The Pumpking - The Mystery of How Development Monies Get Spent

It was a Sunday afternoon.  Clouds drifted above.  Long grasses tossed in the wind.  A chicken scratched beneath a guava tree.  Two horses and three cattle grazed in the far corner of the orchard.  Quiet and peaceful.  For the moment.  The next day,  I would dive back into the madness of spring in Bhutan, a focal time of the year at the Renewable Natural Resources Research Centre.

My colleagues and I, a United Nations volunteer,  were all experts working with vegetables.  Our plates would be full.  We had early season tomatoes blushing with the moment of ripeness.   Our potatoes had burst through the soil, burgeoning with deep green stems, some sufficiently vigourous to already flower in modest pinks.  Young chilli plants quivered their leaves, still in seeding pots in rows upon rows, eager for transplanting and a forward start on the coming season.  Asparagus ferns waved in a soft sea of tender green.  Kohlrabi and kale pushed up through warm beds of straw.  Lettuces flushed for picking.  Yes, our lives were no longer our own, each and every day scheduled on the fickle demands of the season’s deceptively simple gods: vegetables.

We would also continue playing with mechanical technologies.  A hothouse extended the total production season of many kinds of vegetables.  Tomatoes could have an early start and leafy vegetables could be grown out of season.  Such shifts in each vegetable’s season would give farmers a better price for their produce.

There was the vegetable dryer experiment, the machine being a simple device, about the size of a large television cabinet.  Inside the cabinet were six shelves, and below the shelves a small heater and fan.  Warm air was blown up through the vegetables.  With doors closed on the cabinet, everything dried without exposure to insects, dust, or sunlight.  Built with local parts, affordable to many with modest incomes, concept originating from existing traditions of drying vegetables on rooftops.

To boot, spring was a busy time of year for off-station activities.  I and my colleagues would be dashing from one corner of the region to the next (five districts inclusive), preparing farmers for the transplanting of our new asparagus variety.  I would be hanging out in the local sawmill, working with the carpenters in constructing ten new dryers for distribution across the country.  By the end of the following month, we would be hiking four days north into the mountains.  On the way we will be distributing fruit trees at district primary schools and basic health units.  At our destination, at four thousand metres, we would spend a week with yak herders and farmers. 

But the most exciting adventure for the last!

Pumpkings!

In early November of the previous year I was slipped a small, unmarked packet with ten large seeds inside.  Pumpkin seeds.  Giant pumpkin seeds, I was told.  From America.  To grow, I was also told, for the King’s Silver Jubilee celebrations the following June.

I looked my messenger and delivery man square in the eye and said, “Winter has just set in.  At best I can get these started next April?  Maybe two months to grow them, three at best.  Not really possible.”

“For next June,” my man said.  “Money is not an object.  No questions asked.”

And he walked away.

So back in that brisk November, with just ten seeds, we set out to grow the world’s largest pumpkins.  For comfort, we specially ordered and erected a complete plastic greenhouse from Japan, to protect the fledgling plants from frosts, occasional snows, and heavy rains.  When the late winter drought arrived, no problem to install a unique irrigation system, ensuring a constant supply of warm water to the pumpkin beds.  Need special staff?  No problem.  A close daily watch on the vines.  Special beds of straw for the burgeoning fruits.  A lovely diet of compost and synthetic fertilizer carefully monitored for extreme nutrition.  Pumpkins treated like babies.  Pumpkins already passing two hundred kilograms each.  A growth rate of six centimetres in circumference each day.  All well on their way to our target three hundred kilograms in June.

Pumpkings!  What more could a king want!

What a patently successful way to invest development monies and the career of a United Nations Volunteer!

Gross National Happiness - Social Economic Policy in a Constitutional Monarchy

Bhutan

There will be principles of social economic policy in a constitutional monarchy.  This monarchy is an institution of national assembly.  It is a minority cultural and largely racial group.  They govern the reins on national policy.  The King is head of state, he expresses certain visions for the state, everyone refers to the King's visions, public servants in positions of power share the same family names.  Those who differ, stay quiet.

The monarchy also governs a predominantly agricultural society.  A cement factory.  Timber and forest products.  Tourism.  Electricity.  All really export driven.  Demand and other market mechanisms are largely absent from the domestic economy.  There is tithing, barter, redistribution, among other non‑liberal economic mechanisms: religious festivals, child granting to the monastic community, family transfers and marriage of power, ethnic cleansing.

