The piece below is a critique of a documentary entitled “The End of Poverty?” written and directed by Philippe Diaz and produced by Beth Portello. The documentary generally focuses on the quagmire of poverty that many people around the world find themselves in. According to some of the facts presented in the documentary, precisely by John Perkins, an American author and economist, about 24 thousand people die of hunger and disease every single day. This phenomenon is due to so many factors. Many school of thoughts came up with their own version of the story, while some blame the dismal poverty on the western system, others also blame it on the people of the third world countries. However, one notable thing that runs through the entire documentary is that all the speakers and interviewees, both blacks and whites entirely blamed the poverty on the western system. For example, USA has about 5% of the world’s population but about 25% of the world’s wealth and resources! More to it is that they create about 30% of the world’s pollution. The big question is that what accounts for this jagged distribution of the world’s resources? What accounts for abject poverty in the third world countries, especially Africa? Could it be traced to the Atlantic slave trade which lasted for about 500 years? That was the worst thing that has ever happened in human history, just as Eric Toussaint a Belgian author and president of CADTM indicated in the documentary. He said 1492 marked the start of a brutal intervention by the European forces on the people of the third world. As enshrined in the modernization theory, the argument was that if any third world country is able to utilize technology to the fullest, undergo industrialization, acquire capital and are able to use economic indicators like per capita income to analyse their economic systems they will develop like the first world or the west. The big question is, how will the third world get there amidst all these economic injustices? When will the struggle out of poverty end when the IMF and the World Bank continue to give unfavorable conditions attached to loans and grants, when the third world is always compelled to operate a free market system for the west to dumb their goods and services so as to continue to make wealth, where the IMF and the world bank continue to call for increment in taxes that are customarily paid by the poor? The documentary has shown a very critical instance where ancestral lands that is a very valuable resources available to the people of the third world were taken away from them without recourse to how they feel or how they are affected. In Kenya for instance, it was recorded by the documentary that the British colonial system created and used their own legal system to claim lands from the indigenous people. This laws were such that in areas where there is no settled form of government, the land there is said to belong to the Queen of England. How could this be the case? If this is the case, the people of Africa and all other third world countries will continue to die of very preventable diseases like malaria and so on. This is exactly what is postulated in the dependency theory. The world market structure do not favour the third world, prices are determined by the western forces. By the world market structure, the third world will continue to remain raw material producers. There will continue to exist discrepancies in the world. For example, to cut down global poverty and hunger, a total amount of 40 billion USD is needed. However, USA spends about 500 billion USD annually on military operations. This was a fact captured in the documentary. Can we entirely blame the woes of the third world on just the European system? What about our own leaders in Africa for instance? Haven’t they conspired with these same forces to accept terms of contracts that are not favourable to the ordinary African just because of their self-centered gains? There are numerous cases of unpatriotic acts by the people of the third world themselves. We have within ourselves issues of ethnic discriminations at workplaces, nepotism, corruption, bribery and so on. In the documentary for instance, I have realized that even those people who are said to be poor have about 8 or 6 children. These are also factors that are pulling us behind. After I watched the documentary meticulously, I have come to realize that until the people of the third world stand up angrily against both the third world system and that of the western world, poverty is not ending any time soon. By Noel Elinam Korbla Nutsugah
Posted on: Sun, 23 Mar 2014 18:58:18 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015