National Radio Project

MAKING CONTACT

Transcript: #11-98 Cooperating for a New Economy: Women and Development
March 18, 1998

Program description at http://www.radioproject.org/archive/1998/9811.html

Phillip Babich: Welcome to Making Contact, an international radio program seeking to create connections between people, vital ideas and important information. This week on Making Contact:

Kathy McAfee: Countries in order to receive even food aid from the United States must come to an agreement to implement structural adjustment. And what this amounts to is channeling the resources of the country into exports and away from food production or industry to meet local needs.

Dorothy Granada: I no longer say ‘Third World,’ I say two-thirds world, because the people who are suffering these murderous policies are the majority of people on this planet.

Sue Supriano: According to the World Bank, economic growth is the answer to poverty. Yet some scholars, economists, and grass roots activists say that lending policies set forth by the Bank and other so-called development agencies are, in fact, lowering the standard of living for many people around the world. I’m Sue Supriano, your host this week on Making Contact.

Of the top 100 economies in the world, 51 are corporations. While these institutions often profit from the natural and human resources in countries around the globe, we’re told that they have no responsibility for the social and environmental well-being of those countries.

Kathy McAfee: Five hundred years since the conquest of America have brought about more changes in humanity and in the face of the earth than the previous five millennia, if not of all of human history.

Sue Supriano: Kathy McAfee is author of Storm Signals: Structural Adjustment and Development Alternatives in the Caribbean.

Kathy McAfee: When the conquest of the Americas, which began in the Caribbean, led into a phase in which Europe spread all over the globe, dominating the countries of Asia and Africa, and conquering the peoples of the new world. It resulted in undreamed-of achievement and material greatness. It also resulted in unprecedented destruction, and brought our world to the brink of ecological disaster.

Sue Supriano: The International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and development agencies, McAfee adds, have played a large role in recent times to continue this colonial process.

Kathy McAfee: What we have is the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, other so-called development banks, and the official aid agencies, like the U.S. Agency for International Development. Also, the aid agencies of Japan and Europe and Canada and Australia collaborating together to define the terms on which aid will be given or denied, and which loans will be granted or not granted to Third World countries. And that’s where we get into these kind of technical sounding terms, like structural adjustment. It sounds technical, but it’s really pretty simple. Basically, what it is, is a set of policies that say, "Since you’re in debt" -- of course, you become in debt because countries have been forced to export things for which they can’t control the prices, and import expensive imported goods, which work to the advantage of the colonial mother countries and to the United States. They’ve gotten into debt; they’re been encouraged to borrow. They’ve been unable to repay the debts because each county is competing against the other to export the same products. It’s required in many cases, and more and more each passing year, that countries, in order to receive even food aid from the United States, must come to an agreement to implement structural adjustment, and work out a plan with the World Bank. And what this amounts to is channeling the resources of the country into exports and away from food production or industry to meet local needs. Producing for other people rather that producing for yourself, which only makes the original problem worse.

Sue Supriano: The United States, with its political and economic power, guides how the IMF and World Bank distribute funds. Additionally, the United States Agency for International Development, or US AID, offers loans directly to foreign countries if those governments implement social and economic policies hospitable to corporate interests. Kathy McAfee explains:

Kathy McAfee: The real bottom line of U.S. foreign assistance is promotion of this free trade market-led development model. It’s an ideology that says, "Get rid of any kind of public involvement in regulating or checking and balancing the activities of the private sector. Let the market decide what’s to be grown, what’s to be produced, who gets to eat, where it will be shipped." And, the assumption -- it’s kind of a recycling of the old ‘what’s good for General Motors is good for America.’ It’s ‘what’s good for private enterprise, is supposedly good for everybody.’

Now the problem with that is that, free trade isn’t really free. The market isn’t really free. The market is already dominated by a handful of powerful banks and multinational corporations. So when you get rid of any public checks and balances, and when you say to poor countries that they may not put any restrictions on trade, they may not put any priorities on what they want to grow, and what they want to do with their resources, but instead, they must let the market decide. They must look at not what their people need, but what is it that they have to sell. Is it a tropical forest, perhaps? By this kind of economic logic, if a country has valuable hardwoods, and cuts down their entire tropical forest over a period of say, five years, this shows up on the balance sheets as economic growth, and that’s considered development, by this kind of logic. That’s progress. And I think that we know the consequences of that, not just for the environment but for the survival of people. And a country that does this is entirely negative.

