Myanmar (Burma) since 1962: the Failure of Development
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Myanmar (Burma) since 1962: the Failure of Development

Peter John Perry

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Myanmar (Burma) since 1962: the Failure of Development

Peter John Perry

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About This Book

Why has Myanmar (Burma), a country rich in resources - rice, timber, minerals - descended to 'least developed country' status? Is the explanation to be found inside Burma or beyond? Is the failure of development due to political authoritarianism and conflict? Or perhaps the drugs trade is partly to blame? This book contends that all these factors have contributed. But it also maintains that the mismanagement of the country's resources is of equal, or even greater, importance. A clear answer to the question of Burma's developmental failure is sought by focussing upon the misuse of resources in concert with those factors that are more usually emphasized.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2021
ISBN
9781351916127

Chapter 1

Looking at Ne Win’s Burma: why and how

There should be no need to argue the case that what has happened in Burma1 since 1962 is of such intellectual significance and practical importance as to justify a book. Books on the topic exist but given the size of the country they are remarkably few. More generally the literature on the country for the period 1962–88 is modest whether at the journalistic or scholarly end of the spectrum, in any event a blurred distinction. The reasons are simple: the government has set out to make enquiry as difficult as possible, to isolate the country intellectually and economically. For most of the period it has worked hard to stop the truth getting out – and for that matter, and maybe more successfully, in and around. In any case the region offered more exciting and accessible scholarly prospects, spectacular armed conflict as opposed to intermittent insurgency. Yet no other country of Burma’s size and Burma’s generous resource endowment so mismanaged its affairs as to descend in a quarter of a century from the status, not unreasonably or irrationally ascribed by experts, of good growth prospect for sustainable development, to United Nations designation in 1987, at Burma’s request, as a least developed country (LDC). The designation may have been achieved fraudulently by concealment and manipulation of evidence and understating the huge informal sector, but on their literal meaning the words express accurately what had gone on – or even more accurately what had not happened. This book essays an explanation.
World War Two devastated Burma, a country which had by colonial standards become rich in the preceding century on the basis of rice, timber and minerals as export commodities. That devastation was on course to restoration, albeit somewhat selectively, by the early 1960s. Rice and teak had done rather well, minerals had been largely neglected, the infrastructure had been restored unevenly and operated erratically. It was not unreasonable to believe both that prosperity could be recreated, and on the same bases as in the colonial period, but without that period’s distortion in favour of overseas – mainly British – capital and a small local and often immigrant Asian élite. A fairer share and leading role for the Burmese was a reasonable hope and agenda. In each sector there was scope for sustainable expansion. There certainly were problems, notably tension between the indigenous majority and three minority groups. These comprised: indigenous minorities, for example the Karen; ideological insurgents, mainly Marxists; and immigrant communities, from India during the preceding century and from China over a longer period, well represented both in business and also in the case of the former in rice production.
Stated thus the traditional justification for geographical scholarship – ‘because it’s there’ – remains cogent, compelling and essential. Curiosity is not an unfashionable or unaffordable luxury but a scholarly mainspring. This book sets out in these terms, to explain what is there and why, to give a reasonably (but also certainly incompletely) objective account of what the Ne Win régime and its successors made or mismade of their mission. It is important to recognise that what eventually came to be recognised as a burdensome régime began its course as nothing of the sort, and that in each of the problems it confronted or created there are at least two sides to the argument. My conclusion may well be that the régime now deserves to be portrayed as corrupt and monstrous and inherently an obstacle to development; but if in the process of reaching that evaluation and writing this book my mind and that of my readers has not been challenged and new ideas have not been visited and assessed the book is a failure.
That intellectual position and tradition presented above is however no more than a beginning. Burma is not simply an interesting phenomenon worth looking at. It is a tragedy of lost opportunity and waste on a national, regional and local scale, of public catastrophe and personal disaster. Numerous authors have noted this situation and remarked upon its tensions and contradictions. Thus one very perceptive though not especially well known writer, Harriet O’Brien, who spent her teenage years in Burma in the 1970s and returned as a visitor after the 1988 uprising comments (1991, xviii) upon the ‘juxtaposition between Burma’s wealth and the country’s current day poverty.’ She also notes at the same page that ‘the Burmese themselves are well aware of their potential wealth’ and that they also have a ‘sneaking suspicion that they may have missed out somewhere along the line’ (114). But she also remarks that it is ‘a relief to leave behind the self-interest, the pollution and the commercial thrust of Thailand’s rapidly developing industrialism’ (33). But that also means ‘leaving behind opportunity, progress and personal freedom’. Others are more blunt; a ‘real life economy of shortages and black markets, transports snags and bureaucratic bunglings’ is the Far Eastern Economic Review assessment (13 May 1980). In the previous year a European diplomat is reported in the New York Times (14 June 1979) as saying that ‘the economy has now improved to the point of mere stagnation’, and a decade earlier the same paper reports on the first phase of Ne Win’s rule that ‘if we started today it would take us ten years to get back to where we were then.’ (5 Jan 1969) In economic terms – the social dimension will be discussed later – a rapidly recovering rice sector with a large export trade, one of the world’s most famous and sophisticated timber industries, and a diversified mineral resource were taken over from a moderate albeit isolationist socialist government by a military régime committed to extreme socialism at least in its first decade. For forty years that government has in this area of resource management combined incompetence with intransigence. What was proclaimed as the national interest, control of resources by and for the people and investment of the surplus as the basis of economic development, rapidly turned into appropriation of those resources by the ruling élite and a determination to preserve with as little modification as possible that privileged status quo. The question of control is for the present non negotiable. Resemblances between Burma and some of its neighbours as well as with the Third World in general and communist Europe are evident. Control is of course the essence of authoritarian rule, and enshrined in the ever increasing power of the élite – the European term nomenklatura2 is especially useful – dedicated to protecting its privileges. Where Burma is exceptional is in the extent, depth and durability of the experience. The régime has only been seriously challenged once, has until recently suffered little dissent within its own ranks, and has made itself extremely well informed as to what is going on within Burma. It has also overcome strong insurgencies, ground down at first by creeping and costly military success, and then boldly incorporated into the system leaving only a remnant of idealists and its external critics to continue the struggle. Such a sustained political performance within an authoritarian régime is almost unparalleled. (Mexico has provided the closest comparison.) It has been accompanied, and this book argues the inevitability of that accompaniment, by ineptitude and incompetence in resource management and distribution which has deprived most of the population of access to wealth and has in not a few cases been absolutely destructive. If geographers, and the intellectual community in general, have nothing to say about such places and situations, as sometimes appears to be the case but which is certainly not the mainstream of the geographical tradition, then the discipline and its practitioners deserve to disappear.
Giving reasons for writing a book is inevitably to discuss findings and conclusions ahead of evidence and argument even if these latter will dominate in the rest of the work. Reasons do matter however and are too important either to be assumed or to be marginalized into preface or conclusion. My own intellectual discovery of Burma grew out of the teaching of undergraduate courses in political geography in a New Zealand university from the 1970s and the quest for interesting case studies. During that period the sub-discipline regained that prominent place in the discipline as a whole which it had lost forty years or so earlier. That recovery however tended to ignore non-democratic régimes and less than honest and open political processes. Burma provided an excellent case study of this kind of place and few countries so obviously represented that ‘gap to be filled’ which is the essence of all research. It is of course here restated in the even more appropriate terms of a problem to be solved. In the process other dimensions emerge. This is a book about human rights, poverty, rebellion, forced labour, the drug trade, dispossession and the loss of personal freedoms. Neither list nor process are constants. A case can be argued that there have been periods of easing in the degree of control, or that the deals with the insurgents are preferable to the continuance of armed struggle. Equally it is the case that new problems can be added to the list, most obviously an AIDS crisis and the more general but less apparent matter of the collapse of once effective health and education systems.
The totality of the situation I would sum up in the word anti-development. As noted earlier the country has gone backwards, certainly relatively and in many ways absolutely. An opportunity has been at worst rejected and at best mishandled or misappropriated, resources have been neglected or squandered, and the reason for this is the position of the régime, its ideology, its inflexibility, its greed and its incompetence. This book explores these issues because it believes that there is a need to look at them alongside and to connect them to the more familiar and more often discussed topics of insurgency, drugs, and Burma’s politics in general. The drama and tragedy of the Karen struggle is a more exciting story than the rice procurement system and its shortcomings as the cause of the collapse of the export trade, but the latter played the larger role in Burma’s impoverishment and the diminution of insurgency has not created prosperity. Burma remains a land of poverty and scarcity. The kind of report of yet another crisis of shortage that appeared in the Financial Times on 23 October 2002 but which has not yet bought about revolution or reform could have been written in the 1960s. The subject matter is familiar: the spiralling price of necessities; a 200% rise in the price of rice within a year; reports of attacks on stores of rice unverifiable because of’tight control of information and the movement of foreign observers’; speculation and hoarding; subsidised distribution of a meagre ration; procurement; privileged purchasing status for the civil service and the army; technical shortcomings in agriculture. There is little that is new except for an ominous emphasis on the long term process of soil degradation. And as usual ‘people have been wondering when is the breaking point’. Four years later the answer is ‘not yet’. The contradiction between practical economic and technical incompetence and a high level of political survival skill remains unresolved. The incubus with which Burma fought in 1988 remains in place, the country a restlessly sleeping giant. It is time then to return to the resources which are the heart of the failure. Before that is done however some discussion of the relationship of development theory to the work is called for.

