Analytical Review: Give A Man A Fish by James Ferguson

Analytical Review: Give A Man A Fish by James Ferguson

Ferguson proposes the radical suggestion that the solution to the deprivation in southern Africa is the organization of a society that differs from contemporary liberal democratic thinking about politics and social provisioning (Ferguson 2015). Despite the many different interpretations, Ferguson agrees most with the concept of the gendered position of production that the phrase “Give a man a fish” implies (Ferguson 2015). He assumes the “man” as having a moral obligation to provide for his family through employment, and that the greatest obstacle to this mode of production is the lack of available or accessible employment rather than the absence of skill (Ferguson 2015). Unemployment in Southern Africa exists as a sore to the state’s economic development and a cancer to family dynamics and survival. The expansion of social welfare in the Global South, and the widespread proliferation of limited, but unconditional, cash transfers in the 21st century has steeped objections from the Left that describe the act of simply “giving away” money to the poor is promoting both laziness and dependency (Ferguson 2015). Rather than an exchange of cash and labor, or cash and conditionalities, Ferguson proposes that as citizens each individual is entitled to a share in their country’s wealth, but free market proponents disagree (Ferguson 2015).

As a result of economic restructuring and a surplus of labor, the black South African population looked increasingly to their government as a direct provider and the means to a ‘liberation’ that came in the form of goods and social services (Ferguson 2015). Three to four percent of the nation’s GDP is received by the poor 30% of the entire population, through cash payments (Ferguson 2015). Social grants in South Africa, despite yielding “positive development impact” and playing a vital role in sustaining poor households and communities, are limited by the politics of distribution (Ferguson 2015). There is a pervasive idea amongst foreign actors that income grants influence a “dependency” that creates a disincentive to work and degrades productivity, breeding the idea that the existence of simple, universal and unconditional cash transfers form moralizing judgements about who of the poor are “deserving” of being “fed for a lifetime” by its distribution (Ferguson 2015). However, Davis observed social payments as being imperative to the economic and social structure of the region, arguing that the poor South Africans are binded to relations of dependence that are unequal and hierarchical in both the social and economic markets (Ferguson 2015). The “dependent” is thus the poor individual that passively allows for any sort of distribution without the exchange of labor – a passivity that has a devalued sociocultural association with femininity; as a charity that is “demeaning to both the giver and the recipient”; and a term that conservative anti-welfare critiques use to frame the poor as “parasites living off the taxes of the workers” (Ferguson 2015). The framing of the term “dependent” or the “deserving poor” fails to address those that are rich and born into inheritances, therefore acquiring currency without an exchange of labor, nor the conditional income tests and conditionalities that enables the persistent hierarchies of inequality within poor communities and families (Ferguson 2015). Regardless, Ferguson argues that direct distribution does not influence change, rather it allows poor people to meet their immediate needs, therefore not directly altering the individual’s relation to the system of production (Ferguson 2015).

Chang argues that the components of neoliberalism, such as the free market, deregulation and privatization, are strategies that hinder the development of poor countries (Hanlon 2012). The World Bank (WB) touts aspects of good governance as: keeping the state out of the economy, the elimination of subsidies, and supporting policies that widen the gap between the rich and poor – all opposite of the strategies that contemporary rich countries historically used to industrialize and develop (Hanlon 2012). For example, The International Monetary Fund (IMF) admits that Mozambique’s economy gets worse every year, despite following its advice for over five years (Hanlon 2012). Though urban poverty came to be a problem not of social assistance and welfare but of “development”, Hanlon argues that cash transfers have a social purpose, to decrease poverty and reduce inequality, by stimulating growth through the increase of demand and spending by poor, and assuming the spending of the poor to be on more local foods, clothing and farm inputs – thus presumed to build the local economy (Hanlon 2012). Conditions in conditional cash transfers usually involve an income cut-off and a requirement that the recipients’ children attend school and make regular visits to medical clinics – an explicit aim to govern behaviour in some minimal sense, justified by the “need to enhance human capital” (Ferguson 2015). Though rising commodity prices have reduced aid dependencies and the power of foreign aid donors for some countries like Brazil and China, good governance values often demand low state spending and often individuals in the poorest countries cannot afford the relatively large social benefits (Hanlon 2012). The only practiced alternative to the “Market” is then “the Gift”, a system in which Ferguson proposes as new circuits of distribution that supports the ideology of citizens having the right to their nation’s wealth, replacing the old networks of exchange between wage earners and dependents (Ferguson 2015).

