"Successful Development" follow-up

How much does the lack of natural resources and/or cash crops for export affect this equation?

Wow.  Point to my mom for shooting out the highly loaded question.  So loaded, I couldn’t answer it in the “comment” section.  It needed a whole other blog post.  Not that I’m the reigning expert, but here’s what comes to mind.

So when international development first started receiving focus in the aftermath of WWII, there was a huge meeting in a place called Bretton Woods of all the rich, “developed” nations of the world to answer the question: how do we best eliminate poverty (with all these newly independent nations) so as to ensure greater global security (so nothing like the path from German poverty to fascism ever happened again)?  Their solution was to set up massive international lending bodies to (theoretically) develop the business and industry in these new countries.  Sounds great right?  Give some assistance, advice, hard cash to impoverished (and brand new) country governments to build up economies, markets, private businesses.  Poor people get jobs, global poverty is alleviated and people (poor and rich) make money.  It sounds great until you look at it more closely and see that it is “trickle-down economics” heart and soul.  If the business sector—the sector with cash got better, then so would everything else.  If people just had more money….  It’s a very Western—very American—way of looking at solutions to poverty and, hence, development.  The institutions created—the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—existed to lend money to developing countries.  In order to receive their monies, like any lending institution, you had to play by their rules and the reigning belief in these large, international institutions, created and run by the rich, powerful nations of the world, was on expanding international markets and greater inclusion in them.  In order to get IMF money, developing nations had to enter the global market, whether they were ready for it or not.  This meant growing more cash crops for sale in international markets rather than for feeding their own people, selling their natural resources to the rich countries who consumed 25% of the world’s resources rather than selling them to their own people.  That was supposed to give them enough money to then buy the things they needed, including food and resources they had traditionally gotten for themselves.  This is unsustainable development at its finest, and only in the last 20 years have we really seen the problem.  Countries like Jamaica have been in debt to the IMF for so many years, they can’t climb out of it.  They used to be able to grow enough of their own food to feed their population, but now it can’t even compete in the global markets it was supposed to.  Now it’s sold its soul to the tourism industry.  All the money the IMF said it was supposed to make is not there, so what little money they do make has to go back to the IMF to pay for the loan rather than paying for stabilizing an education systems, a health care system, job creation, etc—all those things that contribute to building a structure in a country.  Now they’re one of the many countries clamoring for “debt forgiveness.”  For more, I encourage you to watch the VERY GOOD documentary Life and Debt.  The IMF and the World Bank forced countries to export their goods as the driver of development rather than “keeping it local”.  Which is really totally backwards, I think, from the rich countries.  When I think about the “successfully” developed countries I mentioned in the last post, I realize that these are all countries that import more than they export.  Have you ever heard that statistic—the richest countries in the world have 10% of the people and consume 25% of its resources?  It’s kind of old hat now.  If you (a country) don’t have natural resources to export, you don’t get any of the rich countries’ money, but then you’re not their slave either.  The institutions that were created to help countries help their people climb out of poverty, only succeeded in making them poorer.  These “successful” countries never had substantial help from them.  

Well, I hope that answers at least part of the question.