Suas and the Politics of Charity

national | anti-capitalism | opinion/analysis Tuesday December 21, 2004 13:30 by Terry - NUIG Ecology Society/Anarchist Federation/Organise! (personal capacity) room101ucg at yahoo dot co dot uk

An investigation into the Suas ‘development education’ course and the whole issue of World Bank window dressing.
See also:
http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?story_id=68015

SUAS: DEVELOPMENT EDUCATION?

‘Suas are linked to the World Bank!??!!’, my reaction was one of shock and bemusement turning to outrage when my irate flat mate burst through the front door to reveal this startling fact. Yes indeed the glossy posters bedecking the university had ‘World Bank’ written on them.
Suas are a new organisation who sends volunteers to work teaching in India. Part of the volunteers’ project involves a “development” training course given by the World Bank. Odd you might think, the World Bank not being on your average NGOs’ Christmas list.

Suas was set up in February 2002 as part of Trinity College St. Vincent de Paul and had its first overseas volunteer programme in winter of that year. It has also run ‘development education’ workshops here at home. I’ll be having a look at its ‘development education’ course in a moment. There are currently 4 Suas University Societies, in Trinity, NUI Galway, UCC and Limerick (Mary I), by 2007 they aim to have 20 societies and 7,000 members.

So to investigate Suas further I went to take a look at the materials on their site pertaining to the ‘development education’ courses they have been running in TCD and UCD.
The first pdf of “development education” on the site does contain criticisms of the structural adjustment policies (SAPs) of the I.M.F./World Bank.
Strangely all these criticisms are in the past tense, later we are informed that:

“In 1999 the World Bank came to recognize the shortcomings of the SAPs, and has since adopted a new strategy by making countries develop what it has called, Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers.

The new emphasis is on the needs of the people, as perceived by them, to address issues of poverty, inequality and injustice. The main idea behind PRSPs is that a country itself with the borader (sic?) view of tackling poverty develops them.”

Basically there were some name changes, the Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility, the sub-section which oversees structural adjustment, was re-named the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (P.R.G.F.). While SAPs themselves were renamed ‘Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers’ (P.R.S.P.s).
Something like Windscale to Sellafield or U.D.R. to R.I.R.?

Research groups such as the Bretton Woods Project argue: “[T]he PRSP process is simply delivering repackaged structural adjustment programs” . They point to the paper delivered by the I.M.F. to a meeting of African finance ministers in 2000, which explained that Poverty Reduction Growth Facility makes for “a more rapid privatisation process” and “a faster pace of trade liberalisation”. Thus the I.M.F. circa 2000/2001 ordered water service privatisation in Niger, Benin, Rwanda, Senegal, and Tanzania, amongst others.

The same Suas document earlier goes into the whole definition of development arena.
We are offered what are claimed to be the considerations of students on the course:

“Three biggest challenges: apathy in the developed world, bureaucracy in the developing world and lack of capital in the developing world.”, says one.
Another writes that: “Development is the empowerment of people to improve the situation in their own country in terms of improving education, health and nutrition. Challenges: 1) politics of individual countries, which hinder development projects; for instance in Syria human rights organizations are not allowed to operate. 2) Operating development projects in unstable regions, for instance in Iraq where many NGO's are unable to carry out their work. 3) Difficulty of ensuring that aid directly reaches those it is destined for who are in need.”

In other words no reference to the structure of the global economy, no reference to the policy of Northern institutions. You would not know that the South isn’t ‘undeveloped’, it has been ‘undeveloped’. That is to say not the victim of some random accident of history, but the continual victim of policies emanating from the North, policies which are conditioned by the overall structure of the society we live in.

It is unsurprising that these students would not pick up on this, given that dependency theory is given a grand total of one line and that a distortion:
“the ‘dependency theory’ which described developing nations as dependent on colonial powers because of their past exploitation of that country.”
Actually the key work of ‘dependency theory’, Andre Gunder Frank’s ‘The Development of Underdevelopment’ argues, correctly for the most part, that underdevelopment is in large part the product of North-South relations, and against the idea that the diffusion of capital, institutions and values will lift the South out of underdevelopment. Rather the closer they are to the North the more underdeveloped they will be, and vice versa.
The national metropole sucks capital out of the underdeveloped interior and in turn capital is extracted from there to the North, and while this structural feature was implanted under colonialism it continues to this day. That is, current exploitation not just something which happened in the past. Hence rather than the South being poor it is made poor by capital flight and unequal trading relations, and it contributes to wealth in the North.
While you could certainly criticise dependency theory it is light years ahead of what is offered by Suas as “development education”.

