The Shortcomings of Microcredit

Don’t get me wrong; I think that microcredit can be a wonderful tool to foster gainful employment and reduce poverty amongst the most financially-marginalized segments of the population. One of the primary financial barriers to poverty-reducing economic development in Second and Third World countries is that credit is only readily available to established business interests and entrenched elites; in countries like Bangladesh where Dr. Muhammad Yunus established the Grameen Bank, microcredit banks have indeed opened up entrepreneurial opportunities to rural peasants, the urban poor and women. And microcredit has not only served as a boon for the poor in Dhaka and Calcutta; microcredit programs have helped financially-marginalized groups to capitalize upon their innate entrepreneurial potential in places as varied as Harlem to rural Arkansas.

However, I’m glad to see that the New York Times is finally reporting that microcredit is something less than the miracle cure for poverty that it’s all too often cracked up to be. Critics of microcredit have long abounded on the ideological antipodes – diehard leftists oppose Dr. Yunus’ movement because it threatens the promise of State Socialism, and paradoxically enough free market purists object to the Grameen Bank’s dependency upon government subsidies. But when such a pillar of mainstream liberalism as The Grey Lady is reporting on the shortfalls of microcredit, now even the material objectivist must acknowledge that - like any other money manager – even some of the most well-meaning bankers to the poor have been been practicing reckless lending policies.

Nevertheless, especially since the popularization of the term microcredit from development circles to lay audiences, most lending institutions throughout the world are keen to at least rhetorically jump on the microcredit bandwagon – and the vast majority of self-described "microcreditors" have significantly less scrupulous lending and management practices than the Grameen Bank.

When most people hear the term microcredit they think of a financial scheme which extends loans to the poor at low, easily-repayable interest rates. However, all that a bank needs to do to call itself a “microcredit institution” in most developing countries is to conduct any banking activity under the broad premise of lending very small amounts of money with the stated intent of reducing poverty. What should separate microcredit from common loan-sharking is that the former species of loans to the poor should be issued at low interest rates. However, what constitutes "low interest rates" is relative. In countries where borrowers tend to pay grossly usurious rates along the lines of 60 percent annual interest, it is not so terribly dishonest for a bank to issue small loans to the poor at only mildly less usurious interest rates – say, 40 percent – and call themselves "microcreditors".

Microcredit can be empowering if a bank extends a loan of $20 to an unemployed Bolivian woman who wants to set up an empanada stand. But microcredit can just as easily refer to a situation in which a bank lends $20 to that same unemployed Bolivian woman to buy a pair of Jimmy Choo knock-offs. Predatory loans come in small sizes too. Particularly in economies where banks do not offer adequate financial products for individuals to save their money for regular consumption, it is fairly common practice for individuals to take out micro-loans for items that have little to no potential to be described as “business investments”.

In Mali, people often take out small loans from the local Kafo Jiginew franchise as Americans pay for our large expenditures on credit cards. One common big-ticket item that rural, property-less farmers will take out loans for is a motorcycle; one would argue that a new gasoline-powered motorbike is necessary to improve the efficiency of his business – he could travel to markets in nearby cities to sell their goats and chickens more quickly. Under such fairly valid-sounding proposals, the loan officer would lend them $600 to $700 for the cheapest bike on the market. But the economic reality is that the real value of a motorcycle in a proto-commercial agricultural economy is not derived from any profit that could be measured in dollars and cents. The total benefit of this microcredit-financed endeavor is more or less the sum of the value of time saved and the sheer prestige of driving around the village in a motorcycle – neither of which is going to help him sell any more chickens. Now, the farmer’s financial standing is even more precarious as he has to pay for gasoline for his bike and interest on his loan with more free time but no additional monetary income to show for it. From capital’s self-interested perspective this loan might have been a pretty shoddy investment decision – yet a bank like Kafo Jiginew has every right to classify such reckless lending as “microcredit”.

Compared to other endeavors for which banks issue micro-loans, a motorcycle is sadly a relatively sound investment. It’s somewhat less common for microfinance institutions to give small loans of a few hundred dollars to people who wish to buy cell phones and computers for their business operations which are used more often for listening to mp3s and downloading porn than they are for any profit-increasing business communications. Other times men would take out small loans of $10 or $20 to bet on the horses in France – consider it micro-leverage for investment on the commodities market. It is even more common for people in countries with underdeveloped financial institutions to take out exorbitant loans for things as frivolous as televisions, alcohol and cigarettes. If you think that subprime lending is a phenomenon exclusive to the U.S. real estate market, then you are sorely mistaken.