Burma and Development Theory

For three reasons it is peculiarly difficult to relate the situation in Burma since 1962 to the body of theoretical writing in the field of development which has appeared more or less simultaneously. Firstly there is a paucity of material by comparison with countries of a similar size on account of problems of access and sources. Case studies illuminating theory are almost unknown, likewise presentation of theories to which the Burma experience has contributed. Bryant’s work is a notable exception (1997, 1998). Secondly Burma’s experience, descent from the status of a good prospect to that of LDC, runs counter to any normal use of the word development. At least until the 1990s Burma did not ‘develop’. Thirdly the term contra-development, which, I use as shorthand for that experience, is needed because the more obvious anti-development is already in use as an evaluation of the so called development process as a ‘western constitution’ and miscomprehension imposed upon developing countries (Potter, 1999, 9–13). This is not what happened in Burma and not what I am seeking to describe. However it does preclude my formal use of the term anti-development whatever the plain meaning of the words.
To state the initial problems is not to dismiss the relevance of theory. Firstly the historical-empirical approach (Potter, 1999, 56–62) obviously appeals in the circumstances already outlined – we really do need to know what was going on. Secondly and conversely the bottom up/alternatives approach, (Potter, 1999, 67–71) is bound to fail in a situation of central control and an official unwillingness even to look at alternatives. Its relevance is re-asserted when the role of the very large informal and often illegal sector is considered. Thirdly the idea of radical dependency (Potter, 1999, 62–7), the incorporation of developing countries into global capitalism and the expropriation of surplus value, similarly falls short in a context of extreme isolation. Note however that Ne Win’s own development plans sought to recapture the surplus value of staple exports, which had been drawn into foreign hands since 1850, on behalf of Burma. Fourthly Ne Win’s socialism in fact turned out to be state capitalism, one version of what Potter describes as the classical-traditional theory (46–56), but its execution as such in Burma was partial and peculiar in the case of rice and a practical failure in the case of gems and most distributional activity. Potter (173) (quoting Mackintosh) also notes ‘the very subject of “development” was built on the idea of the state as the main lever for changing the economy and society’. This was certainly Ne Win’s intention but as noted a substantial failure at least in terms of growth or equity. And of course to equate the army with the state, as was certainly the case in Burma, is to introduce an additional assumption. Potter (9) also observes that ‘ultimately development is all about improving the life chances of the people’ a concern scarcely conspicuous in the practices and policies of Burma’s military régime.
At a more particular level Burma does serve to exemplify matters of general theoretical concern even while failing to conform to any one traditional model. Thus for example Burma exemplifies the ‘resource curse’ (Desai and Potter, 2002,224–9). It is evidently equipped with a rent seeking élite which has over a period of four decades both enormously expanded and deeply entrenched. Sustainable development manifestly displays a social as well as an ecological dimension in Burma’s belated and short lived experience of Green Revolution. Finally as development studies has a continuing normative concern with emancipation from inequality and poverty (Desai and Potter, 2002,11) then so any work on Burma in this period is unavoidably a study of development, or more exactly of development denied. Some ideas and concepts highly relevant to Burma’s condition receive a distinctly limited consideration within the traditional frameworks. Partnership is such a word. Rejection of external partnership, lack of concern for the interest of the customer/consumer by the state, the prolonged rejection of joint ventures, the relationship with insurgent minorities, and the failure of the state to negotiate with producers in for example the rice and gem sectors all indicate a Burmese governmental disdain for this concept. When the concept features in the development literature the primary concern is with the global and international scales, an approach which appears to assume the irrelevance or insignificance of local and internal conditions (Deepak Lai and Myint, passim). Here the work may even extend the theory while it emphasises the particularity and peculiarity of the Burmese case. Burma’s particularities do not however simply illuminate the blinkered character of some development discourse but also the profound importance of some contemporary insights. Gender exemplifies this situation. The importance of women in the Burmese situation extends well beyond the traditionally unequal power relationship and their role in bearing the ‘heat and burden of the day’ in household affairs, a burden accentuated by the failures of the distributional system. There is evidence for example of their involvement in money lending (Campbell, 1989, 39), and in the gem trade (Themelis, 2000, 190) at every level. In both cases the involvement is long standing and not a contemporary assertion of the role of women initiated or propelled by external influences.
