by Jason Hickel
A basic income could be funded in a variety of ways, including progressive taxes on commercial land use, like the land value tax made famous by the American economist Henry George, or taxes on capital gains, foreign currency transactions and financial transactions, such as the Robin Hood tax suggested by Nobel Prize-winning economist James Tobin. Another approach might be to tax the $32 trillion of private wealth that is presently hidden away in offshore tax havens, and use the proceeds for direct cash transfers.
In the US state of Alaska, natural resources are considered a commons, so every resident receives an annual dividend from the state’s oil revenues as a basic income. The Alaska model is popular and effective, and scholars have pointed out that the same approach could be applied to other natural resources, such as forests and fisheries. It could even be applied to the air, with a carbon tax whose yields would be distributed as a basic income to all.
Regenerating Hope
Unfortunately, it is not likely that degrowth will happen as quickly as we need it to. Social change can be slow. The idea is gradually taking hold, but it could take a generation to move our collective consciousness on this issue, and we don’t have that kind of time. That said, we might have a way out. And it has to do with soil.
Soil is the second biggest reservoir of carbon on the planet, next to the oceans. It holds four times more carbon than all the plants and trees in the world. But human activities like deforestation and industrial farming – with its intensive ploughing, monoculture and heavy use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides – are degrading our soils at breakneck speed, killing the organic materials that they contain. Forty per cent of agricultural soil is now classed as ‘degraded’ or ‘seriously degraded’. In fact, industrial farming has so damaged our soils that a third of the world’s farmland has been destroyed in the past four decades. And as our soils degrade, they are losing their ability to hold carbon, releasing enormous plumes of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Fortunately, there is a solution emerging. Scientists and farmers around the world are pointing out that we can regenerate degraded soils by switching from intensive industrial farming to more ecological methods – not just organic fertiliser, but also no-tillage, composting and crop rotation. And here’s the brilliant part: as the soils recover, they not only regain their capacity to hold CO2, they begin to actively pull additional CO2 out of the atmosphere. The science on this is quite exciting. A recent study published by the US National Academy of Sciences claims that regenerative farming can sequester 3 per cent of our global carbon emissions. An article in Science suggests it could be up to 15 per cent. And new research from the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania, although not yet peer-reviewed, says sequestration rates could be as high as 40 per cent, and if we apply regenerative techniques to the world’s pastureland as well, we could capture more than 100 per cent of global emissions.
In other words, regenerative farming may be our best shot at actually cooling the planet. And it comes with a very useful side-effect: regenerative methods actually produce higher yields than industrial methods over the long term, by enhancing soil fertility and improving resilience against drought and flooding. So as climate change makes farming more difficult, this may be our best bet for food security, too. Of course, regenerative farming doesn’t offer a permanent solution to the climate crisis, for soils can only hold a finite amount of carbon. We still need to get off fossil fuels as quickly as possible, and – most importantly – we have to kick our obsession with endless exponential growth and downsize our material economy to bring it back in tune with ecological cycles. But it might buy us some time to get our act together.
I pick this example because it is fundamentally different to most of the other negative-emissions and geoengineering schemes out there, which end up embodying the very same logic that got us into this mess in the first place, treating Earth as something to be subdued and dominated. The solution to climate change won’t be found in the latest schemes to bend our living planet to the will of man. Perhaps instead it lies in something much more down to earth – an ethic of care and healing, starting with the soils on which our existence depends. Regenerative farming holds out a first-step solution to our crisis that doesn’t require shiny new technology. Rather, it requires remembering some of the ancient wisdom that got our species through the last 200,000 years, and which may be our only hope of getting through the next 200,000: the knowledge that our existence is tied up with the existence of all other living things, from the fish and the trees to the bees and seeds, right down to the microorganisms that make up the soil on which we depend. And on this point we have much to learn from people on the periphery of the world system – the ones our governments have so long referred to as ‘underdeveloped’.
