Hidden costs of Newly Industrializing Countries
Hidden costs of Newly Industrializing Countries
In this exclusive Inter Press Service column, Walden Bello of
the Bangkok-based Center for the South, argues that the costs
extracted by the Newly Industrializing Countries (NICs) model
from Asia-Pacific nations far outweigh any benefits.
BANGKOK (IPS): The impressive growth registered by the Newly
Industrializing Countries (NICs) of the Asia-Pacific region has
been achieved at the cost of tremendous ecological damage, a
crisis in agriculture, technological independence on Japan,
growing inequality and political repression.
At a time when Europe is stagnating, the United States
recovery is weak, Latin America still reels with debt, and Africa
is further marginalized, NICs achieved their growth through a
combination of export-orientation, aggressive activity of
business groups, and strong state leadership in the development
process.
South Korea and Taiwan have run up massive trade deficits with
Japan, brought about by high-tech imports. Taiwan has become an
ecological wasteland.
Thailand is a particularly good example of the contradictions
of what is called 'NIC development'.
In moving from a phase of massive exports of agricultural
products and natural resources to one of exporting manufactured
goods, only 17 percent of Thailand remains forested. Added to
this crisis is another of industrial pollution as waste-water,
air quality, and industrial safety regulations go largely
unenforced.
The lower reaches of the mighty Chao Phraya River, which runs
through Bangkok and is the site of thousands of factories, are
biologically dead.
With 800 new cars hitting the road everyday, the Thai capital
is strangled by traffic. Workers in electronics factories in one
industrial state are mysteriously dying, and many suspect the
cause is poisoning from substances they come into contact with in
the work place.
While Thailand has become a showcase of environment
degradation, some other Southeast Asian countries remain under
authoritarian regimes.
Increasingly defensive to criticism from human groups, these
regimes have launched a propaganda drive to convince the world
that Asians have their own brand of democracy, which includes
restrictions on individual rights, the banning of labor
organization, tight controls on the press, and the subordination
of citizens' right to internal security.
Such advocates of `Asian democracy', Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore
and Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia, claim that too much democracy
could harm economic growth.
But for increasing numbers of people in East and Southeast
Asia, democracy can no longer be postponed and the justification
that democracy might derail growth is wearing thin.
The Philippines, in 1986, and Thailand, in 1992, overthrew
their dictatorships. South Korea has adopted a parliamentary
democracy, and Taiwan is making the transition from one-party
rule.
These governments still have a long way to go before they
become more participatory. But they are being pushed in this
direction by emerging non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who
are rallying citizens on issues including the environment,
indigenous rights, human rights, workers' rights, and women's
rights.
`Sustainable development' and `participatory democracy' have
become the rallying cries of a diverse new movement that seeks to
move away from the growth-oriented development model guided by an
authoritarian alliance of political and business elites.
As the costs of the NIC model begin to outweigh its benefits
over the next few years, this alternative vision of social
development is likely to become more and more attractive.
The elements of a `sustainable development' alternative have
emerged from grassroots experience of the alienating impact of
unchecked market forces and repressive, state-sponsored
`development from above'.
Far from being an import from the North, the sustainable
development perspective in the Asia-Pacific has been largely an
indigenous effort to address the contradictions of four decades
of Western-style development.
It is now stepping into the vacuum created by the collapse of
traditional socialist ideology and increasingly serves as the
vehicle for the articulation of the aspirations of the
dispossessed.
East Asian NGOs have often been criticized as being long on
critique but short on prescription, but this has changed in the
last few years as a core agenda has evolved from the alternative
development movements in Thailand, the Philippines, Korea and
Taiwan:
* Replacement of the blind play of market forces in the free-
market approach and of state fiat in the NIC model with
transparent, rational, and democratic decision-making as the
fundamental mechanism of production, exchange, and distribution.
* A shift from the free-market and NIC preference for economic
growth to growth that favors equity, quality of life, and
ecological harmony.
* Adoption of a bottom-up process of national planning and
decentralization of economic decision-making and management in
favor of control by community, region, and ecological zone.
* Prioritization of agriculture and the reinvigoration of
rural instead of urban-based industry as the centerpiece of the
development process.
* A shift from the use of capital-intensive high technology in
industry and chemical-intensive technology in agriculture to the
development of labor-intensive appropriate technology for
industry and organic, chemical-free agro-technology.
* The organization of the popular sector, represented by the
NGOs, as the third pillar of the political and economic system in
order to counterbalance business and state power.
* Formal recognition and expansion of 'commons' or community
or ancestral property protected from market or state use.
Sustainable development advocates are not anti-government or
anti-business. They merely wish to insure that the interests of
local and national communities are seriously taken into
consideration in political and economic decision-making.
Their goal is to stop the massive destruction and resettlement
of communities caused throughout Asia by government
infrastructure projects designed to increase profitability of
business, and end the massive deforestation caused by a
shortsighted alliance between technocrats and business elites.
They demand that the determination of the national economic
future be wrested from impersonal market forces and the
government-business alliance that underlies the NIC model.
If NGOs articulating these hopes are getting stronger
throughout the region, as the World Bank attests, it is because
they fill a widely-felt need for representation of the interests
of the community.
Walden Bello spends part of the year in the Philippines, where
he teaches a course in the impact of structural adjustment at the
University of the Philippines. He is also principal researcher at
the Institute for Food and Development Policy in the United
States.