Economies predicated upon agriculture are particularly sensitive to predatory lending practices because the brief period after the harvest is typically the only time that peasant farmers ever stand to receive any monetary income. In the least-developed, poorest of the poor agricultural economies like parched Niger and Mauritania, the single millet harvests only come after the year’s brief, single rainy season; in significantly more prosperous and developed agricultural economies like Ghana and Tanzania, there might be enough rainfall for two long growing seasons so farmers’ revenues come in twice a year. When an economy based on rain-irrigated agriculture faces a drought, every single farmer might need to take out a loan in order to feed his family. However, loans taken out to finance pure consumption are not likely to ever be repaid – especially in a subsistence agricultural economy in which food is rarely sold on the market in exchange for currency. With so much demand for credit, interest rates rightfully go way up. The politically incorrect truth is that there is a rational reason why interest rates in these credit markets are generally so high: in developing, stagnant and regressing agrarian economies alike, the rural poor are not very creditworthy.

But the world’s poor still need to be able to obtain capital without resorting to debt slavery if they are ever to improve their lot. The advent of Grameen-style microcredit is without a doubt a step in the right direction as it popularizes and democratizes lending, but it is also no panacea to the ills of the various financial sectors of the developing world. So what then should the doe-eyed idealists of Davos, Wall Street and Cambridge do if they sincerely wish to rid the world of poverty?

The harsh reality is that aside from conducting checkbook activism on Kiva, there are not a whole lot of options available for private good-doers to extend affordable credit to small entrepreneurs in the Hindu Kush. The opportunities to improve the lending practices of the Global South lie for the most part at the feet of the banking and government elite who reside in the gated communities of these countries’ capitols – in so many words, the very individuals who have the most vested interest in the status quo and not a whole lot of desire to expand credit to the masses who live in shantytowns and mud huts. Western development agents and business consultants might have a role to play in reforming the financial sectors of foreign nation, but only insomuch as we can educate and persuade these elites to implement change in their respective institutions.

Bankers in countries like Guinea and the Ivory Coast tend to practice such egregious usury partly because they make a disproportionate amount of loans to their friends and family-members. In many African cultures it is considered the social obligation of anyone with money to share it with anyone and everyone who might ask for a handout; not only for the haves to lend money to the have-nots, but for the haves to simply give it away – people who keep all of their money to themselves are often shunned and isolated from the rest of the village. Judging by the rate at which credit applicants actually get denied, it would be fair to say that such communitarian social mores are expressed in the decisions of loan officers who simply can’t say no to their blood relatives no matter what sort of lavish status symbols they plan on buying on credit. Not surprisingly, a sizeable portion of these terrible loans never get amortized, so banks do have to charge high interest rates on all of their loans – large and small – simply in order to stay in business. In order to stem the worst of the worst lending decisions and make credit more accessible, banks need to crack down on crony capitalism by introducing stricter standards of professional ethics, increasing transparency in their lending practices and holding loan officers accountable when they issue such egregious loans.

Another one of the reasons why interest rates remain so daunting to would-be entrepreneurs in the Global South is that so many of the microloans issued by banks go to finance not just business investments but also consumption goods that cannot lead to direct financial returns. According to free market ideals people should be able to spend and consume as they want to without having to go into debt, but banks have to start offering modern financial products in order for that ideal to become a reality. Microcredit is only part of the equation; what the world’s poor need even more desperately is some form of microsavings. In many of the countries where microcredit is needed there simply are no financial products which reward small account holders for saving; in these markets, people have to pay the bank exorbitant fees simply in order to keep an account open and thus saving money in a bank account is a losing endeavor for all but the super-rich. If the yeoman farmers and proletarians of the world could stow their money away in bank accounts which reward savers with interest instead of vice versa, they would be able to pay for things like emergency health care without having to resort to the crushing debt which crowds out the market and stifles entrepreneurship. Microsavings is even more necessary for the rural peasants and urban poor of the world to accumulate their own capital to start a small business independent of the whims of any bank – a phenomenon which could foster the strengthening of bourgeoisies and middle classes in societies dangerously stratified between the tiny financial elites and the sprawling, starving masses.

