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Introduction
General introduction
Are you using this book in a school or college in north-west Europe or North America? If so, it is highly probable that your family will live in a home with several rooms, will own a television set, a telephone, and at least one car. You will have running water in the home, will consume more food than is considered necessary to have a healthy body, will have quick access to good health services and will travel away from home yearly for a holiday.
Unless you have spent some time in Third World countries and visited different places within them, you will perhaps imagine that most citizens of such countries simply have a watered-down version of your own existence. In reality in some Third World countries a few ‘privileged’ families may have material standards comparable to yours but the vast majority do not. As a citizen of a comparatively ‘rich’ country you may not only want to learn about the Third World but also to do something to help the citizens of poorer countries.
Our economic life is closely tied through trade and other international transactions to all parts of the Third World. It is a matter of self-interest to learn about what is happening there. Our society has long been influenced by Christian ideas, one of which is the need to help the poor. There is also a strong socialist tradition, going back a century or more in Europe, which regards inequality, or excessive inequality, as undesirable, if not evil. Poverty should be removed, not alleviated. Whether one's concern for the less well-off should extend only to the boundary of one's own country or should reach out world-wide is a matter of controversy.
If you are a geographer then you will probably already have learned more than most people about the world. The purpose of this book is to give you some guidelines on how to study the Third World from a geographical perspective. Other books in this series will cover particular topics in greater depth.
In order to introduce various major features and problems of the Third World, a number of ingredients have been distinguished in this book.
1 Human population: everyone a consumer and some also producers.
2 Natural resources: items such as soil, water, minerals and natural vegetation which existed before humans began to organize the world for their own benefit.
3 Means of production: farm buildings and equipment, factories, schools, which produce goods and services.
4 Products: these are broadly of two main kinds, those such as food, clothing, television sets, which people ‘consume’, and those such as tractors, rails and machine tools, which replace or maintain existing means of production or create new productive capacity.
5 Links between places: necessary for the movement of goods, people and information because production does not all take place in one location.
6 International transactions: needed because the world is divided into some two hundred distinct political units, technically defined as sovereign states (we shall refer to them simply as countries). Each is to some extent a sealed-off and self-sufficient territorial unit of organization. A definitive list of all countries, whatever their size, is given yearly in the United Nations Statistical Yearbook.
7 The ideological, cultural and political views and policies of other people: these must be appreciated, even if not accepted, by you or me. They greatly influence the way countries are organized.
Historical perspective
Was there ever a time in the history of human existence in the world when all human communities were identical? That is a difficult question to answer because the evidence is that for the last several thousand years there have always been marked differences. Long before the Industrial Revolution some people such as the aboriginal population of Australia and many communities in the tropical forests of the world lived in the simplest way imaginable. Indeed some still do and, because such people have few wants and unlimited resources, they could be described as affluent. More frequently, however, we think of other parts of the world where fertile agricultural land and cities existed. In such places at least some people lived in considerable luxury. The development gap has been around for quite a long time, a point that is well worth thinking about.
Machines began to be used widely for production and transport more than two hundred years ago. In particular, coal was used to drive the machines in the earlier decades of the Industrial Revolution, first of all in Britain, in the eighteenth century. Those countries that quickly followed the example of Britain, such as France, Germany and the USA, and later Japan, Italy and Russia, among others, came by the middle of the present century to have a huge lead over most other countries in the means to produce large quantities of goods and services.
The technological contrast between Europe (including Russia) plus the United States of America and Japan on the one hand and the rest of the world on the other was made wider because the Americas, much of Asia and almost all of Africa were for varying lengths of time colonies of European powers. From the time when Spain and Portugal acquired their first colonies in Mexico, Peru and Brazil in the sixteenth century until the present century, the general policy of the European powers was to forbid or discourage industrialization in their colonies. Only industries that were needed to supply local needs or to extract and process food (such as sugar) and minerals (such as silver, later copper and many others) were allowed. The British control of India was powerful enough in the last century to force the closure of domestic cotton-textile industries there. Raw cotton grown in India was shipped from India to Lancashire mills, and some of the cloth and clothing was exported back to India.
