The End of Poverty? a documentary film by Philippe Diaz, Cinema Libre Studio, 2010 (DVD), 104 mins.
Too many films seek to tell us about the horrid conditions of poverty that bewail the planet. Along with reports and books, they sanctimoniously pronounce the misery of the world’s impoverished peoples and offer as a tonic microcredit and NGOs. Although this “poverty porn” describes what is an undeniable reality—one fifth of the people on our planet live in slums, whose conditions resemble medieval shanties, except that they are congested and irrigated with polluted water, and they abut toxic industrial enterprises—it often fails to ask the elementary question: Why are so many people poor?
If the question is asked, the typical explanations are either overpopulation (neo-Malthusianism) or dirigisme (an overbearing state that suffocates individual initiative). None of these bear up against the facts. Indeed, these explanations put the cart before the horse, blaming the effects of poverty for their cause. For years, the Food and Agriculture Organization’s annual reports have shown global food production on the rise and far in excess of the admittedly large world population’s actual food needs. Yet starvation deaths are commonplace. We had record food harvests in 2008, and still the number of hungry people rose by 40 million to rest at 963 million. The dirigiste states have not interrupted either rural production or the initiative of the people. It turns out that the people who starve do work, but they do not earn enough. It is this lack of effective earnings that dampens their purchasing power in the food market. Their poverty, not lack of food or overpopulation, leads to hunger and starvation.
Unlike most films on the topic, The End of Poverty? attempts to explain the existence of global indigence. To do so, it does not portray the poor as pathological. The cause of the “illness” is not laziness but the political, economic, social, and cultural aftermath of colonialism. Early in the film, we go inside the remarkable silver mountain at Potosí, Bolivia. Here a miner takes us into a museum made by the miners to honor their lost comrades. In the days of the Spanish conquest, miners were not allowed to leave the inside of their silver tomb for six months (under the colonial labor draft known as la mita); sending riches to Europe required the miners’ confinement in the bowels of the earth. The miner quotes from Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America: If you take all the silver mined from this hill, it could make a bridge from Potosí to Spain; “another bridge could have been built from Potosí to Spain with the bones of the people who died in the mines.” Violence and theft are at the heart of the colonial project. It produced the down payment for the industrial revolution, and for the great divergence between northwestern Europe and the rest of the planet. The End of Poverty? tells this story carefully, leaning on several respected experts as well as on the historical memory of History’s victims.
Colonial history, the film argues, is the foundation of the contemporary world order. What came after, from the 1940s onward, built on that base. The new nations faced a recalcitrant Atlantic world, which was unwilling to allow a new dispensation. The End of Poverty? is less effective here, giving us little of the attempt made by the new nations to forget their own path. Instead, we jump ahead, past the era of the Third World project—cultivated by the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements and their intellectuals from the 19th century into the 1940s to solve the planet’s problems—and into the arms of the structural adjustment epoch (the 1980s onward).
The narrative picks up again, with insiders like former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz, giving us a potted history of the antics of the Masters of the Universe. The Washington Consensus, Stiglitz wryly puts it, was only a consensus between 15th Street (the U.S. Treasury) and 19th Street (the International Monetary Fund) in Washington’s powerful geography. It confronted a weakened Third World project, lashing out with its petrodollars and its austerity schemes, demanding major changes in the development model in the formerly colonized world. Inequality between North and South widened, as the foundation for an alternative, as sketched out by the Third World project was eviscerated. No more dirigiste state intervention, no more social wage, no more New International Economic Order (the set of proposals presented at the United Nation by developing countries in 1973). Now everyone had to aspire to the impossible, to live the American Dream.
We go from Bolivia to Kenya, listening to ordinary people tell us of their tribulations. They are all hard-working, plucking tea or cutting cane. Hard-pressed by moneylenders and brutal landowners in their vicinity, and far away by the G-7 and bankers, these working people finance the entire economic system. The North’s answer to their poverty is either small-scale change (microcredit, more individual initiative, NGOs) or large-scale laissez faire schemes (huge infrastructural projects like dams and power plants built by northern corporate houses or free trade regimes that benefit multinational corporations). None of these solutions include asking the South what it wishes. There is no longer a political space for such an inquiry.
The End of Poverty? takes its cues from Serge Latouche, author of Le Pari de la décroissance (Paris: Fayard, 2006), who appears in the film. Latouche’s suggestion is “de-growth,” a decrease in the consumption levels in the North and a rise in wages in the South. This view puts ecological sustainability at its heart, interested in drawing away from the “American way of life” (with just 5% of the world’s population, the United States accounts for 32% of global expenditure and 24% of the world’s energy). It is hard not to be attracted to this agenda. In addition, the film points to the criminality of the debt trap, with countries stumbling over their massive “odious debts,” which now total in excess of $2.7 trillion, according to the World Bank. Aid is of no consequence. It can suffocate, as shown by Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid (Macmillan, 2009). For every dollar sent out as aid, the South returns $25 in debt service (The End of Poverty? says $10, but this is not so. The situation is grimmer). Instead of aid, the issue on the table needs to be debt relief. This is implicit in The End of Poverty? but it needs to be explicit in our discussions.
Martin Sheen does the voice-over. It is soothing, reassuring to have such a familiar voice take us through the narrative. The experts are also valuable, from Bolivia’s vice president, Álvaro García Linera, to the Brazilian Landless Movement’s Jaime de Amorim, from Eric Toussaint of the Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt to Nora Castañeda of the Venezuelan Women’s Development Bank. Their commentary provides much to be learned from and more to be pondered. The End of Poverty? sketches the problem and hints at the way forward. If you are interested in the latter, you might visit the film’s website (theendofpoverty.com), where the filmmakers have posted a 10-point plan to end poverty and are seeking 10 million signatures endorsing it. It is a radical plan—among other things, it calls for total debt cancellation and an end to private monopolies over natural resources. Although it has some problems here and there, by and large it is very good. It also sets a horizon. The G-7 and its allies are incapable in their current configuration of adopting any of these points. The End of Poverty? sets the marker. It will be useful to form the crowd that might walk that road.
Vijay Prashad’s latest book, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (The New Press, 2008), won the Muzaffar Ahmed Book Award for 2009. The French and Swedish editions are just out.
