My Initial Thoughts on Poverty, Inc. in Grey skies

The documentary was thought-provoking and well worth spending time to watch even though I had several contentions with parts of it. It only focused on one of the damaging aspects of Structural Adjustment Policies stemming from the Marshall Plan –the reduction of tariffs allowing subsidized foreign agriculture products to flood the market which put local farmers out of business and created a dependency on imports or aid.

Perhaps, there was not enough time in a documentary to discuss the other issues arising from World Bank loans and SAPs: devaluation of currency, cutting government spending in health care, social services, or education, focus on production leading to monocropping or that the countries that were supposed to go through an Industrial Revolution weren’t all the exact same and so forth. Of course, this is based on the premise that the Industrial Revolution isn’t a false premise and that society advanced without slavery.

The end of the documentary highlighted some “solutions” including micro-finance, introducing Rule of Law (Hernando de Soto) and property titles. I didn’t like that it didn’t offer a counter-narrative to these ideas, especially Rule of Law, since it could also be argued that this could also be imposing Western ideologies on others. Not only that, it could have looked at some of the unintended negative consequences of those ideologies. Perhaps, the loss of the wealth of the commons, or making land a commodity which could led to conflict, or community members turning on a person who isn’t able to pay back a microloan.

The idea of subsistence farming was also dismissed and it was noted that subsistence farmers were all poor and the only successful subsistence farmers people who had left jobs were they previously acquired wealth. I wouldn’t consider people who can live of subsistence farming to be poor.

Last updated May 08, 2017