A preview of the unpublished book A CIVILIZATION WITHOUT A VISION WILL PERISH: AN INDEPENDENT SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH by David Willis. CHAPTER 1: INDIFFERENCE. (Part 10). This blog is a review of The Creation of World Poverty by Teresa Hayter, published in 1990.
Background
In The End of Poverty: How We Can Make it Happen in Our Life Time, Jeffrey Sachs, Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University and director of the UN Millennium Project, tells us that: “We can help the 15,000 people daily dying needlessly from preventable, treatable diseases – AIDS, TB, and malaria – for lack of drugs that we take for granted; we can help the 8 million people who die each year because they are too poor to stay alive; we can close the yawning gap between what the rich world claims to be doing to help the poor and what it is actually doing; and we can forge a common bond of humanity, security, and shared purpose across cultures and religions.” “Western governments enforced draconian budget policies in Africa during the 1980s and 1990s. The IMF and World Bank virtually ran the economic policies of the debt-ridden continent, recommending regimens of budgetary belt tightening known technically as structural adjustment programs. These programs had little scientific merit and produced even fewer results. By the start of the 21st century Africa was poorer than during the late 1960s, when the IMF and World Bank had first arrived on the African scene, with disease, population growth, and environmental degradation spiraling out of control.” “When it comes to charges of bad governance, the West should be a bit more circumspect. Little surpasses the western world in the cruelty and depredations that it has long imposed on Africa. Three centuries of slave trade, from around 1500 to the early 1800s, were followed by a century of brutal colonial rule. Far from lifting Africa economically, the colonial era left Africa bereft of educated citizens and leaders, basic infrastructure, and public health facilities. The borders of the newly independent states followed the arbitrary lines of the former empires, dividing ethnic groups, ecosystems, watersheds, and resource deposits in arbitrary ways.” In The Creation of World Poverty Teresa Hayter details how the wealthy countries have enriched themselves at the expense of their colonies and dependencies and reveals that the concerns of the international establishment about Third World Poverty are subordinate to its goal of ensuring the smooth functioning of the prevailing world order. At the time of publication Teresa Hayter was a research Fellow at St Peter’s College, Oxford.