Sue Supriano: Supporters of what’s called free trade argue that boosting the private sector through deregulation will eventually reduce poverty by providing jobs to poor countries. But, says McAfee, this market-led development model only benefits industrialized nations.

Kathy McAfee: These economic policies, unfortunately, and our foreign aid policies, are actually causing more rather that less hunger, more rather than less ecological destruction. And you can see this really clearly on a global scale when you look at some very basic statistics. You find that the poor countries of the world are actually aiding the rich. If you count all of the foreign aid, all of the development assistance from the wealthy countries of the world, add it all together, and compare it to the amount of money that countries of Asia and Africa and Latin America are sending back from these poor countries to the rich countries, you find that more money is flowing from South to North. More money is flowing from the Third World to the so-called First World. It’s about 40 or 50 billion dollars a year. And that’s really just the tip of the iceberg. It’s a reflection of the process by which wealth in many different forms is being drained from these countries and spewed into the systems of production and consumption that we live with here in the industrialized world.

Sue Supriano: Author Kathy McAfee.

Denise Graab: You’re listening to Making Contact, a production of the National Radio Project. For background information, or to get in touch with any of the organizations you hear about on this program, please give us a call. It’s toll free, 800-529-5736. Call that same number for tapes or transcripts, or if you want to make a comment or suggestion for future programs. That’s 800-529-5736.

Sue Supriano: In response to increasing corporate control over social and economic resources, some women of Latin America and the Caribbean are turning to an alternative development model, one that values collaboration over competition, community empowerment over personal wealth. That is women’s cooperatives. According to a 1998 report issued by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, more that 30% of all micro-enterprises in those regions are run by women, many cooperatively. Laura Soriano Morales is executive director of the South and Meso American Indian Rights Center, a non-governmental organization that works with indigenous people throughout Latin America.

Laura Soriano Morales: From the indigenous concept, a cooperative has been a group of people, specifically women, who have gathered together and they have joined their skills in order to make a living. For example to produce, like, coffee, or things made like hand-made crafts and that kind of thing. And then sell it to the public, or to export it to other countries.

Sue Supriano: The systems of decision-making and profit distribution within these cooperatives differ from other micro-enterprises, says Morales.

Laura Soriano Morales: Well, the difference, I think, of co-ops in different regions of Latin America, is that they are grassroots. They come from the community. So that’s very important. And even the ideas come from the community. They have had their meetings, and they have discussed how they can survive and how they can use their skills or whatever they have in order to get some benefit from it. Not only one person is benefiting from it, but the whole community. They are trying to help with each other, and to be accountable, and even to pass on the knowledge. And the difference will be that they always try to have the same people within the administration doing everything. The indigenous people having the control of the whole thing, and teaching others.

Sue Supriano: In Nicaragua, the government has slashed social services to meet conditions set down by the International Monetary Fund as part of a loan package. Dorothy Granada is a nurse who helped found the Maria Ortiz Women’s Center, a health cooperative in Nicaragua that was established in response to the cutbacks.

Dorothy Granada: What has happened since 1990 in Nicaragua is that the International Monetary Fund has really been governing the country with its -- they are called SAPs, the Structural Adjustment Programs. And these are rules set down by the IMF. It’s not just Nicaragua, it’s all poor countries. And if these rules are not followed, then the government does not get more loans. Because of structural adjustment, the unemployment rate is pushing 70% in the country. And all services which previously were provided by the government are now in the hands of private people, of private companies. The health system, which those of your listeners who remember the beautiful health care system in Nicaragua during the Sandinistas. You couldn’t get a heart transplant or a kidney transplant in Nicaragua, but every woman had access to birth control measures if she wanted them, and every child had access to immunizations. Well all of that, almost the entire system has been dismantled, because it’s only 75% of the budget. The previous budget has been cut. And this, at the insistence of the International Monetary Fund. They’re murderous practices.