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If rich countries organise a planned shrinkage of their material economies, with the goal of maintaining and even improving their quality of life, this will free up the ecological space that poor countries need to achieve basic standards of human well-being. But even so, the global South will still have a decision to face. Will they follow the standard development model laid down by the West, with its focus on extraction, consumption and growth? Or will they seize the opportunity to set out on a different path entirely?
In the early 1960s, just as the colonial project was collapsing, Frantz Fanon, the revolutionary intellectual from Martinique, penned words that today carry a new and even more powerful resonance than they did when they were written so many years ago:
Come, then, comrades, the European game has finally ended; we must find something different. We today can do everything, so long as we do not imitate Europe, so long as we are not obsessed by the desire to catch up with Europe. Europe now lives at such a mad, reckless pace that she has shaken off all guidance and all reason, and she is running headlong into the abyss; we would do well to avoid it with all possible speed. The Third World today faces Europe like a colossal mass whose aim should be to try to resolve the problems to which Europe has not been able to find the answers. But let us be clear: what matters is to stop talking about output, and intensification, and the rhythm of work. No, we do not want to catch up with anyone. What we want to do is to go forward all the time, night and day, in the company of Man, in the company of all men. So, comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions and societies which draw their inspiration from her. Humanity is waiting for something other from us than such an imitation.
We are already seeing this ‘something other’ emerge in pockets across the global South, sprouting up like shoots through concrete. Bhutan has famously rejected GDP growth and replaced it with Gross National Happiness as its measure of social progress. But this is only the very tip of the iceberg – the bit that makes its way into our media, almost as a quaint curiosity. Across Latin America, indigenous activists have brought the concept of ‘sumak kawsay’ to prominence – an indigenous Quechua term that translates as ‘living in harmony and balance’. Instead of the Western model of development, which relies on a deep conceptual distinction between subject and object, self and other, humanity and the natural world, sumak kawsay calls us to recognise that we are interconnected, that we are part of a whole, that our well-being is inextricable from that of our ecosystems. This philosophy rejects the linear thinking that lies at the heart of the industrial development model, and calls us to think more relationally. The concept has gained such traction that Ecuador included it in its 2008 constitution – followed by Bolivia in 2009 – recognising the inalienable rights of ecosystems to survive and flourish. Neither experiment has been perfect, of course – cynical politicians in both Ecuador and Bolivia have used sumak kawsay to cloak their own extractivist agendas – but the idea itself continues to flourish.
And it’s not only in Latin America. In India, impoverished communities in rural areas are asserting the principle of ‘ecological swaraj’. Rather than submitting to plans handed down by central governments in distant capitals, people are using direct
democracy to make decisions about their resources and environments, seeking regeneration and harmony with their surrounding ecology. In the Middle East, communities in the mountains of northern Iraq and in Rojava in Syria are experimenting with similar ideas. As central governments withdraw from these regions in order to battle ISIS and other factions vying for regional power, people are taking the opportunity to organise a kind of socio-ecological revolution marked by direct democracy, gender equality and regenerative farming, marking a decisive break with the Western development model.
Who knows what all of this might lead to. Once people begin to reject the single story of development, the future is fertile and rich with possibility. We need only have the courage to invent it.
Endnotes
Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your devic’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.
One: The Development Delusion
p. 8 ‘The media went crazy . . .’ The history of Benjamin Hardy’s involvement in the formulation of Point Four is recounted by Robert Schlesinger in White House Ghosts: Presidents and their Speechwriters (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008).
p. 11 ‘And it has become . . .’ Net official development assistance was $135 billion in 2013, according to OECD data, which is roughly equivalent to the total net income of US banks in the same year.
p. 14 ‘These statistics are certainly worth . . .’ These reductions in child and maternal mortality are important gains, but we need to ask what happened in the decades prior to 1990 that pushed mortality rates to such high levels in the first place, and we need to ask whether it was really Western aid that has since caused them to decline.
