The Coffee Paradox: Global Markets, Commodity Trade and the Elusive Promise of Development
by Benoit Daviron & Stefano Ponte London: Zed Books, 2005; 295pp. £16.99 (pb). ISBN: 1842774573. Reviewed by Michael Barratt Brown, Trustee/Director & Former Chair of TWIN & Twin Trading.
After oil coffee is the largest traded commodity in the world. Every day in the whole world between 2 and 3 billion cups of coffee are drunk. The number has been increasing over the last 20 years to a third more in the 2000s and the price of a cup has increased with inflation. Yet, over the same period the price paid to the grower has actually declined and the share of producer countries in the final value of the coffee in the cup has dropped from 20% to under 10%. The coffee grower is lucky if he or she gets 1 cent on a cup of coffee, costing the final consumer a dollar excluding sales tax. These are some of the facts which Daviron and Ponte have revealed in their studies at the Copenhagen Institute for International Relations and which have led them to explore what they call in this book ‘the coffee paradox’.
The reasons generally employed to explain this unequal distribution of benefits from trade, which the authors examine are several. There is first the general decline in agricultural commodity prices relative to those of manufactures and services, owing to the propensity of those of us in the rich countries to spend less of our extra income on such commodities and to higher labour productivity in manufacturing compared with farming. There is the excess supply of commodities and especially of coffees in the world market compared with demand as a result of the ending in 1989 of the regulation of supply by the International Coffee Organisation and then of the encouragement by the International Financial Institutions of extra production to pay off the debts of the non-oil producing developing countries following the oil price hike of the 1970s. There is finally the withdrawal of state governments from commodity trading and the growing power in international trade of a few giant corporations using their position in the value chain from producer to final consumer to increase their share of the value added to the original product. But Daviron and Ponte see a further weakness in the producers' power in this chain; a cup of coffee in a coffee bar comes as a brand with the personal service and ambience of the bar, and unlike a wine bar with no distinction of taste attributable to the original producer.
In the case of coffee it is undoubtedly, as the authors argue, the roasters who sell the brand and make the money, when they buy the coffees in auctions and from local traders, and then roast and grind and pack for filter coffee or brew, freeze and dry for soluble coffee and sell to the big retailers, mainly supermarket chains. These roasters include such famous names as Nestle, Philip Morris, Sara Lee and Proctor & Gamble, who dominate the world market. The problem for the growers, as Daviron and Ponte point out, is that the roasters in selling a brand want large quantities of a homogeneous product from many sources, which take no account of specific qualities or tastes or geographical origins. The roasters take anything from 33% of the final sales price of a cup in coffee bars to 80% of the price of a jar on the shelves in the supermarkets. The large scale requirements of the roasters mean that they prefer to buy from coffee estates through local traders rather than from small farmers through their cooperatives. In this way an unfair trade system, originally based on slave plantations, has been perpetuated.
Largely as a result of the Fair Trade Movement and of popular concern for sustainable production and of popular preference for organically grown food, consumers in the developed countries have begun to look for a fairly traded and organic product in their coffee. This movement, as Daviron and Ponte recognise, began in Europe and spread to America in the last decade, but since the USA offers by far the largest world market for coffee (23% of imports in 200002, with Germany next on 11% and Japan on 8%) they naturally give much weight to US experience with large plantations. Starbucks is quoted as finding its quality control systems for achieving a homogeneous product more easily applicable to estates than to cooperatives and farmer groups This has the unfortunate effect in the authors' undervaluing the European experience with small holder cooperatives of developing Fair Trade and sustainable production. The most careful case study in their book is of the Italian market, much of it in espresso bars, where taste is not easily distinguished. Even a speciality coffee importer in Italy like Illy of the Lavazza brand buys from many sources.