Rather than empowering the poor and addressing their difficulties, poverty reduction strategies such as conditional and non-conditional cash transfer programs have instead intensified the neoliberalization processes in the developing world. Industrial policy is a set of policies that stimulate growth and activities broadly defined – it is a set of policies that are needed to increase employment (Teichman 2019). However, traditional modes to development are forbidden in the Global South as in the “making up of jobs”, the copy and adaptation of technology – as seen in Pharma countries with patent law protections with the World Trade Organization (WTO), and tariff production (Teichman 2019). The traditional Left perspective views discipline and surveillance as fundamentally capitalist tools for extracting and controlling labor (Ferguson 2015). Structural adjustment, liberalization and democratic reforms, have all played a significant role in weakening the regulatory capacity of the state by removing its oversight power (Szeftel 1998). Deregulation in Africa had reduced the government’s capacity and in turn has made it difficult to control the interactions between private interests and public officials (Szeftel 1998). The problem of corruption in Africa has been widely publicized, with anti-corruption pressures on agencies and governments seeking to promote the liberal democratic agenda in Africa (Szeftel 1998).

Neoliberalism promoted wealth accumulation amongst the classes of both the developed and developing nations, and expanded into Africa (Szeftel 1998). The vulnerability of South Africa’s political office to corruption was largely due to the political order being built on capital accumulation, which produced underdevelopment, deprivation and racial exclusion in South Africa, which consequently led to the submission of the state’s power and depleted the state’s responsibility as the primary provider of goods and services (Szeftel 1998). A powerful organization that acted in parallel to the local government, the World Bank initially promoted social investment funds, targeted towards infrastructure, social services, and microfinance – initially beginning as emergency measures, but later instilled them as permanent features in Africa (Teichman 2018). The implementation of the social funds followed criticisms towards its effectiveness. Some critiques included its exclusion of the extremely poor subsequent indirect targeting of the moderately poor, as well as its politicized role, for example local community votes depending on which party promises benefits, and finally its failure to challenge the political status quo (Teichman 2019). Conditional cash transfers thus acted as a means to target the desperately poor while ensuring that social spending was not being “wasted” on the poor (Teichman 2019). The problems with conditional cash transfer programs are the sole use of income as the deciding factor of who is “deserving”, ignoring the multidimensionality of poverty – for instance, though a family has a higher income than their neighbour, they may be financially worse-off due to an illness in the family; nor the intergenerational pattern of poverty, and finally it assumes that the market will reduce moderate poverty – however if poor families graduate from conditional cash programs with health and educated children, but job creation had remained inefficient or nonexistent, then the family will not be able to remain above the poverty line (Teichman 2019). The question of whether unconditional cash transfer programs then begin to make headway.

The Grameen Bank initially established in 1983 with a central philosophy of lending money to the poor without making a profit, but rather with the goal of providing economic opportunities to very poor people – particularly women alongside the role of monitoring of the quality of schools (Teichman 2019). This organization recognized that lending money cheaply through microfinance loans to poor people, may mean the money will never be paid back (Teichman 2019). This holistic approach to development led to the dramatic improvement of people’s lives – child mortality declines being one of the key indicators (Teichman 2019). By 2001, changes amongst the organization began to shift towards World Bank policies, advocating for the integration of microfinance into the global financial markets – meaning the poor people would be required to pay higher interest rates – and the indicators of the “success” of the organization shifted to loan repayment rates and market interest rates (Teichman 2019). This market-driven solution to poverty alleviation led to the critique of microfinance institutions making profits at the expense of the poor; for instance, due to increasing poverty from previously withdrawn loans, poor people often become more indebted by using loans from other microfinance institutions to pay for other loan debts (Teichman 2019).

Though Ferguson’s vision of a new labor system that replaces current neoliberal policies of distribution and dependence has not been observed beyond Grameen Bank’s initial establishment and philosophy, Ferguson effectively showed the arguments of both free market proponents and critiques. As observed, neoliberal policies implemented by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund on global south countries, the poorest regions of the world – such as South of Africa – has ineffectively addressed the sociopolitical multidimensional aspects of poverty, inadvertedly resulting in increasing income inequalities, indebtedness and or dependencies. The contemporary free market policies cannot be applied universally across different sociocultural and political contexts, rather, as Ferguson suggests, a new form of the Market needs to be established.

REFERENCES

Ferguson, J. (2015). Give a Man a Fish. Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution. Durham NC: Duke University Press. Lewis Morgan Lecture Series

Hanlon, J. (2012). Governance as ‘Kicking Away the Ladder’. New Political Economy. 17(5). http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2012.732272

Szeftel, M. (1998). Misunderstanding African Politics: Corruption and the Governance Agenda. Review of African Political Economy. (76): 221-240. ISSN 0305-6244

Teichman, J. (2018). Lectures on Comparative Development in International Perspective. University of Toronto Scarborough.