p. 15 ‘More realistic estimates put . . .’ FAO, The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2012 (Rome: The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, 2012).
p. 15 ‘It is hard to imagine . . .’ E. Holt-Gimenez et al., ‘We already grow enough for 10 billion people . . . and still can’t end hunger’, Journal of Sustainable Agriculture 36(6), 2012, pp. 595–8.
p. 15 ‘If we look at absolute . . .’ According to the $1.25 (2008 PPP) poverty line. Source: PovcalNet.
p. 15 ‘Many scholars are now saying . . .’ I discuss this scholarship in more depth in Chapter 2. See P. Edward, ‘The ethical poverty line: a moral quantification of absolute poverty’, Third World Quarterly 37(2), 2006, pp. 377–93; R. Lahoti, and S. Reddy, ‘$1.90 per day: what does it say?’ Institute for New Economic Thinking, 6 October 2015, https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/1-90-per-day-what-does-it-say; David Woodward, How Poor Is ‘Poor’? Toward a Rights-Based Poverty Line (London: New Economics Foundation, 2010).
p. 16 ‘These numbers represent almost . . .’ All of the figures cited here are according to the World Bank’s PovcalNet.
p. 16 ‘On the contrary, over the . . .’ As measured in GDP per capita, 1990 Int. GK$, according to the Maddison Project database, 2013.
p. 16 ‘The gap between the . . .’ As measured in GDP per capita, 2005 US$, according to World Development Indicators.
p. 17 ‘Others guessed that . . .’ The argument that underdevelopment has to do with climate and geography has been made by Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).
p. 18 ‘Maybe it has to do with . . .’ The argument that the fortunes of rich countries and poor countries is down to the quality of their institutions has been made most famously by Daren Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown Business, 2012). Their argument has been criticized for not paying attention to geopolitics.
p. 19 ‘Europe’s development couldn’t have happened . . .’ Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
p. 19 ‘Average living standards in India . . .’ Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), p. 25.
p. 22 ‘Global South countries lost . . .’ Robert Pollin, Contours of Descent (New York: Verso, 2005), p. 133.
p. 22 ‘Today, power imbalances like these . . .’ This figure comes from the United Nations’ Trade and Development Report, 1999 (pp. ix and 143). The report estimates that if the Uruguay Round was fairer to poor countries (i.e., if rich countries reduced their tariffs against exports from poor countries), the latter could earn an extra $700 billion in export revenues, solely in low technology and resource-based industries, with big benefits for employment. Earnings from agricultural exports would make this figure considerably higher.
p. 23 ‘But perhaps it would be . . .’ As in the title of Walter Rodney’s famous 1972 book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
p. 23 ‘And for evidence they invariably . . .’ Official development assistance from DAC countries to developing countries totalled $128 billion in 2012, according to OECD data.
p. 25 ‘But more than twice that . . .’ Global Financial Integrity, Financial Flows and Tax Havens: Combining to Limit the Lives of Billions of People (Washington, DC: Global Financial Integrity, 2016). The GFI study cites $2.97 trillion in net outflows between 1980 and 2012 through recorded transfers (mostly driven by countries with large current account surpluses, like China), $6.6 trillion through capital flight through leakages in the balance of payments, and $6.8 trillion through trade misinvoicing in goods. They estimate that another $6.8 trillion was lost through ‘same-invoice faking’ or ‘abusive transfer pricing’ in goods. Including trade in services, trade misinvoicing and abusive transfer pricing rise to $8.5 trillion each. This makes for a total of about $26.5 trillion in net outflows since 1980. For more on GFI’s methodology, see Chapter 7 and accompanying notes. Note that GFI’s calculations of net resource transfers do not include inward capital flight. GFI holds that because capital flight into developing countries does not contribute to development, it cannot be compared with outward capital flight, which actively undermines development. In addition, GFI argues that it does not make sense to net out capital flight in both directions because it does not make sense to speak of ‘net crime’.
