist tariffs and subsidies) that the OECD nations historically employed in their own climb from agriculture to urban high-value goods and services. [56] Slums makes the same point when it argues that the ‘main single cause of increases in poverty and inequality during the 1980s and 1990s was the retreat of the state’. In addition to the direct SAP-enforced reductions in public-sector spending and ownership, the UN authors stress the more subtle diminution of state capacity that has resulted from ‘subsidiarity’: the devolution of powers to lower echelons of government and, especially, NGOs, linked directly to major international aid agencies.

The whole, apparently decentralized structure is foreign to the notion of national representative government that has served the developed world well, while it is very amenable to the operations of a global hegemony. The dominant international perspective [i.e., Washington’s] becomes the de facto paradigm for development, so that the whole world rapidly becomes unified in the broad direction of what is supported by donors and international organizations... [57]full article