Righteous anger, well-managed

• When I was in Togo, I remember hearing on the BBC World Service that Uganda had ticked some development box that meant it would no longer be eligible for some financial assistance (though I can't remember if it was IMF or World Bank or what) and from the tone of the news reports and the commentators, I got the distinct impression this was meant to be a Very Bad Thing. Which I didn't understand at all. What is the point of development if increasing independence from foreign aid isn't progress?
• "Because self-sufficiency is, as Jeremy Seabrook puts it, 'the opposite of poverty,' it makes it very hard for us to tell what constitutes real poverty. For example, a family that grows virtually all its food and barters for much of what it needs but makes a cash income of only $2 per day and a family that owns no land, lives in a shack on a garbage dump and gets all its food from selling things scavenged from that dump (a way millions of people live) and makes about $2 per day are lumped together among the desperately poor, as though their situations were equivalent." (Sharon Astyk, Depletion and Abundance, pp 58-59)
• I paraphrase some development 'expert' on Costing the Earth a few weeks ago, who said that food insecurity affected farmers in the South* more than city-dwellers because they could have bad harvests and their crops could be affected, so the answer was to move all subsistence farmers into cities and waged jobs in the formal economy. Because, what, then food would just magically appear in cities without anyone to produce it and not be subject to drought, pests or disease?
  
• Raj Patel, when asked after a talk whether eating locally meant you wouldn't be able to have coffee or chocolate again, said (again I paraphrase): 'I'm strongly in favour of allowing the people who grow coffee and cocoa beans to decide whether they'd like to trade with us.'

I'm currently reading Mr Patel's book, Stuffed and Starved, and I feel the righteous anger of my seventeen-year-old self welling up inside me. Righteous anger, well-managed, is a useful tool.

I'm also trawling the internet for video interviews with him, as he is wonderfully irreverent and makes frequent use of the oeuvre of John Cleese to explain how world financial institutions work.


* The global South, that is, not the south of England. Though I daresay, until recently at least, you could draw similar conclusions from comparing farmers and bankers in, say, Kent.