There is no mention in the book of the UK's Cafedirect, a FairTrade coffee which has captured between 8% and 10% of the UK coffee market and which is supplied by Twin Trading, entirely from small holders' cooperatives in Africa and Latin America. It is the view of the authors that these suppliers will have great difficulty in maintaining their sales in the future when competition for fairer trade and sustainability hots up. This conclusion is reached on several grounds: estates have better access, they say, to finance, and larger scale to afford inspection and certification costs; they have cupping skills which cooperatives generally do not have; they have better quality control systems; they are better equipped to forge links with specialty roasters and importers. All these supposed grounds for estates' superiority are open to challenge in our experience over 20 years in Twin Trading. Indeed, Daviron and Ponte give examples of better quality coming from cooperatives than from other coffee producers in Uganda. They claim, however, that, often only a small proportion of the cooperatives' production is sold on Fair Trade prices, some farmers getting no benefit from cooperation. This is in our experience quite untrue. All farmers have some of their crop sold on fair trade terms or can hope to do so with the cooperatives providing husbandry advice to all members to improve the quality of their crop. It is also stated by the authors, quite incorrectly, that Fair Trade criteria do not include provision for the wages of employed labour on certificated estates.
The list of recommendations proposed by the authors at the end of their book would be hard to implement if only estates were considered for a fairer trade system and more sustainable production. Most of their proposals indeed provide just those requirements that would give small holders' cooperatives a competitive edge. These are most particularly the requirement of an indication of geographical origin (IGO) and sustainability standards. These would immediately benefit the small holders' normal practices of inter-cropping and of shade cover for the coffee bushes. These are simply not possible on estates where the use of pesticides and artificial fertilisers is the norm, ruling out any claim to organic production. One of the main arguments of the authors for the inequality between producers and consumers would, moreover, disappear if the taste for different origin coffees could be developed as it has been for wines. Cafédirect already offers a Kilimanjaro and Machu Pichu and a premium gourmet blend which are beginning to attract consumers away from the multi-sourced coffees of the big monopoly roasters.
This book supplies an extremely valuable collection of statistical tables and figures relating to the coffee trade and an important new analysis of the international value chain, based on careful research. What is missing is an equally careful study of conditions of the workers on coffee estates and of the small holder farmers in their cooperatives. This has been done for Latin America by Daniel Jaffee in his book Brewing Justice, Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability and Survival, published in 2006 by the University of California Press. Jaffee lived on three Mexican coffee farming villages over a three-year period and carried out a meticulous comparative survey by interview and questionnaire of 25 coffee growing families selling their product through Fair Trade channels and of 25 coffee growing families selling through conventional traders. There was no doubt in the conclusion that the Fair Traders benefited, but they had to work harder and employ more seasonal labour, mainly from other small farmers. This extra work was especially the case where they produce organically. It would be of great value to have a similar study made in Tanzania or Uganda.
Trading Down: Africa, Value Chains, and the Global Economy
by Peter Gibbon & Stefano Ponte Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005. 272pp. £14.95 (pb); ISBN: 1592133681. Reviewed by Trevor Parfitt, University of East London.
The increasing marginalisation of Sub-Saharan Africa in world trading patterns has been examined in some detail over a considerable period. It might be asked if much can profitably be added by another book on the subject. Gibbon and Ponte provide a strong affirmative answer to any such question. Their book provides a persuasive examination of the forces that affect African trade that is noteworthy for combining thorough and effective macro-level analysis with informative and useful sectoral case studies.
Gibbon and Ponte start by examining developments at the level of global capitalism that have combined to impact in a largely negative manner on Africa's trading prospects. They note that the increasing influence of the financial sector has led to corporate performance being assessed mainly in terms how far they have maximised the return on capital employed. This has contributed to a propensity for leading corporations to try and benefit from economies of scale by focusing on their most profitable activities (often production/marketing of branded goods) and outsourcing less profitable processes to smaller companies. Gibbon and Ponte also analyse how the international trading system has changed in ways that are largely disadvantageous to African countries, with the relatively permissive non-reciprocal trading regime associated with GATT and arrangements such as the Lomé Convention giving way to a more ‘red in tooth and claw’ free trade regime associated with the WTO. This makes it more difficult for African states to penetrate OECD markets that are still characterised by substantial levels of (to some degree disguised) protection. It is worth noting that the two chapters dealing with these issues present a worthwhile overview of recent developments in global capitalism and trade.
