From poverty to power - Oxfam-Québec

SUSTAINABLE MARKETSIn using markets to tackle poverty and inequality, the priority is firstto select the right tool, then start building. Up until now, the tool ofchoice for understanding and managing markets, a very crude versionof neoclassical economics, has not been up to the job, offering only avery approximate understanding of the role of markets in humandevelopment. Partly as a result, a period of unprecedented economicgrowth has excluded large portions of humanity from its benefits,generating a world of burgeoning inequalities and stubborn andextreme poverty.The urgency of finding a better toolkit springs not just from moraloutrage at a system that squanders the chance to end so much needlesssuffering, but from the evidence that climate change and otherenvironmental constraints may be changing the kind of growth that ispossible, if the planet’s ecosystem is to remain inhabitable by 6.5 billionpeople (and rising). The challenge now is to move from ‘dirty growth’to ‘smart growth’, guided by a new economics for the twenty-firstcentury that explicitly seeks the elusive goal of human well-being. Wemust seek both quantity and quality of growth, if the planet, alongwith its inhabitants, is to survive.Many men and women living in poverty experience markets as avolatile and uncontrollable force that dictates the terms of their lives.By organising, citizens can gain some degree of influence and powerover the market. When farmers can store grain and sell it in the lean195