Africa, geology and the march of the development technocrats

Jason Hickel asks whether ‘environmental determinism’ – the theory that Africa’s development has been hindered as a result of ‘the environmental conditions that Africans inhabit’ – accurately explains Africa’s poverty. While he commends its attempt to stop blaming underdevelopment 'on the presumed genetic inferiority of black people’, he finds the theory and motives behind environmental determinism to be seriously lacking. Hickel asserts that environmental determinism is both ahistorical and apolitical: ‘Poverty is not a problem of nature, it is a problem of power.’ Furthermore, he argues that to tackle the real issues behind Africa’s slow development and poverty would mean to go against Western economic interests and to radically change the world system in which we exist. ‘The wealth of the West’, Hickel reminds us, ‘is intimately bound up with the poverty of Africa, and vice versa.’

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'Development’, I’ve discovered, operates as a flagrantly racist discourse in some guises. Scrambling to explain the reasons for Africa’s perpetual poverty and apparently incurable misery, laypersons in the West point to Africans’ ‘savagery’ and alleged incapacity for civilisation. This is not just a fringe opinion; even among putatively educated individuals such nonsense recurs with disturbing frequency.

In an attempt to defend Africa and Africans against the cancerous ignorance that this model propagates, a collection of more thoughtful academics and development theorists – Jared Diamond and Jeffrey Sachs among them – have proposed an alternative, more liberal-minded approach to understanding Africa’s difficulties. Instead of blaming underdevelopment on the presumed genetic inferiority of black people, they insist instead that we cast our critical gaze on the environmental conditions that Africans inhabit.

In development circles the theory is known as ‘environmental determinism’, and it attempts to explain persistent poverty in Africa as the consequence of material forces outside the realm of human agency that have made it difficult for Africa to develop. In doing this, environmental determinism suggests that Africa’s climate, geology, and natural resource portfolio has ultimately determined its economic trajectory. Compared to the racist assumptions that infuse popular pontifications about African underdevelopment, environmental determinism seems like a breath of progressive, fresh air. But a closer look shows that it smuggles in a number of insidious claims that connive to direct attention away from the real issues at stake.

But before getting to the critique, let’s deal with the theory in its own terms. Environmental determinism looks as far back into the geological past as the break-up of Gondwana – the ancient super-continent – to show that plate tectonics conspired to grant Africa a coastline with few natural harbours and a gradient too steep to allow easy river transportation, making regional integration difficult. In addition, the relatively older age of Africa’s geological profile means that its top soils have been weathered to the point of deep depletion, rendering most ecological zones unsuitable for good agriculture.

The notorious Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) also makes a strong appearance in the arguments of environmental determinists. This unique weather pattern pits dry, continental winds against wet, oceanic winds to create an annual precipitation cycle that oscillates between two dramatically different seasons: rainy and dry. The rainy season is characterised by concentrated downpours, and the dry by often extreme drought. The result; flash floods, cutting erosion, and topsoil degeneration that further militates against sustained agricultural pursuits.

Furthermore, the ITCZ weather pattern produces an environment in which a number of tropical diseases flourish; among them malaria, sleeping sickness, river blindness, and schistosomiasis (bilharzia). As the pathogens responsible for these devastating diseases gravitate toward verdant, well-watered areas, they render some of the otherwise most arable land hostile to human settlement. The two-season weather cycle also militates against settled agriculture in certain regions, necessitating nomadism or regular migration to urban centres, rendering peasants vulnerable to the dictates of a violent labour market and creating ideal conditions for HIV transmission.

And so it goes; a litany of arguments that prove that Africa’s problems are not necessarily the fault of Africans, but the inevitable outcome of nature’s capricious designs. But while its observations are not untrue, as a standalone theory of underdevelopment, environmental determinism has some serious limitations.

First, the obvious objections. The correlation between environment and development is indeterminate; there are many regions in the world with hostile geological and climactic characteristics that have nonetheless managed to keep from descending into inveterate poverty. Second, the theory focuses on what Africa lacks rather than what Africa has, being – among other things – vast natural resource wealth in the form of unprecedented petroleum reserves and mineral deposits. The question should not be what to do in the absence of resources, but how existing resources get used, how they are distributed, and who pockets the profits.

In these terms, it becomes clear that environmental determinism completely elides both history and politics. It elides history by ignoring past European involvement with Africa through the slave trade, colonialism, and resource extraction. It elides politics in that it ignores the present relations of power – African, American, Chinese and European – that continue to develop the continent’s resources in the interests of some, while marginalizing others through debt-manipulation, structural adjustment, and neo-liberal trade arrangements

Because environmental determinism posits an ahistorical and apolitical analysis of the problem, it lends itself naturally to solutions that ignore how inequalities have been, and continue to be, generated out of the capitalist world system. We are led to believe, for example, that a massive infusion of aid and modern technology to improve agriculture, basic health, education, power and sanitation will help clear the hurdles posed by a hostile natural world. As Jeffrey Sachs (author of the popular messianic treatise ‘The End of Poverty’) and other development technocrats have it, the solution lies in the Western aid paradigm of the Monterrey Consensus and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Western development technocrats are not as calloused and blithely myopic as those who insist that Africans – now long independent of colonial rule – bear responsibility for their own problems and should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They do, however, accomplish a similar shifting of blame – a sleight of hand – that directs attention away from the pathologies of power that lie behind the phenomenon of underdevelopment. They want us to imagine a world in which their two billion desperately poor neighbours can be raised up to decent middle-class living standards, without any restructuring of the capitalist world system and its inherently uneven division of labour, production, consumption, and emission.

Western development technocrats content themselves with ahistorical and apolitical solutions to poverty and underdevelopment in Africa, because to tackle the real issues at stake would be to run up against Western economic interests. It would mean deleting debt, promoting fairer international trade, eliminating agricultural dumping, and requiring multinational corporations to pay living wages. Instead, concerned Westerners want to feel good about helping, while maintaining the system that supports their lifestyles and refusing to face the fact that the wealth and privilege of their nations – and, ironically, the very presence of the surplus that they can dispense so liberally in aid – depend on a system of extraction and exploitation that necessarily generates inequality. As the dependency theorists have so long insisted, the wealth of the West is intimately bound up with the poverty of Africa, and vice versa. Neither our wealth nor their poverty is natural, as the development technocrats suggest. Poverty is not a problem of nature, it is a problem of power.

Pambazuka