p. 25 ‘Today, poor countries pay over . . .’ Developing countries paid $211 billion (INT, current US$) in interest payments on total external debt in 2015. Source: World Bank, International Debt Statistics.
p. 25 ‘Foreign investors take nearly . . .’ International investors repatriated $486 billion in profits in 2012. Jesse Griffiths, ‘The State of Finance for Developing Countries, 2014’, Eurodad, 2014.
p. 25 ‘And there are many smaller . . .’ Meena Raman, ‘WIPO Seminar Debates Intellectual Property and Development’, Our World is Not For Sale network, 10 May 2005.
p. 26 ‘But by far the biggest . . .’ $23.6 trillion includes capital flight through leakages in the balance of payments, plus through trade misinvoicing and same-invoice faking in goods and services. Global Financial Integrity, Financial Flows and Tax Havens: Combining to Limit the Lives of Billions of People (Washington, DC: Global Financial Integrity, 2015).
p. 26 ‘A similarly large amount . . .’ These figures on trade misinvoicing and abusive transfer pricing include estimates for both goods and services. Global Financial Integrity, Financial Flows and Tax Havens: Combining to Limit the Lives of Billions of People (Washington, DC: Global Financial Integrity 2015).
p. 27 ‘Comparing aid to various outflows . . .’ The sources for the figures used in this graph are all as cited in the text. Note that they apply to different years, however. The figure for aid is for 2012. The figure for debt service is for 2013. The figures for trade misinvoicing, abusive transfer pricing and capital flight are for 2012. The figure for tax holidays is for 2013. The figure for TRIPS was published in 2015. The figure for climate change was published in 2010. The figure for structural adjustment is the annual average across twenty years during the 1980s and 1990s, in current dollars. The figure for the WTO Uruguay Round is for 2005. The figure for undervalued labour is
for 1996, rendered in 2013 dollars.
p. 28 ‘In the mid-1990s . . .’ Gernot Köhler, ‘Unequal Exchange 1965–1995: World Trend and World Tables’, 1998, wsarch.ucr.edu/archive/papers/kohler/kohler3.htm. See also Gernot Köhler and Arno Tausch, Global Keynesianism: Unequal Exchange and Global Exploitation (New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2002). Köhler calculates unequal exchange in 1995 as $1.752 trillion in current dollars. Köhler’s method is to calculate the difference between nominal exchange rates and real exchange rates (i.e. corrected for purchasing power) for goods traded. For example, imagine a nominal exchange rate between the US dollar and the Indian rupee of 1:50. Now imagine that India sends R1,000 worth of goods to the US, and receives $20 worth of goods in return. That would be a perfectly equal exchange. Or at least so it would appear. The problem is that the nominal exchange rate isn’t exactly accurate. In India, R50 can buy much more than the equivalent of $1 worth of goods. For instance, perhaps it can buy closer to $2 worth. So the real exchange rate, in terms of purchasing power, is 1:25. This means that when India sent R1,000 worth of goods to the US, it was really the equivalent of sending $40 worth, in terms of the value that R1,000 could buy in India. And yet India received only $20 in return, which in real terms is worth only R500. In other words, because of the distortion between real and nominal exchange rates, India sent $20 (R500) more than it received. One way to think of this is that India’s export goods are worth more than the price they receive on the world market. Another way is that India’s labour is underpaid relative to the value it produces. The problem with this method, of course, is that it relies on PPP calculations, which can be inaccurate. Other scholars have made more recent estimates of unequal exchange. Zak Cope estimates that unequal exchange in 2009 was between $2.8 trillion and $4.9 trillion, depending on the method used. See Zak Cope, Divided World Divided Class: Global Political Economy and the Stratification of Labour Under Capitalism (Montreal: Kersplebedeb, 2012).