Think I’m being a bit harsh, it’s just naivety isn’t it?, well get a load of this, the description of the World Bank from the same Suas document:

“The World Bank or International Bank for Reconstruction and Development was founded in 1945. Its mission is to fight poverty and improve the living standards of people in the developing world. It is a development Bank that provides loans, policy advice, technical assistance and knowledge sharing services to low and middle income countries to reduce poverty. The Bank promotes growth to create jobs and to empower poor people to take advantage of these opportunities and the Bank provides loans, policy advice, technical assistance and a knowledge sharing services to low and middle income countries to reduce poverty. The Bank promotes growth to create jobs and to empower poor people to take advantage of these opportunities. For more information on the work of the bank, please visit their site: http://www.worldbank.org”

Your stomach churning yet? no, then try the description of the International Monetary Fund:

“The International Monetary Fund (IMF) was also established in 1945 to promote international monetary cooperation, exchange stability, and orderly exchange arrangements; to foster economic growth and high levels of employment; and to provide temporary financial assistance to countries to help ease the balance of payments adjustment. It has 184 member countries. For more information of the world of the IMF, please visit http://www.imf.org”

Or how about the “Human-needs centred approach” of the World Bank:
“This approach has required development agencies to adopt
much more 'participative' approaches to their work. To quote the World Bank, 'Participation is a process through which stakeholder's influence and share control over development initiatives and the decisions and resources which affect them’.”

Careful now puke will not do your keyboard any good!


STUNNING NAIVETY OR SOPHISTICATED GREEN WASH?

Greenwash is the process by which corporations, through advertising, or bogus environmental projects, or hired scientists, try to claim they have ecologically sound policies or give a green image, to hide what they are actually up to.

Perhaps the best example is from Shell, who after becoming probably the most notorious planet abuser in the world, principally from their actions in Nigeria, ran ads on the theme ‘People, Planet and Profits’.
A more recent example is the planned launch by Nestle, and Kraft, owners of Kenco, Carte Noir, and Maxwell House, of a “fair trade” brand. The difference between this and fair trade under the banner of the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation (F.L.O.) is F.L.O.’s fair trade has producers receiving twice the market price, by comparison with “fair trade” ala Kraft and Nestle where producers receive a mere 20% more than the market price. Not to mention the notorious record of Nestle in regard to baby milk products.

Another episode of capitalism-with-a-human-face, ethics with a market value, was before me when I opened the latest edition of the re-launched Magill. An advertisement for the charity GOAL: “provide vulnerable children in the developing world with food, clothing, shelter, education”, an advertisement sponsored by the Jurys Doyle Hotel Group. Regular readers of Indymedia will remember Jurys hosting a ‘less lethal weapons’ conference just recently, and a privatisation get-together in the fall of 2001. Providing vulnerable governments in the developing world with riot shields, electro-shock batons, tear gas and plastic bullets, all useful things if you have privatised water, education, health and all else.


The World Bank is in the business of greenwash, for instance it launched its ‘Development Gateway Internet Initiative’ in July 23, 2001’ and hired marketing company Third Level Data to promote the site, part of a project with a $50 million budget and full time staff of 25.
It obviously has plenty to cash to chuck around at improving its image, an image whose severe denting probably reached its high point, thus far, in 2001.

To consider the case for subtle greenwash, consider the fact that the Suas ‘development education’ does criticise the financial institutions’ policies, but in such a manner to suggest that they are no longer a problem, that just some mistakes were made, and consider that in the ‘The Aid, Trade and Debt’ Suas document as much space is given to having a go at NGOs!

Consider the fact that the criticisms made by “advocacy groups” are given some space, but crouched in such a fashion as to make them seem a lot more minor than they are (as with the brief mention of dependency theory). For instance “unsustainable debt repayment impeded a developing country’s ability to invest in…healthcare” (advocacy groups say), when actually a central issue is what the policy of structural adjustment directly does to health care, or education, or food security.

Moreover the issues are addressed, though that is too strong a word, as if they were past tense and the conclusions are all about how it is being sorted.
Consider that there is the illusion of balance and debate between say the likes of Oxfam on the one hand and organisations responsible for millions of deaths on the other.
Consider that despite all this referenced websites include sound ones, though with a LOT less prominence than those of the World Bank, a little smokescreen?

Or, maybe, this is idealistic kids, naive but well meaning, who some how managed not to stick ‘World Bank’ or ‘Structural Adjustment’ into a search engine before putting together a ‘development education’ course, who never picked up that ‘Globalisation: The No Nonsense Guide’ book from their local Amnesty shop, and managed not to read the sites they reference. Co-incidentally they openly run a development education course with the World Bank for their volunteers abroad. Hmm yeah, find some sand stick your head in it and see if there is anything there to pull, it might have bells attached.