The idea that the colonies or ex-colonies of Europe, most of them in warmer latitudes than Europe itself, should serve as a source of food, beverages, spices and raw materials for the industrial countries, lasted until after the Second World War (1939-45). In the late 1940s the British government, Labour at the time, supported a costly and disastrous scheme to grow groundnuts in East Africa, particularly in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), for export to Britain. Highland areas in neighbouring Kenya were still seen as a potential area of settlement for ‘white’ settlers. At great cost militarily the French government tried to support several hundred thousand French settlers in Algeria in the 1950s against growing opposition from the Algerians. The colonial period was nearly over, however, because of a new development of world importance.
During the Second World War, shortly before the defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945, the leaders of the existing countries of the time were getting together to work out a new and, they hoped, a better world. The result was the formation of the United Nations Organization. Like its predecessor, the League of Nations, the United Nations had a primary aim: to maintain peace in the world. For forty years there has indeed been no world war, but there have been many local and regional conflicts.
A second aim of the United Nations was to hasten the removal of colonial rule from the remaining colonies of the world. By the early 1960s, almost all the former colonies of West European powers had become new independent states. In contrast, the many non-Russian colonies of the Russian Empire remained within the Soviet Union after the takeover by the Communist Party from its tsarist predecessor.
A third aim of the United Nations and its various associated institutions has been to assist the poorer countries of the world. In this respect, the United Kingdom and France, having accepted the loss of their colonies, have, through the British Commonwealth and the French Community, continued to trade extensively with many former colonies and to provide them with assistance of various kinds. All the richer countries send assistance to the poorer ones, through both state and private channels. Some contributors are more generous than others and some put more conditions on the use of the aid than others.
Although a number of former colonies, mainly small ones, have become independent since the early 1960s the world political map has remained fairly stable since then. However, several different groupings of countries have now been recognized. When one talks about the developing world or the Third World, therefore, it is important to make it clear which sets of countries come under which heading. In the next section various terms will be discussed.
Terms and definitions related to development
How you refer to something does not necessarily affect or change it, but in order that we should be clear about terms used with regard to development a number must be examined and if possible defined.
1 Rich and poor countries. On the basis of gross national product (see below) per inhabitant (in us dollars), Switzerland ($16,400) and Kuwait ($18,200) must qualify as rich, regardless of how unevenly the dollar equivalents are distributed among the population, since the world average is only $2760. Bangladesh with $130 and Ethiopia with $140 per inhabitant must be poor. It is very difficult, however, to draw a line somewhere near the middle of the range of countries.
2 ‘North and South’ is a fashionable classification but is also rather vague. When reference is made to North and South hemispheres, the geographical split is absurd, because most of the population of the poor countries lives in the northern hemisphere (which includes both India and China). What is more, some prosperous countries, including Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and Uruguay, are actually located to the south of ‘The South’.
3 Another common classification of countries is into industrialized (or modernized) and non-industrialized countries. Strictly speaking, every country in the world except the very smallest has some industry. The term here implies that industry makes a major contribution to total production of goods and services in an industrialized country. At the same time various sectors of production would be quite highly mechanized, consumption of energy would be high and each worker in agriculture would be producing enough to support several or many other people.
4 The term ‘Third World’ has been in use for many years now. Although easy to remember, Third World is unfortunate because there is confusion over what is meant by Third. The original First and Second Worlds were based on political or ideological aspects. The western democracies (as they call themselves) were the First World and the Eastern socialist countries (as they are described by the Soviet Union) are the Second World. The Third World consisted of ‘neutral’ countries (in a political sense) including among others Yugoslavia, Egypt and India. So there has been a transfer of meaning because Third World now popularly implies the poorer countries.
5 Perhaps the most appropriate terms for us to use are developed and developing, though not everyone agrees exactly what development implies, and some even doubt whether devel...