So what we have in Nicaragua is people out of work on the street. We have thousands, hundreds of thousands of children who are virtually thrown-away children. They leave abusive homes, they leave because there’s no food in their homes, they’re hungry. They go on the street to look for food. And many of them have become workers. And I was talking to a little boy not long ago, who earns about $1.25 a day on good days washing windshields at a stoplight in Managua. And he is the only -- there are about 6 people in his family. And he is the only wage earner in his family. He’s about nine years old. So this is what’s happened to Nicaragua, but this is not unique with Nicaragua. This is all debtor countries. I no longer say Third World, I say two-thirds world, because the people who are suffering these murderous policies are the majority of people on this planet.

Sue Supriano: Granada began treating people in 1990 from the porch of a bamboo house in a remote coastal village, 10 hours from Managua. Now the women’s center has four consultation rooms, a women’s library, some office, and some meeting rooms. Granada says the women’s center is beneficial to the whole community.

Dorothy Granada: I’m a nurse and we have 6 health providers. These are women from the community that get on-the-job training. We study together. When we have visiting nurses or other health workers that can come down and teach, we set up a little course. And we provide health care. Last year we had 9000 patient visits.

Our task is to provide health services for women. Women are dying in the countryside at epidemic proportions. One, from abortions badly done. They die of hemorrhage infection. Secondly, they die because they have too many pregnancies and they become too anemic and they bleed to death following a delivery. Now these are preventable illnesses of course. With proper birth control, and with spacing of children, these women do not need to die. So that is our first task. We provide birth control services. We cure simple infections. We have a visiting team once every month, once ever six weeks. We have a surgeon, a woman surgeon from Matagolpa Women’s Clinic. She comes and does tubal ligations on women who have had their family. They’ve had eight, ten, sometimes 15 children and they simply do no want any more. And other measures of birth control are not appropriate for them.

We serve the children that the women bring. As I said, though, our main task is the health of women, and particularly the reproductive health of women. But secondly we serve the children of the women, and thirdly a sprinkling of men, because our task is women and we simply don’t have the resources to provide health care for everyone. We have severe malnutrition in the countryside. Children come in to us literally dying. We have children dying every couple of weeks. The child comes in and just literally dies in our arms. To try to respond to this problem, we have about 30 of the most severely malnourished children under the age of five in a lunch program, in improving the traditional diet with soy beans and green leaves. And the mothers are preparing -- the mothers of these children are the ones to prepared the meals. The mothers are learning new skills. Basically, the women are organizing and trying to find answers to the problems that they face.

Sue Supriano: While some cooperatives are organized to meet local needs, others are producing goods to be sold in the international marketplace. Sandy Hunter, a volunteer with the East Bay Sanctuary, describes two women’s cooperatives in Latin America that sell products to the Sanctuary. The Sanctuary in turn re-sells them in the United States.

Sandy Hunter: A town called Tio Cente in El Salvador -- Tio Cente was in the middle of the fighting in the civil war down there. And there were two women, among others, two women from Eugene, Oregon who were down there protecting the town. After the fighting was over, these women took a group of women from Tio Cente up to Guatemala. They found a Guatemalan weaving cooperative in the Lake Atitlan area. They hooked the women in Salvador up with the weaving cooperative. They introduced the Salvadorian women to a Kiche Indian tailor who taught them how to sew well, and then established a --actually it’s called a bag project. They make other things, but what they mainly make in Tio Cente now are beautiful, beautiful bags. They’re made of Guatemalan weaving material, and the women are now back in Eugene, Oregon marketing the bags.

The other place that I wanted to briefly mention is a place called Upavin. That’s an acronym which in Spanish means United to Live Better. This is a group of I think 40 women now who work with -- in a cooperative. It’s a weaving and other kinds of craft cooperative. They were enabled by an American women, a U.S. citizen nurse, a really fabulous gal in her forties, who one day woke up and said, "I want to go and work with these women in Guatemala, to help the women form their own co-op." Now, from the crafts that they have made, they have built a four-story house in the middle of this slum. You just don’t believe it. It’s a slum with feces running down the street, the children and dogs are playing. In the middle of it, with their cleverness, and with the advocacy of this American woman and some other church groups primarily, they’ve done it themselves. They have these four floors, they have a Montessori School, and a tutoring program for older children. They have a dental clinic. They’re now sending one of their members to dental school, so they can get a dentist in there. And they also make beautiful things.

Laura Soriano Morales: I think one of the challenges for women cooperatives in different countries, especially Latin America is that they don’t get the support of the government.

Sue Supriano: Laura Soriano Morales of the South and Meso American Indian Rights Center.