In order to obviate the absolute most predatory sort of micro-lending, quasi-modern banks also need to take a step backward in order to go forward by creating new financial services which cater to those borrowers whose means of production remains defined by pre-capitalist subsistence agriculture. In particular, banks which issue microcredit and microsavings accounts to the poor need to establish cereal banking divisions which allow small farmers to deposit their surplus in years of good harvests and to withdraw a few sacks of millet, rice or corn to feed their families in years of drought and blight. Chauvinists of Western capitalism might be inclined to pooh-pooh cereal banking as a philanthropic sideshow, but those who think that the archaic proto-commercial economy has nothing to do with the shortage of affordable credit in the relatively modern money market are profoundly mistaken. When there is a drought which threatens the subsistence farming population with starvation, everybody wants to take out loans from the bank to pay for basic foodstuffs – loans which most likely will never be repaid by people who have no source of monetary income – and so interest rates skyrocket for everyone. The expansion and development of cereal banking can serve to reduce the risk of all participants in the money market and should drive down interest rates for all borrowers – including those who wish to take out a loan to start a new cash business.

The impoverished masses of the underdeveloped world are also shut out from affordable credit largely because in most of these countries where they live the law does not recognize any titles or deeds to the one thing they have: the land they live on. As a result, peasant farmers and urban slum-dwellers have no de jure property they can use as collateral to help them receive a favorable loan. Developing countries should heed the advice of Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto and overhaul their property laws to codify the de facto land property of the credit-needy poor so that they can collateralize what little they do have. Champions of traditionalism and leftists opposed to private property in general howl at what they perceive as the injustice of such unabashed Neoliberalism and Western imperialism – but I dare de Soto’s detractors to come up with a better way of addressing the basic causality between land that cannot be collateralized and the paucity of affordable credit. If the humanitarians of the world are so genuinely concerned about predatory lending, they should applaud the efforts of the World Bank, USAID and the like when they push such property-livening legal reforms which could serve to reduce the incentive for banks to charge such usurious interest rates in the first place.

Microcredit has warts just like any other financial product, but the shortcomings of this strategy to foster economic growth and poverty reduction do not mean that it must be discarded to the ash heap of history. Indeed, much of the Global South’s economic ills could be abated if their respective banks were to simply begin genuine microfinance programs which emulate the Grameen Bank’s commitment to issuing loans at low, affordable interest rates strictly for the purpose of business development. Yet the expansion of real microcredit is only a partial reform of economic systems which fail the bottom billion of the world's poor; if these countries are ever going to fix their credit markets in a way that systematically reduces let alone eliminates poverty, their bankers, borrowers and legislators are going to have to comprehensively reform their financial practices.

The Future is Here

Now that the clunker of a Jeep Wrangler has been traded for a hyper-efficient Toyota Prius, I’ve been in awe of modern Japanese technology. Being eternally vigilant of keeping my smug emissions to a minimum, I can only heap praise upon the ultra-light, aerodynamic, hybrid-electric which stands as the most fuel-efficient gasoline-consuming automobile ever mass-produced thusfar in the history of human civilization.


It is a pleasure to drive, the built-in GPS and rear-monitor make driving and parking incredibly easier, and with an average of 48 miles per gallon on highways and 51 miles per gallon in cities I hardly ever have to fill up for gas. When I drove the Wrangler I could hardly drive from Vista to Vermont without having to fill the tank, but on a recent road trip I was able to drive the Prius from Amherst, Massachusetts to Alexandria, Virginia – a total of 8.5 hours and 401 miles – without having to stop for gas! And if that weren’t good enough, it only cost me $29 because the Prius gas tank is so small to begin with! Forget about carbon emissions; the expense of this car will eventually pay for itself in savings on gasoline consumption!

Though it is the most fuel-efficient car on the market, the Prius isn’t necessarily the superlative most cost-efficient when it comes to fuel consumption. Though the Prius II gets 48/51 miles per gallon it costs a whopping $22,800 – whereas the Honda Civic gets a mere 40/43 mpg it also costs only $15,800. Of course, if private consumers as well as policymakers in business and government are trying to figure out ways of minimizing CO2 emissions, they should focus more on those models that can reduce fuel consumption the most cost-efficiently. Hybrid vehicles are only going to be practical solutions to the macroeconomic issues of air pollution and climate change when they are sold at a price that not just the sons of doctors and real estate brokers but also middle-class and working-class consumers can afford such an unwieldy investment.

