mad bad world

Between 1980 and 1989 some thirty-three African countries received 241 structural adjustment loans. During that same period, average GDP per capita in those countries fell 1.1% per year, whilst per capita food production also experienced steady decline. The real value of the minimum wage dropped by over 25%, government expenditure on education fell from $11 billion to $7 billion and primary school enrolments dropped from 80% in 1980 to 69% in 1990. The number of poor people in these countries rose from 184 million in 1985 to 216 million in 1990, an increase of 17%.

Intimately linked to the debt crisis is the enormous burden that capital flight from Africa has imposed on this poorest continent. Recent work by Léonce Ndikumana and James K. Boyce of the University of Massachusetts reaches the conclusion that Africa’s wealthy have, during the period from 1970 to 2004, exported a total of $420 billion, nearly double the total debt burden of Sub-Saharan Africa in 2004, which in 2004 was $227 billion. Most of this money was not acquired legally. With the interest this capital could have accumulated over the 35 year period, the authors estimate the total loss to Africa at $607 billion.

The social consequences of structural adjustment [imposed by the WTO] cum agricultural dumping were predictable. According to Oxfam, the number of Africans living on less than a dollar a day more than doubled to 313 million people between 1981 and 2001 – or 46% of the whole continent. The role of structural adjustment in creating poverty, as well as severely weakening the continent’s agricultural base and consolidating import dependency, was hard to deny. As the World Bank’s chief economist for Africa admitted, “We did not think that the human costs of these programs could be so great, and the economic gains would be so slow in coming.”

On September 11, 2001, while the world lamented the deaths of innocent people in the United States, the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation reported that the daily mortality rate continued: 36,615 children had died from the effects of extreme poverty. This was normal in the age of 'economic growth'.

In Mauritius... the Sunday Times reported that migrant workers in factories supplying UK brands earn as little as 22p to 40p per hour, when the average local wage is 55p. One of them had supplied Sir Philip Green’s Topshop for the past ten years. “When I go to bed at the end of the day,” one woman told the paper, “I lay down and weep.” Another explained the conditions in which they work:

'We were put in dormitories – approximately 20ft-30ft, 40-50 workers huddled together in this room. There was no space to move around. For the 985 employees there were only 10 toilets and at least three of them did not work at any time. More often there was no water in the toilets. The food was so bad we could not consume it.'