Having thus set the scene, Gibbon and Ponte introduce Global Value Chain Analysis to examine how the value generated in production of a commodity is distributed amongst the various companies involved in producing it. They note that the aforementioned emerging emphasis on economies of scale has led to the emergence of buyer driven chains that are dominated by large firms such as Tesco and Wal-Mart, which maximise profit by focusing on certain core activities while outsourcing less profitable activities to businesses lower down the chain. Contemporaneous to this tendency it has become more difficult for African businesses to climb beyond the lower levels of such value chains due to the adverse developments in the trade regime mentioned above and certain of the effects of structural adjustment (such as elimination of state marketing boards that organised marketing for producers and provided some subsidies). Whilst these general trends emerge quite clearly from the analysis, the focus on global value chains enables Gibbon and Ponte to undertake a number of commodity based case studies. Thus, they develop a nuanced account of a variety of different trajectories experienced by African businesses in different sectors, some of which have experienced a measure of success (e.g. Zimbabwean cotton), although mosthave experienced varying levels of marginalisation.
The book combines sound macro-analysis with an interesting use of case studies founded in global value chain analysis to provide a somewhat subtler and more thorough account of Africa's trading position than is normally provided. This enables Gibbon and Ponte to point towards strategies that can help African companies to improve their situation, notably involving economies of scale. There are some drawbacks to the book. Parts read a little dryly, and the use of Convention Theory to examine governance of value chains seemed less convincing to this reader than the very effective mobilisation of global value chain theory. However, it is eminently clear that this book should be essential reading for anybody interested in understanding African trade.
The New Development Economics: After the Washington Consensus
by Jomo KS & Ben Fine (eds.); New Delhi: Talika Books and London: Zed Books, 2006. 304pp; £7.95 (pb); ISBN: 1 84 2776436.
The Long Twentieth Century (1) Globalisation under Hegemony: The Changing World Economy
by Jomo KS (ed.); New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006; 312pp; $35 (hb); ISBN: 0 195673859.
The Long Twentieth Century (2) The Great Divergence: Hegemony, Uneven Development, and Global Inequality
by Jomo KS (ed); New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006; 262pp; $35 (hb); ISBN: 0 195673867. Reviewed by Michael Barratt Brown.
Some 40 years ago in the mid 1960s the late lamented André Gunder Frank began to speak and to write about ‘The Economics of Underdevelopment and the Underdevelopment of Economics’. It was becoming clear to scholars that the science of economics (seen as the study of the decisions of rational and informed persons on the allocation between alternative uses of scarce resources, in particular of capital, in a competitive market) was unable to explain the continuing and deepening division between developed and undeveloped economies. Persons everywhere were not equally informed and did not rely solely on their reason in making decisions; the market was not everywhere (or even often), competitive, and resources, and especially capital, varied in their scarcity.
Economists were finding it necessary to go back to their origins in political economy and to call upon the insights of sociologists and historians in trying to explain the nature of development and underdevelopment. I found it necessary to take a political-economy approach when I was asked in the 1970s to write a Penguin Modern Economics text on The Economics of Imperialism 1 and in the early 1990s to write another Penguin on Africa's Choices: After 30 years of the World Bank.2 The World Bank and its ‘Washington Consensus’ survived, and another decade on, we have three volumes of collected essays on The New Development Economics: After the Washington Consensus. Once again economics has had to go to political economy, sociology and history to give explanations of what has been happening.
The Washington Consensus was indeed an attempt to go back to neo-classical economic theory and to make markets work without state interference, as they had supposedly done in the development of the developed economies. The fact that none had developed without massive state protection and support did not appear to trouble the ideologues of Washington, DC. Removal of the state's corrupt and exploitative role in underdeveloped economies, and freeing flows of trade and capital would, they believed, allow private capital and technology from outside to do the job of development. In something that is called ‘the post-Washington consensus’ insights from sociology about the causes of poverty and from history about the legacy of colonial rule have been allowed into the story, but it is rather like the Ptolemaic addition of successive epicycles to maintain the theory of an earth-centred against a solar-centred system. Such modifications of the Washington Consensus are critically examined in several of the essays under review, but the fundamental point – that a capital-centred system has to be replaced by a human centred one – is touched upon only in the essay on ‘human capital’ by Pauline Rose of Sussex University, in which she rightly derides the World Bank's commitment to education as being entirely concerned to train workers to meet capital's needs.