So the other day I was driving around doing errands when I stopped in a parking garage and saw something which put my puny Prius to shame: a Tesla Roadster.

I was just dumbstruck standing there for what must’ve been five minutes admiring this beautiful, sleek and unarguably sexy car as though it were Lea Michele posing there in the parking garage in lingerie and stilettos… (drool)…

And this Jamaican delivery guy parks next to me, sees me and laughs a good hearty belly laugh, “Ho ho ho! Dis electreec ca! De man paks his electreec ca hea every day! It ees de Futah!”

“Yeah… I know…”

“You know how much money I spen’ on gas? Hundreds and hundreds o’ dollas every week! If I had an electreec ca I could deeliver my packages and not spend no money! I’d just plug eet in and feell eet with electreecity!”

And for the rest of the day, I couldn’t help but think of that Jamaican dude in the parking garage. In all probability this guy making $15,000-$20,000 a year can’t afford to go out and buy a Tesla Roadster. And he’s probably not in line to buy one of the first Chevy Volts for $32,780 or one of the Nissan Leafs for $25,280. But what if one day five, ten, twenty years from now the Volt or the Leaf or one of their progeny is produced on such a scale that he can afford to buy one?

These electric cars are being marketed as being able to run on $1.50 worth of electricity per day. If you can charge your car up at home or at the office then the cost would just be added to your overall utility bill – but a great deal of commuters who need to drive long distances every day would need to be able to recharge at private recharging stations en route. A small business owner like a package deliverer, a carpenter, a cable repairman or Joe the Plumber who drives from house to house for business might have to recharge multiple times every work day! And of course, no country has ever had a full-scale economy of electric-charging stations and we can only speculate as to how this hypothetical market is going to function.

But could the recharging of electric cars really cost only $1.50 per day – even for someone like the Jamaican delivery guy whose job consists of driving around town all day long? And wouldn’t charging a commuter fleet only be adding to the burden of our already-strained electric grids? Maybe in a market along the swaths of California, Nevada, Arizona and Texas desert that will soon be electrified exclusively with solar and wind energy a fleet of electric cars could have a miniscule carbon footprint - but here in New York where so much of our electricity is derived from oil, coal and gas of course electric cars would only have a marginal effect on reducing our greenhouse emissions for staving off the most disastrous global climate change. Electric cars could have only modest improvements on our environmental degradation in a cloudy region like New York without a massive reinvention of our energy grid - which for now remains untold generations away, so they can really only be rationally superior products in this market if they offer genuine economic benefits in terms of saving on transportation costs.

I must concede my own ignorance on the matter – and beseech you all in the peanut gallery for some answers. At the moment I’m only tangentially interested in electric cars in terms of air pollution or carbon emissions – I'm much more interested in the potential for electric cars to improve the traditional indicators in our economy. If a typical commuter who drives from, say, the suburbs of Westchester County to Madison Avenue five days a week were to drive a Tesla Roadster, a Chevy Volt or a Nissan Leaf, how much money would he be saving on gas? In the case of the Jamaican delivery guy who is driving not just as a commuter but as an operating cost of his business, how lucrative would his investment in a Volt be over the course of 10 years? Is this fuel-saving technology something that could help small businesses stay afloat in this perilous economy – and if so, to what degree? Could it help small and large firms save so much money on gas that they could actually afford to invest and expand their production and start making new hires? And considering that many of these cars are going to be manufactured here in the United States and they will be using less Middle Eastern oil, how will the growth of electric cars effect our trade deficits? Can the gradual conversion from a fleet of gasoline-fueled cars and trucks to vehicles powered by electric batteries contribute to the overall solvency of the United States economy?

If any of you can find any good data on the economic benefits of electric cars – or even just personal anecdotes or musings on your own household budget, I would much appreciate it. Here’s to making Zacstravaganza more of a two-way conversation in the new year!

