Last year, 150,000 migrants crossed the Central Mediterranean in small boats from North Africa, fleeing war, pestilence and starvation in their own countries. Over the years, thousands have died making this journey, because their boats have capsized or caught fire. However, while these tragedies regularly evoke humanitarian concerns, the steady flow of migrants has also fueled right-wing nativist parties across the democratic world.
A prescient, but now almost unobtainable, 1990 film hinted at darker outcomes. Director David Wheatley’s The March, based on a screenplay by William Nicholson, tells the story of thousands of starving Sudanese refugees who make their way to the Mediterranean and attempt to cross into Europe at the Strait of Gibraltar, only to be met by a wall of machine guns. The crisis depicted in the film should by now be purely fanciful. However, Sudan once again faces catastrophic hunger on an unprecedented scale. What went wrong? Or, rather, what has not gone right?
The UN Millennium Development Goals (MDG) were designed to avert the kinds of scenario portrayed in the film. In 2000, 191 United Nations member states committed to halving extreme poverty — defined as living on less than US$1.25 per day — by 2015. Most of the focus was on Africa, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, which was to receive US$165 billion in development aid.
Illustration: Mountain People
The MDGs were only partly realized. Extreme poverty was halved ahead of schedule, but largely because China’s real (inflation-adjusted) per capita income grew by a stupendous 10 percent per year between 2000 and 2015. With about 18 percent of the world’s population, China’s growth reduced the global poverty figure dramatically. Moreover, China owed its real income growth not just to the productivity of its economy but also to the stabilization of its population. China’s escape from poverty was not held back or reversed by a rising number of mouths to feed. India then followed a similar, albeit less dramatic, trajectory.
By contrast, in sub-Saharan Africa, English economist Thomas Malthus is alive and well. From 2000 to 2015, the region’s GDP grew at an average annual rate of about 5 percent, but its population increased from 670 million to 1 billion. This trend limited its real per capita growth to about 1 percent, which is far too low to achieve a 50 percent reduction in extreme poverty. Although the percentage of extremely poor Africans dropped from 54 percent to 41 percent from 1990 to 2015, the number of poor people increased in absolute terms, from 278 million to 413 million. Desirable outcomes like reduced infant mortality have improved survival ahead of any reductions in fertility.
Explanations for Africa’s failure to break out of the Malthusian cycle include violence, extortion, climate change and ideology. Some African countries have long been ruled by military juntas and crony capitalists who fight for control over scarce resources like oil, minerals and water, while extremist groups like Boko Haram and al-Shabaab continue to spread terror across the Sahel region.
These “new wars,” as the political scientist Mary Kaldor calls them, drive large-scale population displacement, and the Horn of Africa has also experienced years of severe drought, leading to famine for millions. The international community then responds with new and even more ambitious poverty-reduction targets, the deadline for which is pushed ever further into the future.
For differing economic analyses of the situation, one can turn to development economists like Jeffrey D. Sachs and Paul Collier. Sachs argues that, to grow, poor countries need foreign aid to plug their domestic-savings gap. Extreme poverty could be eradicated through targeted investments in health, education, agriculture and infrastructure, but financing on the required scale has been lacking in sub-Saharan Africa, because rich countries mostly reneged on their pledges to offer financing equal to 0.7 percent of GDP for the MDG targets.
By contrast, Collier argues that while aid is important, Sachs’ diagnosis ignores the importance of governance. Where good government is lacking, any money that comes in would be seized by rival military groups to finance their wars, just as private loans to rickety states would end in default. While Sachs suggests that governance is poor because the countries are poor, Collier says it is the other way around.
These two approaches correspond to different development strategies. Whereas Sachs tends to see well-targeted foreign aid as a sufficient condition for economic growth, Collier suggests that foreign intervention is necessary in some cases to make such aid effective. Thus, international peacekeeping forces, global standards for natural-resource management and foreign control of strategic ministries should all be part of the developmental toolkit. These conclusions have predictably led to charges of neocolonialism. Nonetheless, by looking beyond empire and national sovereignty (even if he does not resolve the issue), Collier raises the crucial question of what a successful political system in Africa would look like.
What both arguments ignore is the extent to which state failure has been caused, or at least exacerbated, by globalization — which has licensed the free trade in arms, foodstuffs, and commodities — and geopolitical rivalry, which has inserted China into the scramble for minerals and influence in Africa. The destruction of traditional farming systems in the name of efficiency has left the world’s poorest countries dangerously dependent on volatile food imports. As we saw following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, blockades, sanctions, and other impediments to exports of wheat and fertilizer inflicted large-scale collateral damage on African economies. Rising food prices might cause hardship in Europe, but they cause famine in Africa.
Over the years, “Fortress Europe” has been trying to keep out undocumented migrants through a mix of bribery (paying for refugee camps in Turkey and the Greek islands) and force. However, the message of The March still holds. Europe cannot insulate itself from Africa by such methods. If mass starvation in Africa cannot be overcome, nor will Europe’s struggles with immigration.
Robert Skidelsky, a member of the British House of Lords, is professor emeritus of political economy at Warwick University. He is the author of an award-winning biography of John Maynard Keynes and The Machine Age: An Idea, a History, a Warning.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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