Finally recent theoretical work while at an early and immature stage of its own development looks potentially more useful than traditional approaches. Thus Rihani and Geyer (2001) propose a complexity based framework, arguing that complex adaptive systems are those best placed to develop. Characterised as such systems are by liberal democracy and the market economy – in its rich variety – and by the state’s appreciation and protection of a wide diversity of individual and group activities (241–3) they stand a world apart from Burma. Note however that complex adaptive systems are much closer to Burma’s experience in the colonial period, from which basis Ne Win sought to provide a more equitable version, and that in such systems there is a key role for ‘uncoordinated efforts by individuals and groups’ (243), a place for Burma’s informal sector. These however are exceptions to a model which overall generates a gloomy picture for Burma, summed up in the authors’ remark (242) that ‘too few interactions result in a state of stultifying order’. Note the word used is not action but interaction; again the idea of partnership is implicit. A list of hostile forces (243–4) includes corruption, local interest groups (in Burma’s case enshrined in ‘deals’ with ethnic and drug trading groups) and global business. Rihani and Geyer seek a middle way between positivism and post-modernism (255–9). This broadly parallels Simon’s claim (Simon, 2000, vii-viii) that there are many alternatives (a word disliked by Burma’s rulers) to ‘crass bureaucratic or agencyled modernisation (top down)…(or)…the blanket rejection of “development”.’ He envisages a spacious middle ground of ‘pluralism, syncretism and hybridity’ as opposed to ‘supposedly homogenous norms’. These are, however, counsels of perfection dependent upon ‘locally appropriate relations of trust in co-management frameworks that seek to address divergent needs, aspirations and perspectives without either ignoring or precluding conflicts and contests’. This is again remote from the authoritarian, corrupt and privileged ruling élite of Burma, but as Rihani and Geyer note (240) the overarching framework of complexity insists, with good supporting evidence from (significantly) the command economies of post-war Eastern Europe, that rapid and radical change will often have small insignificant beginnings and can take place in societies where the capacity for evolution has long appeared very constrained.
More extended recent treatments by Medd (2001) and O’Sullivan (2004) suffer by comparison from their location within a social science framework concerned with the development of computer models based on reliable and abundant data, a world away from Burma. Development studies scarcely feature in their bibliographies. When that has been said the cogency and relevance and thought provoking character of some of their remarks are undeniable: ignorance as a ‘productive dynamic’ (Medd, 2001,57). (I recall that in an introduction to an earlier book I used Lord Bullock’s definition of scholarship as ‘grappling with ignorance’ (Perry, 1975, xi)); the recognition that self organisation may occur without (and I would add or in spite of) higher direction (O’Sullivan, 2004, 285), Burma’s informal sector for example; and finally the legitimacy of intellectual untidiness when our evaluation moves on from reduction to re-assembly (O’Sullivan, 2004, 284).

The Resource Base

Burma is well endowed with natural resources. The term resource endowment itself suggests a body of raw materials to be used permanently, and by implication as sustainably as possible, for a body of beneficiaries. The development of such a body of resources was the achievement of a century of British rule, albeit a flawed achievement even though it built on earlier experience. The rice export trade of lower Burma was created from almost nothing on the basis of indigenous and immigrant skills; the teak trade combined traditional understanding and the new forest sciences to become an international leader; a diversity of minerals were exploited with, in this case, more variable profitability. But at least in oil Burma became until World War Two a regional leader. Sinai (1964, 126) asserts not unreasonably that the rice industry belongs in the same pantheon of nineteenth century agricultural expansion as the development of the Canadian prairies or Argentinean pampas, and I would argue that as an exercise in sustainable resource development the timber trade stands even higher. The achievement was as already noted flawed. This was most obviously the case with rice where the major beneficiaries were few and alien, immigrants from Indi...

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