After studying African geography this spring, I became particularly outraged at something I really hadn't known about until learning about modern Africa. Specifically, I am talking about how Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) that were forced upon many African nations by the World Bank and the IMF during the 1980s and 1990s effectively retarded any positive economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa in the post-colonial period [1]. These programs were instituted by the individual African national governments as conditions for receiving foreign loans from the aforementioned donor organizations. As to why this all involves conservatives, I will get to that part later.
SAPs were meant to "liberalize" African economies and promote development by cutting funding for social expenditures such as education and health care, slashing public infrastructure spending, and the elimination of agricultural subsidies in order to balance the budgets of the recipient nations.
Since agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa generally comprises anywhere from twenty to sixty percent of the national GDP, conditions in rural areas where peasants depend on government subsidies became much worse after SAPs began to be implemented [2]. These programs had disastrous results on the local economies producing conditions where prices for food fluctuated wildly in rural areas. I won't go into too much detail on these points, but enough to hopefully paint a picture for you as to why SAPs were teh suck.
This made agriculture a risky prospect for African peasants. In the aftermath of these programs, many Africans in rural areas turned to other means of generating income. This meant that "all able-bodied adults as well as many children...sought to earn incomes to prevent impoverishment" [3]. In addition, due to increases in food prices many peasants were forced to sell off some or all of their own land in order to purchase food for nourishment [4].
SAPs artificially imposed free market economics into situations where they had never existed before with disastrous results. Along with agricultural subsidies, funds for health care and education were slashed by national governments in order to satisfy the world community by showing the IMF and World Bank that these African governments could run balanced budgets.
Obviously, these budget cuts also affected basic services normally provided by the government. Healthcare access and primary education suffered due to these budget cuts. Improvements to the national infrastructures of many Sub-Saharan countries did not survive the budget cuts either. Ironically, improving infrastructure in rural areas in Africa would do a great deal of good in terms of economic development making trade and communication easier as well as combating the spread of disease through clean drinking water and sanitation systems.
Now we get to the part of this story that involves conservative economics. The United States and the United Kingdom play major roles in both the IMF and the World Bank. The President of the World Bank has always been appointed by the President of the US [5]. While the Managing Director of the IMF is European, the Deputy Managing Director has traditionally been an American [6].
Thus, it is no secret that the US and the UK both play enormous roles in the development of World Bank and IMF policy. The victory of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party in the 1979 UK Parliament election and Ronald Reagan's victory in the 1980 Presidential election ushered in a period of conservative economic philosophy that has ruled over international relations involving the developing world, arguably even still today.
Neo-liberal economics that favored free market principles were thought to be the answer to the question of how best to promote development. Structural adjustment was the IMF and World Bank's way of implementing these principles in Africa. Combined with poor governance and periodic natural disasters, SAPs were considerably damaging to the economies in Sub-Saharan Africa who happened to undergo structural adjustment.
To be certain, kleptocratic, dictatorial regimes in Africa such as the military regime that ruled in Nigeria during the 1970s-1990s, or other regimes such as Laurent Kabila in the Congo and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe have not helped matters in the least. The billions of dollars these corrupt regimes siphoned out of their governments' coffers amounts to robbing their citizens of much needed services. However, the SAPs imposed upon many African nations are absolutely responsible for much of the damage done to Africa during the 1980s and 1990s.
The state of weakness that the African economy is in today is largely due to the ascendancy of Republicans in the US and Conservatives in the UK during the late 1970s and early 1980s. As Americans and as Democrats, we have to understand just how far our reach is in the affairs of the world. We have tremendous power over world institutions of governance and when the party in power changes, the policies of these world institutions change with them.
This is perhaps why we have seen President Obama being welcomed so warmly on his overseas travels. The world understands what's at stake in American elections and the foreign policy changes that come with the results. They are hoping that he will end the era that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher started. It is up to us to make sure that he does.
References:
[1] Structural adjustment
[2] FAO Map of Agricultural GDP as a Percentage of Total GDP
[3] Fahy Bryceson, D. (2002). The Scramble in Africa: Reorienting Rural
Livelihoods. World Development, 30 (5), 725-739.
[4] Peters, P. (2006). Rural Income and Poverty in a Time of Radical Change in Malawi. Journal of Development Studies, 42 (2), 322-345.
[5] World Bank
[6] IMF