Laura Soriano Morales: The government is trying in a way to destroy those cooperatives because they sound leftist, although they have nothing to do with the leftist movement or anything like that. So, that’s why women have to ask for other sources, like foreign sources, like Europe or the U.S.

Sue Supriano: Despite this foreign influence, says Sandy Hunter of East Bay Sanctuary, local indigenous women have complete control over their cooperatives.

Sandy Hunter: Well, in both of the instances I was talking about, there’s an organization that has a secretary, a president, a foreman, or something like that. And they make the decision of how they’ll sell their craft, where they’ll sell their crafts, whether somebody wants them to do something they’ll do it. Whether they use the money to send one of their members to dental school, for example, the decision making is in the hands of the local indigenous group. It’s not in the hands of the Americanos who fly down with good ideas.

Laura Soriano Morales: It depends on the motives of some of these women and depends on the understanding of these foreign women of indigenous peoples or cultures.

Sue Supriano: Laura Soriano Morales of the South and Meso-American Indian Rights Center.

Laura Soriano Morales: I’m sure they’re having problems like that, I see a lot the organizations from other places, or just groups of women or whatever, have probably learned from the different experiences they have had. I think one of the lessons is that they have to understand that the idea has to come out from the community. I cannot say that one idea will be for all the indigenous communities throughout the world, Latin America. Because each single community is totally different and each community has a different way to communicate, ways to do things and so I have seen them having some problems. On the other hand I have seen that probably these women have learned from this experience and are now more like a backup, are more like helping where the people need help. I guess encourage them to organize the whole thing by themselves otherwise it doesn’t work.

Sue Supriano: Author Kathy McAfee is formerly a policy analyst with Oxfam America, an organization that works with cooperatives all over the world. She says establishing cooperatives and regional development projects will lead to local economic and social empowerment.

Kathy McAfee: We have groups that are working to show that we can process some of the local commodities, so that fruits, wonderful tropical fruits, citrus and others, can be processed into juices and jams and jellies and canned goods, so that not only will people be able to benefit from these nutritionally and enjoy them when they’re off-season, but also the export of these products bring in so much more money. We have groups of women who are working and setting up their own factories and in some cases getting some help from the government. They’re not getting any help from the United States aid programs. United States aid programs are entirely geared toward export, not to agro-processing for local use whatsoever. In spite of that, people are going on. They’re forming these projects. They’re also forming alternative development plans. There are regional institutions and networks of non-government groups and grassroots groups that are sharing skills, meeting with each other, learning -- bringing back some of the traditional ways of farming that work better than these monocrop plantations. But also learning new technology, biogas, and other more ecologically rational things, learning to train each other. And also putting together a very strong critique of this export-oriented structural adjustment model, And beginning to flesh out what an alternative should look like, how it could work.

Sue Supriano: McAfee adds that these alternative models serve as lessons for a more just and sustainable approach to economic development around the world.

Kathy McAfee: We don’t have to go down and tell them what to do. They’ve got a plan. They need a little support getting it off the ground. But I think that the kind of things that we can learn from them are even more important in the short run and the long run than what we’re able to do for them right now. Because we all have to learn to live in an ecologically, more rational way. We all have to learn to be self-sufficient. We all have to learn to make democracy really work. It doesn’t work very well in this country. So I see this as something, we’re all in it together. And our partners in the Caribbean and Asia and Mexico, wherever they may be, are working on the same set of problems that we are. And that’s really encouraging.

Sue Supriano: That’s it for this edition of Making Contact, a look at women’s cooperatives in a global economy. Thanks for listening. This week’s show was a production of the Women’s Desk at the National Radio Project. Interviews were conducted by Denise Graab and myself. We had production assistance from Rebecca Armstrong. For Making Contact, I’m Sue Supriano.

Phillip Babich: If you want more information about the subject of this week’s program, call the National Radio Project at 800-529-5736. Call that same phone number for tapes and transcripts, or if you’d like to make a comment or suggestion for future programs. Making Contact is an independent production funded by individual contributors. We’re committed to providing a forum for voices and opinions not often heard in the mass media. Our producers are David Barsamian, Phillip Babich, and Denise Graab. Our senior advisor is Norman Solomon and our executive director is Peggy Law. Our theme music is by the Charley Hunter Trio. For everyone at Making Contact, thanks for listening.