Clearly the World Bank responded to the rise of anti-corporate globalisation with public relations operations, such as the ‘Development Gateway’ website detailed above. Now a large slice of has made up the anti-corporate globalisation wave has been fluffy NGOs, there has been a certain sector of youth attracted to it that you would find in One World Societies, or Amnesty International. It would be no flight of fancy to surmise that someone in an office somewhere realised that what they had on their hands was a body of idealistic young people spurred on by moral outrage who were not necessarily overflowing with political sophistication and who didn’t have a class position particularly at odds with the structure of society.
Why not intercept them? Something of a honey trap then?
Consider the ‘What is Suas’ blurb:
“Service to Others and Social Engagement - We get the society we earn: we promote the involvement of individuals in creating a better society - locally and internationally”
“the capacity to make a positive difference” Does it seem attractive to you?

There were rival state funded student groups in the 1950s and 1960s set up to a certain political agendas so this would not be something new IF that was what is happening in this case.

SUAS AND “DEVELOPMENT EDUCATION”: A FURTHER EXPLORATION.

Other sections of the documents on the website continue the blend of spurious balance and objectivity, with a few critical voices, a little dissidence thrown in to prevent the corporate-state-imperialist analysis from being too blatant.

Look at the part on “Food security, biotechnology & Biodiversity”. We are told under the ‘precautionary principle’ there may be a case against genetic modification. That is: ”scientific uncertainty + suspected harm = precautionary action. This principle removes the burden of proof from scientists before precautionary action can be taken”
We are given an account of Vandana Shiva on biopiracy, that is, the patenting of seeds by multi-national corporations, but see how the core argument - that GM crops will increase world hunger is constrained and brushed away with one line “They also think it will increase the dependency of farmers on MNCs.”, to be compared with “others believe it could literally eliminate worldwide hunger”.
There is no mention of the massive popular resistance to the introduction of GM technology in India.

We are then pointed in the direction of “an interesting lecture on the topic” from Dr David McConnell from the Smurfit Genetics Institute in Trinity.
He is quoted in the latest issue of The Village as saying: “There are 800 million starving people in the world today, with 45,000 dying of hunger every 24 hours. We have got to introduce GM technology if we are to feed these people”.
However as has been addressed in the above section on hunger, the problem is not production but distribution, and this issue is not technical, but political, social and economic.
The proposal of technical fixes just hides the fundamental need to restructure global society to make it fit for human habituation.

Moreover GM technology will increase world hunger, which is the main case against it, this principally for the simple reason that it is an expensive technology. We have been here before, in the 70s the ‘Green Revolution’ was to feed the world. This was the introduction of high yield seed varieties, which produce more grain per acre, in a shorter growing cycle. However as the seeds were expensive and the necessary inputs – good irrigation, pesticides, fertilizer and mechanization were also expensive this had a particular detrimental effect. This benefited agribusiness and rich farmers, and was disastrous to the majority of the rural population. Small farmers couldn’t compete in the new market. Landless labourers who lost their jobs due to the introduction of these new technologies. Thus apart from an ecological issue with the technology the social impact of agricultural modernisation is a negative one in this context.
Vandana Shiva gives a good relation of the impetus the ‘Green Revolution’ gave to class and communal violence in India in her book ‘The Violence of the Green Revolution’.

In the same way as the others the Suas document ‘The Conflict Debate’ gives a dutiful minimal account of the arms trade before locating the source of conflict with ethnicity, that’s it something over there, something nothing to do with the North. In regard to the injurious diversion of resources away from development to militarisation the world’s biggest military budget by far – that of the United States seems strangely absent.
The two case studies of conflict, Rwanda and Sudan, seem singular in being well removed from the contempory actions and interests of any Northern state. Though in fact, and this is not mentioned in the case study, there was considerable French involvement in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
We get a long spiel on U.N. peacekeeping, yes some power from above is there to sort the problems, and, well it is bizarre to see, the NATO website is included under ‘peacekeeping resources’.

In the Suas ‘development education’ the proliferation of post Cold War conflicts is ascribed to ethnicity, which is not a casual factor I would simply dismiss. However there is no mention of the fact that many post Cold War conflicts were simply the continuation of Cold War conflicts which the superpowers poured arms into in, namely Angola, Afghanistan, Ethiopia/Eritrea, Morocco/Western Sahara.
The role played by Northern states in supplying sophisticated weaponry to governments involved in brutal counter-insurgency conflicts is also missing.
I say states because the truth of the matter is the arms industry is umbilically attached to the state, for instance in the U.K. there is ‘export credit insurance’ so that if the recipient of arms doesn’t pay the London government will. Furthermore there is ‘trade linked aid’ where the likes of Malaysia and Oman, hardly totally impoverished economies, get the bulk of British aid in turn for buying British weapons.
Also big arms deals are brokered at governmental level, as was the case with the British supply of weaponry to Saudi Arabia in the 80s and 90s, or more recently, at the height of the India-Pakistan tensions, British diplomacy was being employed to proffer the sale of Hawk warplanes to the warring parties, while we were being told the British government was trying to make peace!
Weapons supply plays an important role in recent and contempory wars in Columbia, Algeria and the Kurdish areas of Turkey, to name but three. You might also note a certain well televised conflict is not mentioned.

