Wasting the Nation.indd - Groundwork

Chapter 1: Dust and Asheshouseholds 5 produce over half the waste while the dumps are located in poor areas[Swilling 2006]. Dumps are expensive but this is an investment that destroys value.The object then, is to invest in removing the waste from wealthy areas and to invest ascheaply as possible in disposing of it at the ‘back of the shop’.Waste and war on the poorYet the relation between poverty and waste goes deeper than this. Development has,since the Second World War, been associated with geopolitical strategies. Thus, thegreen revolution promised a better life for the rural poor in Third World countrieswho might otherwise be inclined to revolt under the flag of the red revolution. Forthe most part, it delivered new markets for corporate agri-business in alliance withlocal elites while the dispossession of peasants and rural workers was naturalised inthe language of development as part of ‘the urban transition’. Policies that supportedthe accumulation of wealth in urban areas would, it was promised, create industrialjobs to absorb the flow of migrants. Nevertheless, permanent urban migration wasrestricted in many countries, including South Africa, in order to subsidise low wagesfor migrant workers with the shrinking product of peasant farming. Rural insurgenciesresisted dispossession across much of the Third World and were contained by thedeployment of counter-insurgency strategies framed in Cold War terms. The defeat ofthis strategy in Vietnam was central to the crisis of US power in the 1970s. The empirefought back. In the 1980s, the US used the economic instruments of neo-liberalism toreclaim power and reframe development as a function of ‘the market’.There are now more people in the cities than in the country and one third of them livein slums with little hope of secure work as economic growth yields fewer jobs at lowerwages. The urban poor are now at the centre of a development discourse which expectsthem to create their own jobs through entrepreneurial enterprise. This follows theWorld Bank’s prognosis that, throughout the ‘developing’ world, the informal sectorwill now provide the jobs that the formal sector no longer offers. In South Africa, ithas been formalised in the language of the ‘two economies’ adopted by the Acceleratedand Shared Growth Initiative (Asgisa). Even dump picking is now counted as a jobin employment statistics. 6 As urban scholar Mike Davis comments, “it makes moreobvious sense to consider most informal workers as the ‘active’ unemployed, who haveno choice but to subsist by some means or starve” [2004: 25].5 This represents a much smaller proportion of the population as fewer people live in wealthy households than inpoor households.6 A fuller critique of Asgisa is offered in The groundWork Report 2006.- 18 - groundWork - Wasting the Nation