It’s a typical Saturday afternoon at the
flashy Metro Centro mall in Managua, Nicaragua, and the joint is jumping. As I
watch a young barista crank out $4 iced cappuccinos at the Casa de Café kiosk,
I find myself reflecting yet again on the mysterious phrase “developing
country.”
To those who don’t know this part of the
world, the phrase suggests poverty and deprivation - chicken buses spilling
over with skinny peasants making slow progress along dirt roads; neighbourhoods
of rickety houses built from bamboo and banana leaves; poor people with seven
or eight children scratching out meagre livings in tiny villages.
Paul and I are just beginning our third
posting as Cuso International volunteers in Central America. I suspect more
than a few of our acquaintances back home imagine us living in just such a country.
They assume that working with non-profit organizations in countries like
Nicaragua and Honduras means giving up the good life.
Yet the reality of life in a modern-day
Central American city looks a lot like life in Canada in many ways. And the
more time I spend in the south, the more my confusion grows over what we mean
when we talk about development.
All the stuff of “developed” countries like
Canada exists here in Nicaragua, from beautifully maintained highways to fancy
malls, big universities, well-equipped hospitals, 60-inch televisions, pricey
iced-coffee makers, and luxury cars. The view from where I’m sitting as I write
this is of attractive pink-plaster houses with immaculate gardens as far as the
eye can see.
But were I to walk a few blocks to the
eight-lane highway that cuts through this part of town, I’d see a different
view.
I’d
see wooden shacks with thin curls of smoke coming out from wood cooking fires
inside. I’d see skinny dogs sleeping on dirt floors and families in worn hand-me-down
clothes shipped in bales from the U.S., sitting in cheap plastic chairs in scrubby
dirt yards. Employment is scarce and notoriously low-paid for families in those
kinds of neighbourhoods.
So the real problem is not a lack of modern
conveniences, it’s that so many people who live here can’t access them. The
problem is not a lack of development, but of inequality – both in terms of
income and in having the political clout to be able to change that reality. The
World Bank rates Nicaragua as the second-poorest nation in Latin America and
the Caribbean, but that poverty definitely isn’t shared equally among the country’s
six million citizens.
The bad roads, rickety houses, and
impoverished families that come to mind for those who haven’t been to Central
America do still prevail in many rural areas. Rural development efforts tend to
concentrate along three lines: Helping people improve food security through
better agricultural practices and diversity; encouraging people to engage more
effectively with their governments; and helping communities organize themselves
better to prevent or respond to emergencies such as floods, mud slides, drought
and other natural disasters. (I haven’t seen much development work focused on
the needs of the urban poor.)
It’s important work, of course.
Better and more diverse agricultural yields
can mean the difference between life and death for subsistence farmers, as can better
logging practices that stop the deforestation that turn a regular rain storm
into a devastating flood or slide. Democracy is still a fragile concept in
Central America, and building a more informed and engaged citizenry is an
integral part of sustaining that. Development work that improves the lives of
women and girls is fundamental to improving a country’s economic performance.
But can those efforts change the structural
inequalities, cultural habits, and harmful government policies that feed the
growing gap between rich and poor around the world? I don’t know. Like so any other global problems, it’s
complicated, and there are many competing interests at stake – most notably,
the interests of consumers in wealthy countries like my own.
For instance, Central American farmers wouldn’t
be nearly so poor if they got paid more for their crops. (The price people pay
for the coffee beans in their iced cappuccino is about 100 times more than what
the farmer got for growing them.)
Workers in the giant maquilas that make clothing, auto parts, and electronics for the
world would benefit immensely from higher wages. The countries that host those maquilas would have more money for
infrastructure, education, health care, and social programs if the
multinationals that owned the factories paid taxes, like they would have to do
if the factories were located in wealthier countries.
But in the global market, consumers demand low
prices. Were the government of Nicaragua to take a stand on behalf of factory
workers and farmers, corporations doing business here would instantly start
scoping out even poorer countries where they could set up shop. The resulting
loss of jobs and markets would be disastrous for the country.
And consumers around the world would barely
blink, because it’s our buying habits (which in turn are fuelled by our own
falling purchasing power as the income gap grows in our own countries) that have
led to this situation.
What to do? Pay attention. Reject easy
labels that hide what the real problems are. Come see for yourself. No
country’s problems are ever as simple as they appear from a distance, nor are
any of us as different from each other as we might believe.
Thanks for supporting our work in Central America with a donation to Cuso International! Here's our fundraising site.