There are two economic principles to propose in a constitutional monarchy.  One, a micro‑economic principle, is that each individual will invest themselves according to the perceived benefits of a given activity.  For example, farmers in Bhutan, despite a context of consensual decision making and deference to authority, remain highly independent in working the land.  Conversely, where they have little or no independence they are tenant farmers or sharecroppers.  The principle remains the same: farmers put into their work according to what they get out of it.  It is next to impossible to convince a tenant farmer to try a new technology ; any rewards of such go to the owner.

In this context, the success of public investment in the agricultural sector depends on the perceptions of individual farmers.  There are several reasons to emphasize this dependence.  One is that, on the whole, farmers are farmers in such a monarchy because they were born into the class of those who work the land.  This means that for the majority of farmers, farming is not an occupation.  An occupation is a choice.  These farmers had no choice.  However, the farmers’ enthusiasm in their daily routine correlate fairly strongly with their degree of choice in the matter.  The success of public investments in the agricultural sector probably have an enthusiasm multiplier.

There are then those farmers who work the land for someone else.  Tenant, chattel, slave.  As you wish.  This translates to low enthusiasm at the field level and, judging from the general abhorrence to hand labour among the educated and owning classes, a high degree of ignorance among decision makers.  Public investment is hampered.

A second principle, a macro‑economic principle, less commonly recognized, is that in a stratified society it is not how much people are taxed but rather how much is left in their hands which determines satisfaction of the public with national socio‑economic policy.  Expectations and standards in the form and quality of life play a key role in this principle.  Think of satisfaction with the status quo.  Similar to the first principle, there is an individual concern for benefit here, perhaps in their own pocket or through the public coffer.  It does not really matter how benefit is perceived, so long as it is felt and adequate satisfaction is attained.

The peculiar characteristic of the second principle revolves around the classic economic principle of scarcity.  A person who concerns themselves with investments and returns (benefits), juggles scarce resources.  This is the liberal economist.  The person who concerns themselves with maintaining the status quo (how much they are left with judged by popular or traditional standards) is making decisions in a system of abundance / surplus.  This is the monarchist.

A monarchist is an individual who is more or less subject to the decisions of higher authorities who concern themselves with relative surplus production in society.  There are no opportunity costs comparisons.  The individual is not a classic consumer.  They are a status quo enhancer.

In a constitutional monarchy, all is swell with surplus.  All is swell with constraint.

You just need a few above, a whole bunch below.

And no questions asked when someone disappears if they get in the way of the equation.

Tropical Sky

 Four months the tropical sky above me, hazy, washed blue from horizon to horizon,

The sun, detonating in silent perpetuity, the heat bearing down heavily,

My life, the one I once believed I had,

A woman, mortgages, investments, the colour of my car, the surety of progress,

Has slowed, stopped, evaporated amongst the humidity.

These past few days I have slept, three, four hours in the afternoon,

Early to bed at night,

Up with the dawn.

No dreams.

And during the sweltering days,

Though sheltered on the porch,

My thoughts wither.

I watch a fly land in a patch of sunlight,

Streaming from a rusted hole in the tin above,

Land on a piece of paper;

It rubs its tiny hands together, then flies away.

The ants have come,

Clambered up my small table,

Scurrying where my cold drink has been, sucking up the sweat.

From outside the courtyard,

Drifting in from the still foreign quartier

I hear music, voices, motorcycles, grinding mills,

An ever present cacophony surrounding me

Though far, far removed from me.

Occasionally, the wind dancing in the banana fronds and coconut palms

Reaches across my porch and cools my skin,

The heat from the sun so intense

That I notice the smallest swirling breeze wherever it touches me.

I find, oddly, that I cannot think beyond what I see, feel, hear,

Even the wet taste in my mouth, slightly bitter from the tonic water I drank.

As though I was that person I once thought I was.

I seem to wish to find meaning in the pageantry around me.

But I find no meaning.

My thoughts stop at sensation.

As the person I once thought I was,

Appears to have stopped at being.

Or, maybe, maybe,

The I is just beginning to be.

A War on Migration – International Development as Containment Policy

People on the move.  Looking for a better life.  Willing to leave the kisses of their children for months, years, maybe forever.  Migrants.  Immigrants.  The real movers and shakers of the world.

Whoa down!  Not so easy.  Can’t just have all these people running around without some kind of order.  What about security, economic order, even maintaining ethnic purity?  One answer, early twentieth century:  passports.

Along that same vein of thinking and as the century progressed, states instituted increasing degrees of control over the movement of people, ideas, and goods.  These ideas included, for the US, containment policy, which, with the best of intentions, would protect us all from communism.  Another idea was international development.

The growth of international development as an institution paralleled containment policy.  Both born in the 1950’s or so, the idea of containment was initiated by a fellow named George Kennan, quickly followed by the Truman Doctrine.  On their tailcoats came the creation of the Peace Corps, approved by John F. Kennedy.  Both focussed on containing people.  On one hand, communists.  On the other hand, all those rebellious poor and potential migrants from poor countries.