The problem in these studies, at least in relation to Africa's underdevelopment, is that none of the historians who make up the largest number of the contributors to the two volumes of The Long Twentieth Century go beyond the colonial period in their studies. It is astonishing that the work of Christopher Fyfe3 and of Basil Davidson4 is not referred to and that the contributing African historians come from the Republic of South Africa and not from among those like Claude Ake', George Ayittey, Mahmood Mamdani or Hassan Zaoul5 who come from what was colonial Africa. Nor is this improved on in the New Development Economics, which has an essay by Dimitris Milonakis from Crete on ‘Pioneers of Economic History’. This list of pioneers includes W.W. Rostow, who is praised also by Ben Fine in his opening essay for Rostow's exposure of the limitations of purely economic analysis, but is not criticised for lumping all pre-industrial and pre-colonial societies together as ‘traditional societies’ without distinction. In the case of Africa, this is most serious because the achievements of pre-colonial Africa are simply not mentioned, but have to be understood when discussing the application of Western historical and political norms to Africa's development.
One would not know from reading the historical essays which make up the greater part of these books that there was a considerable literature by African scholars on development, which I attempted to bring to wider notice in my 1996 Penguin Africa's Choices: After 30 Years of the World Bank 6 and in ‘The African Model’ chapter of the 1995 revised edition of my Penguin Models in Political Economy.7 These cited not only the work of the African historians already referred to above but the so-called ‘Beyond Hunger Project’ produced in 1987 by African scholars under the auspices of the Nairobi-based African Academy of Sciences and the Dakar-based Council for the Development of Economic and Social Research in Africa (Codesria) in a carefully constructed vision for 2057 just a century after Sudan and Ghana achieved independence from colonial rule.8
This project did not remain a dream, but within two years had inspired the UN Economic Commission for Africa, under the direction of Professor Adebayo Adedeji, to respond to the World Bank's report on Africa's Adjustment and Growth in the 1980s with the UN's own African Alternative to Structural Adjustment Programmes: A Framework for Transformation and Recovery. This emphasised that human beings and not institutions and markets must be the ‘fulcrum for development’ and this must involve ‘the extended family for the cooperative spirit of self-help development and traditional sanctions on leadership’9 – both specifically African values. It was very largely in response to this ‘African Alternative’ that Joseph Stiglitz, on leaving his post as chief economist to the World Bank in 1998, prepared what came to be called ‘the post-Washington consensus’ which becomes the main object of study in The New Development Economics. But no mention of such an African alternative appears in any of the texts and references in the three books that are here under review.
It would be wrong, however, to dismiss these books as being without use for students and practitioners of development. The historical studies of colonial rule, studies which apparently emerged from a Sephis-sponsored research project on the ‘Long Twentieth Century’ are interesting and important contributions to scholarship. This is most particularly true of the chapters in the volume on Globalisation under Hegemony by Utsa Patnaik and Deepak Nayyar, both of Jayarhal Nehru University of New Delhi, which emphasise respectively the importance for Britain's industrialisation of colonial tribute in the first years of colonial rule during and after the industrial revolution from 1770–1820 – a surprising extension of the ‘Long Twentieth Century! – and of the early appearance of globalisation after 1870, which is said to be ‘seldom recognised until recently by economic historians’. The statistical series of capital flows have been carefully re-examined here and in other contributions, but scant respect is shown for earlier works in Patnaik's claim to a ‘new’ view of the early tribute from India and the West Indies or in Nayyar's statement that the earlier globalisation after 1870 was ‘until recently seldom recognised’. In relation to the latter period S.B. Saul's Studies in British Overseas Trade, 1870–1914,10 which was published as long ago as 1960 is listed by Patnaik in her references though not by Nayyar in his, and both the earlier tribute and the later globalisation were recognised in my After Imperialism, published by Heinemann in 1963.11