The ultimate issue is that underdevelopment is not something which just happens, but is something which is shaped and caused in part by the actions of Northern states and business interests, as well as those of the elites in the South.
All these problems are problems inflicted on the poor majority of the Majority World; they do not fall from the heavens.

THE WORLD BANK AND GREENWASH: A FURTHER INQUIRY.

Continued investigation reveals a monumental amount of greenwash carried out by the World Bank.
The Global Environmental Facility was established as a sub-section of the World Bank in the early 90ies coming out of the series of ‘Earth Summits’.
In ‘Saving Nature for Capital with the Global Environmental Facility’ Zoe Young claims that to some GEF project affected people it is: “‘an enormous con’ promising vastly more than it can deliver, ‘greenwash’ for the World Bank’s environmentally destructive developments in forestry, dams, energy, transport etc. and financial ‘sweetener’ for international lending and thus, third world debt”.

In ten years $4.1 billion was granted under it auspices to more than a thousand projects, but in many cases this was pure greenwash, for instance conserving one small part of a forest another World Bank program was devastating, in others she argues it simply funded the inevitable environmental aspects of other World Bank projects, and in others it was an added extra grant as a bribe to governments to take more loans, the later meaning more debt, and hence more structural adjustment which is always ecologically damaging. But not all the projects have been utterly useless, some have been the opposite.
So she argues that: “The GEF was certainly planned by governments partly for the Bank to respond constructively to the Western environmental uprising of the late 1980s, which focused much of its ire on the ecological consequences of Bank-funded dam, road and other development projects in the South.“
“One result is that (actual and potential) environmental critics become World Bank consultants, often working for nothing in the hope of later reward. Claiming to speak for ‘civil society’ but lacking any democratic mandate, many of the biggest environmental campaigning organisations are now keener to gain access to GEF’s funding than to publicly challenge it, let alone ally themselves with grassroots movements for justice represented for example in the Peoples’ Global Action network of resistance to neo-liberalism. By bringing in selected environmentalists as advisors, or even to implement projects, the GEF helps the Bank’s external relations team to distract observers from the wider impact of Bank projects and policies. “
More closely pertinent to the case under deliberation I spoke to a former activist with the World Bank Boycott who told me the World Bank has a vast ‘education division’ which even runs actual Third Level courses in prestigious American universities.
Furthermore, according to reports from an English activist at the Prague meeting of the World Bank Boycott, the Bank has deliberately targeted charity-NGOs in their early days, helping them get set up, to get them on side.
Subsequently I reviewed the World Bank websites, where I found innumerable public relations operations, mostly directed at secondary school children, including the “Development Education Program”, “Global Development Learning Network”, and “Youthink”.
Moreover it has an extensive section geared towards “civil society”, including offers of grants for NGOs.

BARRICADES, THEY ONLY HAVE TWO SIDES

The core issue is that the neo-liberal agenda of the I.M.F. and World Bank is challenged in streets, workplaces and neighbourhoods across the globe, a phenomenon usually occurring far away from the glare of cameras at summit venues. In that context what end is served by the make-overs and greenwashes coming from these institutions? What purpose could it serve but to inhibit international solidarity with such opposition?
I’m going to conclude with a few links to reports of resistance:

Struggles in Argentina, from Peoples’ Global Action:
http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/imf/argentina/index.htm#2001

Chile Con Carnage, from Schnews:
http://www.schnews.org.uk/archive/news475.htm

Protests have occurred all over the world, from globalissues.org:
http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/FreeTrade/Protests.asp#ProtestsHaveOccurredAllOverTheWorld

‘States of Unrest: Resistance to IMF Policies in Poor Countries’ are a series of annual surveys published by the World Development Movement.

2000 report: http://www.wdm.org.uk/presrel/current/anti_IMF.htm

2002 report:
http://www.wdm.org.uk/cambriefs/debt/stateunrest3/unrest3a.htm

Bolivia Vanishes See Style Section:
http://www.mediachannel.org/views/oped/palast.shtml
A Greg Palast piece on how the media didn’t cover uprisings in Bolivia.