Outline of main points
1. The conditions of the poorest countries, including those of Haiti, are truly alarming -- especially if viewed in the context of the present day world economic order and prevailing systems and power structures. Alternative strategies must be sought. This study deals with the central elements of such a strategy.
2. The attached diagram based on data and elaborated by the UNDP illustrates the two salient facts. First, the poorest twenty per cent of world population partake in a virtually zero share of world income, while the richest twenty per cent reap some 80 per cent. Second, and even more alarming is the fact that over the past thirty years conditions became about twice as bad, the real dollar gap between the rich and poor having increased from 1864 to 15149 dollars, as measured in real dollars at constant purchasing power.
3. Using elementary economic analysis these facts are perfectly obvious. With a world labor force far in excess of resources which would be necessary to employ it using modern [high-product generating] technology, wages and incomes tend toward subsistence levels of a borderline between life and death for millions. This is nothing but the direct result of the market mechanism for human labor on which western capitalist economics prides itself.
4. Such theoretical results are most dramatically confirmed in the context of human hardship and suffering combined with the perversion of values of those living in luxury. Just a few of thousands of possible testimonies : According to the New York Times, October 1995, jackets produced in San Salvador maquiladoras [surrounded by prison-like walls] are sold in the United States for 178 dollars and their production labor cost equalss 0.77 dollar (i.e., 77 cents) per jacket. In a documentary film dealing with Papa-Doc's economy, multinational contracts were facilitated by the visiting U. S. Vice-President Rockefeller according to which daily wage for a woman worker producing 700 bras per day were $2.50. The worker interviewed on the film complained that to have and keep the job she had to provide certain improper services for the foreman.
5. Of central importance and the key to the resolution of these problems is what I identify as the MSS [or the minus-sign syndrome] inherent in the capitalist principle of profit maximization. To maximize profit -- defined as revenue minus labor cost minus other costs -- other things being equal, the corporations must minimize labor cost. And thus a jacket selling for 178 dollars has its labor cost minimized at 77 cents, with no regard for what this means for the mother or family earning that wage.
6. The difference of 177.23 [hereafter 177] dollars goes to the capitalist owners and managers, suppliers of materials, credit institutions, transportation etc, and a good portion of it is simply the result of the capitalist labor market where services of human beings are dealt with worse than slave labor, because who cares if the worker or its child dies? whereas under the slave institution the owner may have been interested to preserve the health [i.e. worth ] of the slave. Incidentally, the chief executive officer of the GAP corporation which sells the jackets, Mr. Donald Fisher has a personal fortune -- according to Fortune magazine -- of one thousand five hundred seventy two MILLION dollars.
7. To seek an alternative solution which would transfer a substantial portion of the surplus [i.e. the excess of 178 over 0.77 figuratively speaking] the following should be recommended. The analysis of where the 177 comes from will give us all the important solutions:
8. As history has shown, one should not call for one-sided radical-socialist solutions. Nothing is wrong with the market mechnism. Wrong are the all powerful multinational corporations which practice the MSS and deal with people as with animals. The perversion of western societies resides in the fact that human beings and their labor services are subject to the market. It is therefore necessary to create another sector of the economy -- the human, cooperative and ecological sector -- to show the different approaches and to let the two sectors compete.
9. The first element of the solution is the elimination of the MSS through cooperative and democratic enterprise, where the incomes of associated labor are maximized and not minimized. This does not mean that the 177 dollars would all go to the workers, but a good portion thereof. It is not necessary to sell luxury jackets on Fifth Avenue for $178 but perhaps more ordinary jackets for $10 to domestic customers, where $5.00 and not 0.77 goes to the workers and the other $5 to the storekeepers, suppliers of raw materials of energy and of equipment etc. The workers and their families will thus benefit not only from better wages but also from lower product prices.
10. A good portion of what increases incomes and makes a country developed is the education of its people. But advanced training and education supplied in the northern developed countries is inefficient, inappropriate for countries like Haiti, and far too expensive. It is much better and more efficient to provide technical skills and education, after literacy is obtained, in conjunction with real hands-on production and experience in the context of domestic cooperative production -- precisely in the alternative cooperative sector.
11. Besides learning and technical skills, a very significant component of development is energy. In developing countries we are uing several thousand times the energy in muscles of human beings. What energy? For the most part non-renewable and dirty energy of petroleum and coal. Haiti may not have any of these -- and if it did it would be better to sell that in the world markets to buy other useful supplies. But it is endowed with large quantities of solar energy for which the technology coming from the north is not appropriate. And thus another major element of the second sector is that it be based on abundant and renewable solar energy. And that energy must be produced/supplied domestically, through instruments also produced domestically as much as possible.
12. Perhaps the most important component of the second alternative cooperative sector is that it produces primarily -- at least in the first ten to twenty years -- products of vital necessity : food, clothing, housing and services of transportation, health and education. For the rest, the modern luxury products and products from the electronic superhighway may just as well be relegated to the first, multinational-oligopolistic sector where they are produced at present.
13. Of course some dollars are necessary for the cooperative sector. Besides earnings from tourism, foreign remittances by Haitians abroad and payment for labor in the traditional maquiladoras, there should be another source of hard currency, especially if the strategy of the cooperative sector were adopted by more poor and solar-energy endowed countries. The effect of engaging in a predominantly ecological type of development strategy on global ecological sanity -- and even survival -- should be of tremendous value to the first world of the north. The aggregate degree of environmental destruction would thereby be mitigated and ultimately even reversed; perhaps reversed thanks to experience of the Third World with clean renewable energy. Through the United Nations or some other international good offices this benefit to the world, especially the world responsible for most of ecological destruction, ought to be compensated for to the poor countries, rich in solar energy, through substantial transfer payments. These payments should at least be sufficient for purchase of necessary solar products from the north, such as reflective plastic etc.
14. This is not to mention the direct effect of extensive substitution of renewable energy for traditional forms within the Third World countries themselves. Reforestation instead of deforestation could now be begun on a large scale, giving jobs as much as further ecological healing of our planet.
15. This all may sound utopian and perhaps absurd. But we now have essential answers in both domains of cooperative economy and vital forms of simple solar energy use and generation. This is why we came with our mission of the STEVEN Foundation with working designs of all vital technologies, producible locally with minimum foreign inputs, if reckoned per unit of output. While this is not the objective of this presentation, one example should serve as an illustration:
The STEVEN solar oven [which can serve one family, or in extended form a whole village] is made primarily of wood. It reaches temperatures comparable to those of an ordinary kitchen oven when exposed to full sun. If the wood were burned and the energy used for baking a single loaf of bread, the bread would not quite be baked. If instead the oven is used over and over again over its lifespan for baking, some 20 thousand loaves or more can be baked. The cost of the single-family oven in the form of the prototype we brought with us is about 7 to 10 dollars. It can be produced in as little as one or two hours, with no sophisticated machine tools. And the cost can be further reduced, perhaps to one dollar when using recycled cardboard, dry grass for insulation, large tin-cans for metal lining and recycled reflective material of various kinds.
We have cooked, baked or roasted just about everything in the oven, ranging from rice to beans, potatoes and chicken. Here in the United States we pay for a loaf of bread about one dollar, but materials for that loaf can be had for 20 to 25 cents. The difference of 75 cents -- multiplied about five times in five loaves baked every day -- like the 177 dolars noted above, can now contribute to the wellbeing of the population. It is a contribution from the sun given to us freely by the Allmighty, which cannot be monopolized or extracted by the powerful of the world.