The importance of early African history and of African traditions for understanding Africa's development is recognised in the chapter on ‘Development and Geography’ by Hugh Goodacre of the London City University in his demolition of the influential view of Jeffrey Sachs that geographical and ecological variables are enough to explain the underdevelopment of certain regions without the need to study their history including colonisation. It is the economic and social facts in that history which have to be understood. The chapter in The Long Twentieth Century volumes on ‘The Commodity Terms of Trade and their Strategic Implications for Development’ by J.A. Ocampo and M.A. Parra of the UN Secretariat offers a robust defence based on careful statistical analysis of the thesis propounded in 1950 by Raoul Prebisch and Hans Singer to the effect that there is a built-in tendency in international trade for the world prices of primary products to decline, and for the prices of manufactured goods to rise. This is explained by the income elasticities of demand that mean more manufactured goods than primary products being demanded by consumers as their incomes rise and by technological change which leads to less material being used per unit of manufactured output and to many cases of synthetic products replacing natural products. The authors emphasise that this tendency has been exacerbated by the power of large corporations in developed countries to fix transfer prices to their advantage in their purchases from developing countries.12
There are several historical studies of international trade in the first volume on Globalisation under Hegemony in the Long Twentieth Century, apart from those already mentioned. These include essays on ‘International Movements of Unfree Labour’ on ‘Trade and Industrial Policies’, and one on ‘Globalisation Now and Then’ in which Richard Kozul-Wright of UNCTAD explores the necessity of protection and not free trade in the early stages of a county's economic development. The second volume on ‘The Great Divergence’ includes detailed studies of particular regions – Latin America, south-east Asia, India and the Middle-East, as well as the two on Africa. Rather surprisingly there is no chapter on China, which the editor of these books, Jomo Kwami Sundaram of Malaya and of the UN Secretariat recognises as having developed rapidly ‘with a non-convertible currency, state control over its banking system and other major violations of IMF and World Bank prescriptions’. But the development of the East Asian miracle is recognised by Jomo K.S. as having been based on statesupport. Moreover, both the Long Twentieth Century volumes and The New Development Economics have chapters on the role of the state in development – in the first volumes this is cited by Amiya Kumar Bagchi of Kolkata as having been ‘under imperialism’ in Germany and Japan as well as in the Soviet Union, China and Korea while in The New Development Economics it is cited in the contribution by Ben Fine as being in the form of ‘the development state’ encouraged as a response to the Washington consensus.
These books start from the most devastating criticism of the Washington consensus and its subsequent modifications, both in the failure of these policies to create any development and in their generation and deepening of inequalities inside and between countries, but the presentation of an alternative view is distinctly weak. This applies not only to the neglect of development alternatives proposed by African scholars discussed above, but to the provision of an alternative economic model. The New Development Economics provides a magisterial review of the literature. In the 304 pages there are 53 pages of references for 14 chapters and 12 pages of index. But alternative economic models are not considered except in the requirement that ‘the existing frontier between what is fashionable to label as ‘economic factors’ and as ‘social factors’ is abolished’, as the marxist Maurice Dobb is quoted at the end of the chapter by Dimitris Milonakis on ‘Pioneers of Economic History’.
The argument of much of the book on the New Development Economics is concerned, as Ben Fine insists in his introduction, with demolishing the thesis of a homo economicus who maximises utility where economic agents behave no differently in developing countries from those in industrial economies. But the implication that human beings might naturally combine together and form cooperatives is not examined. There is not a single reference in any of these books to cooperatives or to non-governmental organisations, despite their considerable success in selling in international markets both fair trade and organic products-coffees, teas, chocolate, tropical fruit,nuts, wines, cottons etc., and thereby improving the terms of trade.13
It is impossible to end this review without commenting that anyone who reads every page, as I did, will find that, at least in the second of the Long Twentieth Century volumes, when opening up the pages the whole bulk of the 262 pages falls out from the binding. In going to an Indian printer the OUP seems to have made a false economy, but it must be said that the first volume did not fall apart in the same way, despite the same treatment, nor did the much longer Tulika and Zed Press book on The New Development Economics, which was also printed and bound in India, but by a different printer. Such are the diversities of technological development. It is a good example of the varying results of transfers of technology in differing conditions, discussed by Sonali Deraniyagala of SOAS in his contribution to this book. The message of these books is obvious: you need horses for courses.
