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Friday, October 30, 2009

The perpetuation of poverty: analyzing Bangla Desh


Now and then seems wise to recall why poverty exists and is perpetuated in spite of the overproduction we have, including many countries that pay farmers to produce less, not more.


Vicenç Navarro picks one of the poorest countries in the world, Bangla Desh, as case study. Why is Bangla Desh poor? Does it not produce enough food? It does and even exports it because their inhabitants don't have enough money to pay for it. The crucial problem, like elsewhere, is that wealth is concentrated in very few hands: 16% of rural Bangladeshis own 75% of the land and this olygarchy rules the country (75% of parliament members own huge land swaths). These have absolutely no interest in redistributing even a fraction of that wealthin order to increase the internal demand: they are just interested in perpetuating their power and wealth.

So constitutionally land redistribution, what is just a self-evident need in order to create a "middle class" that can drive demand and serve as backbone of the country's sociology, is just illegal. No matter who wins in the polls (the usual clone-party pseudo-democratic regime, with the occasional military intervention), nothing can change. Only a violent revolution can in fact change things in such a country but the odds are against it and keeping people semi-illiterate and ignorant, and stranded in religious false promises, helps the olygarchy to perpetuate the status quo.

This is of course not just the case of Bangla Desh but of so many other countries through the world, in dire need of a revolution with some blood and specially some good wealth redistribution. And this applies, in my opinion, also to supposedly wealthy countries like the USA, that are in dire need of some wealth redistribution too. By the moment, all they got is further taxes to pay the bankers who suck their blood. Why not put them in jail, as they deserve?
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

According to Chomsky in The Discovery of India . Neru points out that the areas that had been administered by the British the longest are the poorest today.
They had a middle class the - Pakistanis.

Childbirth mortality in Bangladesh is less than than in (nuclear) Pakistan.

I think they've got a system of all sons inheriting in Bangladesh, it leads to dividing land into smaller and smaller plots.

Maju said...

Bangladesh is just the case study, chosen for its rank as one of the poorest countries on Earth: the situation is roughly the same elsewhere, though some details will vary, no doubt.