Underdevelopment is a Universal Shame

As long as I’ve been alive to remember, not a whole lot has ever happened in my hometown of Vista, New York. Back when I was ten years old there was a big to-do when an Associated supermarket sprang up in our sole strip mall, but they shut their doors just a few years after it opened because our town’s demand for groceries was too small to keep a full-size supermarket in business. There was an Italian restaurant along a little pond behind the strip mall which couldn’t lure enough customers as it couldn’t be seen from the road, so it closed and a new manager set up a new Italian restaurant – which quickly went out of business, and that was replaced by a third Italian restaurant – which also went out of business. For a couple of years Vista boasted a carpet store – which just as soon as it opened up went out of business, and of all things a used sporting goods store – which lasted maybe six months before it too went bankrupt. The only real economic development that I can think of over my 22 years of knowing Vista is when the shopping center sprouted a shop for beers by the caseload and keg and a merchant of wines and hard liquors – to my understanding these businesses are thriving.



Vista is such a peripheral enclave of Westchester County in that we are too small to justify our own infrastructure – we have no train station, no library, not even a post office of our own, and still we are too far from the larger suburbs of Mt. Kisco, Bedford Hills or Katonah to make use of theirs. Until the Katonah-Lewisboro School District was carved out in the 1950s, Vista residents went to school in Connecticut. You see, Vista is so far from the larger suburbs of New York that for many practical purposes Vista residents had to leech off of the state next door. By the time cell phones became widely used in the late 1990s and 2000s, Verizon and Nextel built cell towers in all of the New York suburbs and all of the Connecticut suburbs, but Vista was so far between both that it couldn’t get reception from either. Vista is so distant and relatively isolated that if its residents wanted to be able to use cell phones anywhere within the 533 neighborhood code, the hamlet would have to built a cell tower of its own.

The lack of cell phone coverage in my bucolic hometown is quite a serious matter. All of the landline phones in my parents’ house are wireless, so when the power went out we had no functioning phone at all – though we would if our cell phones could find a signal. When an ice storm this past month turned our vital artery Rt. 123 into miles of bumper-to-bumper traffic, none of the commuters trapped in their cars could communicate with the outside world to tell them to avoid the road. Once when I was 16 years old I was pulling out of a parking lot and another driver raced around a blind corner and crashed into my side and my car spun out in a 720 degree turn until it plowed into a snow bank – though we both had cell phones, neither I nor the other driver could call out for help and we had to wait for someone to physically drive to the Fire Department to call in a police officer from their two-way radio. Especially for emergency situations, public safety in Vista is endangered by the lack of reliable communication infrastructure which exists just about everywhere else in the populated territory of the United States.

For more than a decade there has been considerable demand, and multiple plans have been orchestrated to put up a cell tower on the property of a church along the only considerable road in town. For years each plan has floundered, because town meetings on the subject were dominated by a coalition of overprotective soccer moms who were terrified by the fear that the radio waves emitted from a cell tower might stimulate cancerous growths in the healthy tissues of their children. Of course, medical researchers have yet to conduct any study linking cell towers and cancer; if anything¸ contemporary understanding of oncology suggests no reason for such a link to exist. Even the American Cancer Association espouses that since cell phone radio waves are of such low energy levels, the wavelengths of radio waves are so long, and the magnitude of exposure to radio waves emitted by cell towers is so insignificant compared to microwaves, televisions, radio sets and cell phones themselves that “cell phone antennas and towers are unlikely to cause cancer.”

Though the mantle of science and reason hasn’t stopped the Sheila Broflovsky’s of Vista from holding up progress. Even though the medical fallacy is gaining less traction, the voices of reaction now put up claims that a cell tower conflicts with “the wooded landscape and the rural character of the town”; in so many words, we can’t have modern technology which is all but necessary to do business and simply function in the world nowadays because some people are under the delusion that their suburb of the New York metropolitan area is in fact a clearing of log cabins in the Adirondacks.

The Town Hall debate was often re-enacted at our dinner table between my father (a psychiatrist) and mother (a real estate agent):

“I am licensed medical professional, and I can tell you that a cell tower is not going to give anyone cancer unless they were to lay down with their head directly next to the transmitter for 20 years! If people in this town are seriously worried about the level of radio waves emitted from a cell phone tower, then they shouldn’t put a cell phone next to their head, they shouldn’t stand next to their microwave oven, they shouldn’t ever listen to the radio in their car!”

“That doesn’t matter! The people of this town don’t want it!”

“Yes they do! Everyone in Vista has a cell phone, but they have to drive 30 minutes to the next town over to be able to make a call!”

“Well maybe we want a cell tower, but Not in My Back Yard! It’s going to be ugly and drive down home values!”

“Isn’t your business booming in all of the other towns? Maybe people value being able to actually talk to one another?”