A Life Looking Forward: Memoirs of an Independent Marxist
by Samir Amin; London: Zed Books, 2006; 266pp; £16.99 (pb). ISBN: 1842777831. Reviewed by Jeggan C. Senghor, ICS, University of London.
As is to be expected, the memoirs of Samir Amin depart from conventional methods and approaches to recording life experiences. He goes beyond presenting a linear evolution of the more prominent events in his life in relation to his own growth and development. Rather, he intimately intertwines three levels of analysis, namely, the personal, the historical-political statement of ideology, and the transmission of the ideology to his institution-building operations in Africa and globally.
Concerning matters of a personal nature, the first chapter which deals with his childhood is somewhat in the tradition of a biography. Not only does the writer trace his maternal and paternal lineage but the normal warmth and closeness of family life pervade these early sections of the book. The comfort of family is particularly strong with his grandparents and intricate bonds were cemented within the nuclear family. Similarly, school life and the large network of friends and acquaintances established in the communities in Port Said and Qift made for a very happy childhood. In this regard, relationships with his teachers at the lycée were particularly influential. Throughout other stages in this life journey personalities – high-brow and low-brow – turn up here and there. Not only does the author have an incredibly extensive network of friends and comrades but human relations are highly valued by him. Perhaps nowhere is this more vividly illustrated than in life in Bamako, Mali (pp. 120–131)
Even a cursory reading of these early chapters leads to the observation that Samir Amin was a scion of a privileged family. His was a bourgeois upbringing, with good food, beach visits, cars, country rides, and visits to different parts of the country. In terms of ancestry, his father's family belonged to ‘the Coptic aristocracy’ (p.1); his maternal grandmother ‘was one of the descendants of the French revolutionary Jean-Baptiste Drouet who played a role in the arrest of Louis XVI at Varennes in 1791’ (pp.3–4). His paternal grandfather was a railway engineer – ‘he should have become a “director” (that is, at that time, a minister)’ (p.2). His father and mother were medical doctors, having both been trained in Strasbourg; for much of his career his father was a health inspector and general purpose state physician. Samir himself went to Paris at the age of 16 years and over the next 10 years had his post-baccalaureate and university education up to the doctorate level. All this in the 1930s and the war years.
The family and broader childhood experiences provided a ‘vanguard way of thinking and a system of values’ (p.1) which left more than an indelible impression on a young mind which, in response, as early as the age of six years, declared a commitment to changing the circumstances of poverty and inequality to which the vast majority of fellow citizens were condemned. Samir Amin's ancestry ‘was a happy meeting between the line of French Jacobinism and the line of Egyptian national democracy’. Grandfather was a freemason and socialist and father's strong communist sympathies grounded on what Amin refers to as a ‘social sense’ and ‘social vision of problems’. Compared to Victoria College, the local English school, the liberal and progressive educational philosophy of the Lycée in Port Said also created an environment in which the young Amin was encouraged to read extensively the classics of marxism, to debate with schoolmates and teachers and to organise the group of ‘young communists’ on the premises. Similarly for life at Lycee Henri IV and at the Institute of Political Science (Sciences Po) in Paris.
In a sense the second level relates, first, to an update on developments in the socialist/communist camp and in the anticolonialist struggles in the 1940s and 1950s, building on the author's Re-reading the Postwar Period: An Intellectual Itinerary (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1994). One such was the establishment of the new world system involving a radical transformation in the structure of the world political system. Naturally, some epochal events had a decisive impact on the thinking of the author. An example was the relationship between bourgeois revolution and socialist revolution on the periphery of the capitalist system; the rise of the national bourgeoisie in the periphery demonstrated the simplistic nature of the belief that the radical development of national liberation towards socialism was a natural progression. These and related issues are the subject of a separate chapter on the political context in the 1960–1998 period which summarizes sections in the above-mentioned tome.
