Thomas Lines - Making Poverty: A History

THOMAS LINES is a freelance consultant specializing in international agricultural markets. He started his working life as a journalist reporting on the commodity and financial markets in London and Paris, and later became a lecturer in international business at Edinburgh University. He has worked as a team leader of agricultural aid projects and a policy advisor for UN agencies, leading NGOs, and fairtrade and trade union organizations.

The author has worked in more than 40 countries and speaks fluent French and Russian. He was a candidate for the Green Party in the 2005 UK general election.

His recent work as a research consultant made him look at world markets and their impact on poverty from numerous angles, according to his clients requirements. This unusual wealth of experience leads the author to some troubling questions about the way the globalized economy affects the Earths poorest inhabitants.

Making Poverty

A HISTORY

Thomas Lines

Zed Books

LONDON & NEW YORK

Making Poverty: A History was first published in 2008 by Zed Books Ltd,
7 Cynthia Street, London N1 9JF, UK and
Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA

This ebook edition was first published in 2013
www.zedbooks.co.uk

Copyright Thomas Lines 2008

The right of Thomas Lines to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

Cover designed by Andrew Corbett
Interior designed and set in 11/12.5 pt Perpetua by Long House, Cumbria, UK

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

US Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 978 1 84813 730 1

Contents

Tables and Figure

Abbreviations

Foreword: crisis year

Events move fast during a crisis, and so it has been since this book was written in the middle months of 2007. When I started writing it, loan-financed private equity funds were busily buying up famous companies while speculative hedge funds were well-established investors, among other things, in primary commodities, including foodstuffs such as maize (corn), wheat and rice. Indeed, we were told that a commodities supercycle had placed the prices of foods, metals and other commodities on a long-term rising trend, which might even banish the boom-and-bust character for which their markets have always been renowned.

Then suddenly, in the usually quiet holiday month of August, the credit markets suffered what a leading banker called a heart attack. Financiers lost confidence in the new debt instruments which lay behind the boom, the banks stopped lending to each other, and the financial authorities were left scratching their heads, since the methods they had applied to previous financial crises would not work on this one.

The world of high finance might seem a long way from the struggle for survival of smallholders, pastoral herders, rural labourers and their families in Ethiopia, Mongolia, Moldova, the Solomon Islands, Haiti and other poor countries, about whose plight this book is written. But in the world of global free markets which has developed since the 1980s, they are closely linked. Poor countries have been required by financial institutions to set their future on exports, which in most cases means primary commodities and more often than not the produce of their fields, trees and animals. The prices they receive for them are set in global markets and by corporations which order the produce and sell it on to the worlds consumers.