The problem of all those unruly ‘movers and shakers’ was exacerbated by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and continued expansion of a globalized economy.  Globalization, while great for corporate interests, especially the international mobility of finance and capital resources, also stirs up people.  You know, people, too, like to be mobile.

International development and containment policy suffer an apparent contradiction.  It is largely accepted that, in principle, development promotes the concept of the democratic state in which it seeks justice and qualitative improvements in the human condition.  These improvements are especially focussed on those with the least access to finance, capital resources, and means of mobility.

However, the development industry also accepts, or only mildly refutes, the basic tenets of globalization like market liberalism, assumptions of economic scarcity and competition, and materialism.  In theory market liberalism is innately egalitarian, that is, it harbours no human prejudices.  There is an assumption of a kind of equality.  We hear  expressions such as an equal playing field and comparative advantage.

It is well documented that the reality is quite different.  In practice, the development industry is party to a structural disparity between the world’s poor and wealthy.  Disparity means some have stuff and a lot of other folks do not.  You have it, I do not, I do everything possible to follow the rules to get there, I can’t, I get pissed off.  Structural disparity is responsible for degradation in general, of the economy, of the environment, of living conditions, and the many kinds of political and physical violence which many people suffer.

Not far from almost any development professional’s thought is a quantitative problem: tensions arise between economic classes where capital resources are proportionally diminishing and where the numbers of humans are increasing.  Competitive tensions lead to many of the world’s contemporary woes.  In general, this is understood to be a problem of economic scarcity to be treated with market liberalization, that is, intervention and barriers should be minimalized so that scarcity can be treated by comparative advantage and other laissez faire mechanisms of the market.  Translated into lay terms this means to withdraw politically as far as possible from economic activity, allow people to be free to buy and sell as they please, social problems will generally work themselves out.  The quantitative problem remains: how to create more wealth to satisfy more people out of fixed resources in finite material and biological world.

Oddly, mobility and migration are assumed fundamentals to any liberal economy.  Actually, it could be said that mobility is the primary device of free trade.  Money can be invested anywhere.  Technology can be relocated.  People can migrate.

So, too, does the idea of growth underpin liberal economy.  Herein lies a complication.  Having accepted liberalized trade and globalization, one also must accept consumption, unlimited wants, profit, and, in the end, the inevitable competitive growth.  Hmmm.  Increasing numbers of people.  Resources, both renewable and non-renewable, diminishing proportionately and absolutely.  This is what we call a no-brainer.  A present, palpable, and profound problem.  Growth in a no growth world.  The planet is not getting any bigger.  Non-economic competitive tensions are unavoidable.  Mobility necessarily becomes a political issue.

Can’t just have anybody migrating, now, can we?

The development industry presents a rarefied, monolithic perspective on the world.  We are always doing such good.  Health improvements.  Emergency relief.  Mining companies cooperating with community workers.  We have such lovely words like micro-credit, gender, sustainability, partnerships, entrepreneurialism, eco-tourism, capacity building, strategic planning, management by results.  We also offer that funny thing called hope.  Promises of improved soil fertility, renewed forests, democratic reform, peace, equal rights between women and men.  Nice ideas, but why always somewhere in the future?

Oof!

By and large, international development institutions operate in any country they choose.  They rarely, if ever, pay local taxes.  They are not elected bodies.  They are free to move as they wish.  Obligations are short term, confined to projects, nothing to do with governments, votes, or local taxes.  Financial resources are spent on themselves and the administration of their activities.  Meetings, conferences, annual leave, trainings, contract travel expenses.

Actually, essential to the business of development is the mobility of development itself.  Development is free of the constraints of any specific constituency and, therefore, free of democratic constraints.  Development simply operates as it wishes.

Development institutions contain people.  They promote the organisation of people into tiny collectives, like village groups or interest groups.  These lack size, political status, or the resources to develop independent polities or economies.

Development institutions contain ideas.  Ideas are discussed and legitimized within the walls of their own profession.

Development institutions contain the autonomous evolution of economies.  The institutions flood local economies with cheap credit and technologies.  They steer access to capital resources and production toward a world economy.

Development institutions contain societies.  They co-opt as a universal cause the ideas of indigenous rights and traditional ways of life.  They treat the traditional as a thing to be conserved.  They imprison peoples with development’s own ideas and theories of gender equality, civil society, and democracy.  Pluralism is neutered.

International development, as containment policy, serves to diffuse unrest and immobilize poorer populations while an ever evolving global elite consolidates power.