A fundamental principle in marxism is the unity of theory and praxis. The third level of analysis in these memoirs relates to concrete activities undertaken by Samir Amin, an independent marxist, in (re)shaping objective conditions. For him the period spent working in Mwasasa Iqtisadia (an autonomous state holding institution) in Cairo, synchronized with that at the Service des Etudes Economiques et Financières (SEEF) in Paris, in that was professionally satisfying and it was punctuated by communist political activities which, in the case of Cairo, led to his escape from arrest. The three years spent working for the newly-born Government of Mali – which had declared Marxism Leninism as the ‘state religion’ – opened up new vistas on the realities of underdevelopment and the challenges of socio-economic planning in such a context. As he notes, ‘The idea was not to dream up some spectacular advance on the highway of progress, but to predict the dangers on the winding road ahead’ (p.114). The actual process of producing the first Plan is instructive, especially in that the constraints confronted were to be replicated in many other African countries. Likewise the fate of the first Plan – which he summarized as ‘from drift to debacle’.
IDEP (United Nations African Institute for Economic Development and Planning, Dakar, Senegal), Codesria (Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa), and the Third World Forum are institutions that produce knowledge through research, process knowledge through seminars, workshops and conferences, and disseminate knowledge through teaching and training activities. Samir Amin played a central role in the birth and nurturing of these institutions and, accordingly, he devotes about one-fifth of the memoirs to this phase. This slice of the memoirs is of particular interest to the reviewer. As a young researcher at IFAN, University of Dakar, I spent many hours sitting in on lectures in IDEP, participating in debates, and engaging in discussions with the staff. As fate would have it the reviewer was also to succeed the immediate successor to Samir Amin (Essam Montasser of Egypt) as Director, from 1990 to 2000. From this vantage position I can confirm that ‘The 1970s were the high point for IDEP’ (p.208). Amin's tenure not only brought stability to the institute but its reputation was established throughout the continent and beyond. Likewise, in terms of numbers and quality of professional staffing, range and diversity of activities, productivity and impact, and any other indices of successful institution-building this period has not been matched. Indeed, it served as a point of reference for the management of the 1990s.
Two other comments on this part of the memoirs. First, Samir Amin casts his term in IDEP in the context of the intricacies of the UN bureaucracy and the machinations of UN bureaucrats. This is interesting, if even one does not agree completely with his views. Second, as defined by the author, the strategic objective of IDEP was ‘to create an independent centre in Africa for critical thought’, a channel for promoting African thinking and reflection on the continent's development strategy (p.210). On the other hand, those he termed the ‘enemies’ of IDEP, within and outside the UN, perceived his intention as one of using the institution as a base for propagating marxist socialist ideology and building an anti-West coalition of radical ideologues masking as academics. Eventually, the more powerful antagonistic forces marshalled against the institution were overwhelming and IDEP was never to be the same again. The offsprings, Codesria and the Third World Forum, were ‘saved from the wreckage’ (p.209).
A Life Looking Forward, a translation from the French original (1993), is a companion to all the numerous works of Amin, especially in that it re-emphasises some of his major theoretical contributions to a critique of global capitalism and the struggle against world hegemony. Equally valuable is the fact that it brings out the person out of an avant guard intellectual. His life experiences in a multiple of cultures – Egypt, France, and West Africa – and the vast panoply of personalities mentioned through the book add considerable to the value of the well-rounded book. A Life Looking Forward is a model for Third World and African scholars, notably those of Samir Amin's pioneering generation.
Globalisation, Neo-Conservative Policies, and Democratic Alternatives (Essays in Honour of John Loxley)
by A Haroon Akram-Lodhi, Robert Chernomas & Ardeshi Seppehri (eds); Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2005. 464pp. £13.70(pb); ISBN: 1-894037-22-7. Reviewed by Sylvester Odion-Akhaine, Centre for Constitutionalism and Demilitarisation, Lagos.
For nearly two and half decades, capitalism has asserted its dominance on the global political-economy in the mould of globalisation powered by what Manuel Castells called the second scientific revolution. Equally, it has been bolstered by the bond between organic intellectuals of the ‘new right’ and the power-wielding politicians of the core, and partly reinforced by the relapse of its ideological parallel – communism – and the extinction of its sphere of influence, the eastern bloc. This trend is viewed by some scholars of the right as the triumph of capitalism, and an expression of its ideological superiority over other social alternatives.