“Some people just don’t want it, and everybody’s entitled to their own opinion. It’s a free country, isn’t it?”

“You know, one of my patients suffers from panic attacks every time she sees an Asian man in a pickup truck - maybe society should accomodate her phobia with a town ordinance prohibiting Asian men from driving pickups?"

When I’m sitting in my little Minianka village in the Malian bush and my parents call my Nokia cell phone via Skype, I find it hard to believe that the villagers of Vista are still debating about this. I find it even harder to believe that educated Americans in the year 2010 can be so terrified of technology that they don’t quite understand, and that their unfound fears are strong enough of a political force to prevent such unarguably necessary development. And I find it absolutely humiliating that I live in a village of mud huts and millet stalks with no electricity, no running water, no trash collection and no dirt trail worthy of the word “road” – but I have 5 bars of cell coverage 24 hours a day 7 days a week, and my parents in Vista, New York can’t even receive my text messages because my hometown has been for so many years too pigheaded to put up a cell tower.



My Minianka tribesmen neighbors are afraid of lots of things - they believe in witches and wizards and black magic, they are scared of frogs, goblins and demons I which supposedly wander the fields at night. But unlike the villagers of Vista, they aren't scared of cell phone towers. The people here are proud of their cell phone tower which dominates the skyline of one-story huts - to them it symbolizes progress and modernity, it demonstrates that their otherwise backwater village matters enough to have a place on the map.

The chief of my village is an old illiterate, toothless man named Abdoulaye Sogoba. He doesn't have a phone himself, but he still understands the value the service has for the rest of his neighbors and their market. In conversation, Abdoulaye let me understand how important is the cell tower of Sanadougou.

"Nowadays, phones are necessary to do business! No one can do any serious business without one!"

"But what about back in the days before Sanadougou had a tower built? Aren't you sad about the traditional way of life that is now lost?"

"Nothing has been lost! This change is only good for us! The time of not being able to speak with other villages is a thing of the past, it is time to move on."

"What about all of those other little villages that don't have cell towers? What do you think about them?"

"I feel pity for any village without a cell tower. Without a cell tower, the people cannot experience any development."

Emancipated from the Smoky Kitchen by the Power of the Sun

This scene might look like just another day in the life of a Malian housewife. But in fact, this is far from a portrait of mundane drudgery - rather, this scene captures the quiet struggle of women's empowerment and feminist revolution.



You see, something is missing from this picture - were it to capture the quotidian labors of the average Malian woman. Deborah Dao cooks her family three square meals a day - a responsibility which in this economy requires nearly constant preparation and cooking. Most women spend all day pounding millet, mixing the batter, chopping firewod and fanning the flames to cook their family's toh, but here there is no burning hearth, no fire, no smoke.

On a closer look, you can see that Deborah is cooking with a solar oven - a wonderful appliance made by local carpenters with their own wood and just a few imported materials which harnesses solar radiation to collect heat energy.



If Deborah prepares her family's lunch early in the morning and places it in her solar oven, by noon it's ready to eat. And she is free of the tedious labor of fanning the flames for hours at a time.



Now that she no longer has to spend all morning in the smoky kitchen inhaling the noxious fumes and tars of wood smoke, Deborah can occupy her time with various cottage industries. She makes shea butter, soap, liquid soap and incense to sell at market and earn money for herself and her children. On this day, she is sewing garments for her neighbors; a Westerner might think that Deborah is still relegated to traditional "women's work", but here in Mali, most women are too busy fanning the flames of the hearth to engage in much income-generating activity - most taylors are men. Deborah, on the other hand, is the only female taylor in the entire Commune of Sanadougou.

A Wormhole into the 12th Dimension

Sometimes I cannot help but feel as though I was walking down the street one day, minding my own business, when I accidentally slipped into a wormhole, traversed 12 dimensions through space-time and wound up somewhere on this planet but eons back in the dawn of human civilization. In the year 2009 I live among a village of Bambara farmers who live and die according to the whims of the rain spirits, who use primeval methods to till the land with simple hand tools, who build their most complicated structures out of mud and rocks and sticks. A short walk away from my hut is a thatched mud hovel where old men gather in the middle of the night, slaughter a dog and drink its blood to impart the wisdom of the animal spirits. The inhabitants of this village tell me that they are an advanced society – they look down upon other tribes which are known to conduct ritual human sacrifice.

