• We are living in Milton Friedman's world.
• The field of international development is in crisis, or if it doesn't think it is, it should.
• The official line in China is that 'the explosive growth has left so many people behind that the stability of the country is at stake if it's not addressed.' (And if you don't believe this one, just imagine the entire population of metro Montreal living in Beijing illegally)
• There is a bit of madness in believing the most logical way to get money to everybody is to send it the top and wait for it to come down. In a trickle. Which is in the name.
  
• The principle of redistribution is so out of fashion that it is now 'the principle that dare not speak its name' (And I question Avi here on what we're redistributing, and where it's coming from)
• NAFTA has allowed American corn producers to dump so much cheap corn into Mexican governments that the price producers can get for their crop has gone down 70% since it was adopted, and now US consumers are demanding so much corn back to produce ethanol that tens of thousands have taken to the streets to protest the subsequent massive increases in the price of tortillas. Yes, tortillas.
  
• There can be no development when wealth is going in the wrong direction.
• Wealth is flowing from the global South to the global North, not the other way around. In the hundreds of billions of dollars.
  
• There are no poor countries. There are no developing countries. The gold and silver of Bolivia is lining the cathedrals of Spain. The diamonds of Sierra Leone are filling North American and European safety deposit boxes. There are impoverished countries. There are countries which need justice, not sympathy.
• Solidarity, not charity.

Labels: justice, poverty