In this regard, the book, Globalisation, Neo-Conservative Policies, and Democratic Alternatives is a welcome relief. It could not have been otherwise as its provenance lays in the quest for a befitting honour for John Loxley, a man who all his life has struggled for social justice across continents: Africa to the Americas. His armour in the fight against the contradictory dynamics of capitalism, while foregrounding a social alternative, was intellectual. Globalisation, Neo-Conservative Policies, and Democratic Alternatives is made up of twenty chapters anchored by an interesting array of scholars. The issues explored, namely, capitalism's accumulation process, institutional reforms and new perspectives in social mobilisation a la alternative budgeting, tug at the soft underbelly of the neo-conservative agenda. The case of Canada and Africa deflates the general notion of convergence which globalisation engenders. In Canada, a seeming increase in the organic composition of capital attained by exploitation of the working class did not increase the profitability of capital due to leakages by means of indirect tax and high interest rate particularly in the decade of the 1990s. Indeed, it was underlined by a lower profit rate more than the crisis years of the 1970s. The neo-conservative era in Africa dominated by debt crisis and adjustment programmes did not produce convergence. There was a conscious deconstruction of the national bourgeoisie and white elephant project allowed for the dominance of foreign capital in the pre-structural adjustment period. Structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) with its extroversion have only reinforced Africa's position in the global economy as primary commodity producer. An observable steady inflow of foreign direct investment (FDI), largely in the extractive industry, creates more divergence. In spite of its public persona, the New Partnership for Africa Development (NEPAD), the new development mantra, mainly reinforces Africa's position as an appendage of global capital ‘being compatible with the neoconservative agenda’(p.78).
Institutional reforms are critical to the neo-conservative agenda of creating the socio-economic and political contexts for capitalist realisation. Since the world is its stage, the international finance institutions (IFIs) consciously universalise governance principles. The point that needs to be made is that the nuances in the governance complex are a response to the strictures on the neo-conservative agenda. This is seen in the renegotiation of donor-Government of Tanzania relationship aimed at local ownership. Institutional reforms aim at enabling the realisation process of capitalism in the global economy. The imposition of a market narrative through governance institutions helps this goal. But its counter-productiveness cannot be glossed over. A near-perfect Commune Health Centres (CHC) in Vietnam is destroyed by user-fee scheme that produces on a national scale ‘provider's moral hazard’ (p.196) and a ‘deterioration of the health status of individuals seeking hospital’ (p.192). In Egypt, agriculture, which accounts for about 36 per cent in employment, has been distorted by a market-driven land reform which has led to increase in the disparity between the rich and poor as well as social tension. The new resource management (NRM) approach is supposed to empower local communities and a market approach to NRM produces quite the opposite: it exacerbates structural weaknesses of communities and existing power relations. Bonnie Campbell et al. are right to observe that ‘we are witnessing the distancing from a liberal and pluralist model, based on a participatory ideal, in favour of a more neo-conservative authoritarian model based on a technocratic ideal’ (p.258).
Engaging the neo-liberal agenda by means of an alternative budgeting approach that has an element of gender mainstreaming in resource allocation, as the cases of Canada and Kenya illustrate is useful. In Africa, it has the potential to resolve resource-based conflicts and deepening democracy. Again, as the Canadian experience illustrates, the process was limited by fiscal constraints and was barely able to tug at the structural transformation of the Canadian economy. The political opposition inherent in this process is, however, significant.
The efforts made in this book vitiate the claims of globalisation: globalised markets. The analysis of Scottish economy (pp. 287–302) and sub-Saharan Africa (see Chapters 4, 5, 7 & 9) reveal that there are different levels of peripherality in terms of economic problem and the neoconservative agenda. Its contradictions afflict both the so-called developed and underdeveloped economies which are being shaped by it. As Chernomas and Ardeshi rightly argue in Chapter Two, the neo-conservative agenda may have facilitated attack on the developmental state but evidence from trade to inflow of FDI shows increasing regionalisation thereby undermining its claims. Here lies the strength of this book. The attempt to differentiate neo-conservatism from neo-liberalism has only heuristic value (pp.404–407). Both, in my opinion, attain unity in the strengthening of global capital.