It is though I have gone back in time to 8,000 B.C. – but somehow these Bambara villagers got a hold of cheap Chinese-manufactured televisions which transmit these messages from an alien civilization 12 dimensions and 10,000 years in the future, and they grasp the basic concepts of the aliens’ advanced technologies.

These alien peoples on the television set do not have to farm because they have these paper boxes they put in a big plastic box, they push a button, and then food comes out! One craggly old man is convinced that we Americans have so much money because we have invented machines where we push buttons – and the machines give us money!

The farmers in my village know of these things such as “Jumping Boats” which every couple of months fly over their fields and cause everyone to stop what they are doing, crane their necks up and stare. These “Jumping Boats” are peaceful, but some of those farmers know that others exist which are divided into the subspecies of "Jumping Boats Which Jump to the Moon”, “Jumping Boats Which Kill Arabs” and “Jumping Boats Which Fight Other Jumping Boats”.

“One day we will have these things too”, I am told by my most optimistic neighbors. But these developments are spoken of in the future tense, the far future tense - as in “One day we will have commuter rocket ships to Mars” – the developments which America and Europe conducted in the 20th century are for all intents and purposes science-fiction for the village of Sanadougou in the year 2009.

There are times when everything I try crashes and burns and I feel that Western interventions are intrinsically doomed and we should let the Bambara society remain unblemished in its natural state. I think of when Homer Simpson stuck his fork in the toaster and with a loud zap found himself transported to the Cretaceous Period. Homer recollected the ancient wisdom which Grandpa Abraham Simpson passed on his wedding day, “If you ever go back in time, whatever you do, don’t step on anything. Even the slightest change can alter things in ways you can’t possibly imagine.”

At first Homer tried his best to heed Grandpa’s message and tiptoed carefully around the dinosaurs, conifers and ferns. But then he heard a "crunch" and realized that as hard as he tried he squished a beetle. And then as mosquitoes start to bite, he slaps them, and in a rage Homer knocks down a few trees and clobbers a giant sloth. When the toast finally pops out of his magic toaster, Homer returned back to his kitchen in Springfield – but the ripples which he created in the space-time continuum have completely altered existence as he knows it!

The purpose of this analogy is that in all honesty I don’t feel that I have been doing all that much “work” in the 20th century American capitalist, sitting in a cubicle making copies sense of the word. I don’t feel that I have changed much of anything at all. But consciously or not, I have stepped on a lot of things, and I have swatted many a mosquito. And according to the chaos theory, even the smallest of ripples of energy can cause a chain reaction which gathers momentum and accelerates and transforms into a giant tidal wave of societal-institutional change!

It is really quite difficult for yours truly – straight from the ivory tower where “economic development” refers to a web of complex macroeconomic issues like globalization, trade deficits and currency exchange rates – to come to terms with the fact that none of those things have much bearing on day-to-day life in a subsistence agricultural society. Here where the majority of a family’s caloric intake is derived from fields which they hoe, they seed, and they harvest, one can go an entire lifetime without trading in a market economy.

And in such a fashion, over the centuries there has been progress in Sanadougou. Here in an isolated backwater which has seen so little change in its means of production over the past countless millennia, the introduction of new seeds from faraway lands has constituted major “economic development”. From time immemorial until about 1880 people in this village really only grew millet, rice, peanuts and onions. About a hundred years ago the French colonial Commandant exhorted the villagers of Sanadougou to farm cotton. Though as le Commandant and his family tired of the monotony of indigenous staples, the colonial bourgeoisie imported for their own use cabbage, cucumbers, garlic and beets, as well as New World crops like corn, squash, peppers, potatoes and tomatoes. At some point in time the colonialists shared some of these exotic foods with their servants who liked them so much that they kept the seeds and began to grow them too. In the 1970s General Moussa Traoré brought to the Malian people yellow melons which now bear his name.

So now the Bambara people are still by and large subsistence agriculturalists, but they now subsist on a slightly diversified number of crops. The change has been modest indeed, but the Bambara apparently like it so much that they have continued the practice themselves – that is what we call “sustainable development.”

After four months at site, I have learned that the problems of disease and poverty in my village are overwhelmingly vast and I want to actually shake things up for the long run. And so I am thinking small – microscopic, unicellular, nano-level small…

(...To Be Continued!)