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.