ISSUES OF DEVELOPMENT

What follows tend to apply to most LEDCs,

but not to all.

Access to Food

• Enough grain is produced to feed everyone more than 3000 calories a day.

• MEDCs dump food rather than sell it for a

price that is too low.

• There have never been so many people suffering from starvation or malnutrition than now.

Why?

It is not being distributed effectively.

Reasons

• The producer sells to the person that will pay the highest price.

• Food aid

Although food production per capita is increasing in most parts of the world, it is declining in Africa.

Why?

• Growing population

Characteristics of farming

• The impact of agricultural reforms has not been felt

Characteristics of farming

• Subsistence farming (no specialization)• Traditional farming methods (broadcasting

seeds, wooden ploughs and animal power)• Poor storage facilities (insect pests)• Small divided landholdings• Absentee landlords • Agribusiness companies encourage commercial

crops• Smaller number of people engaged in

agriculture

Some countries have been more successful

(Green Revolution)

• H.Y.V.s

• Irrigation schemes

• Chemical pesticides and fertilizers

• Mechanisation

Access to Shelter

Shortage of accommodation is one of the most common characteristics of cities in LEDCs due to:

1. Less taxation

2. Larger proportion of income spent on food

3. Few large profits available for private developers

4. Massive rural-urban migration (shanty towns)

Access to Health and Education

Increased health risk

• More travel opportunities

• Overcrowding and poverty

• Poor water quality

• Lack of toilets

• Malaria (cannot afford draining swamps, rice fields)

• Bilharzia

Industrialisation

• Labour-intensive, not capital-intensive• Import substitution• Export processing zones (EPZs) - offering

tax holidays, low interest loans, cheap labour, exemption from normal import taxes and duties and assistance). India, Puerto Rico.

• Special Economic Zones (SEFs). China• Tourism

Debt

• Debt-trap (sometimes more than aid)

• Terms of trade has turned on the

LEDCS (slower rise in price on raw

materials than manufactured goods)

Ecologically Sustainable Development

Several phases of the study of development since World War II.

Structural change phase (the 1940s to the 1960s)

Rostow• The pathway to development was seen

as the route followed by Western Europe and North America during the Industrial Revolution.

• Five stages: - traditional society - economic “take-off”

- maturity - high mass consumption

Dependency approach (1970s)

• Seeks to explain global patterns of development

• China, Vietnam, Tanzania and Cuba followed different strategies.

• Core-periphery model (unequal distribution of power - colonization, transnational companies encourage unprofitable raw materials)

• Growth poles (where economic and political power is concentrated)

Neo-liberal counter-revolution (the 1980s)

• Free market economics

• Industries in LEDCs should compete effectively or close down.

• Competed to attract foreign investment to introduce modern technology to upgrade inefficient industries.

Sustainable development (the 1990s)

The Brundtland Report• “development which meets the needs of the

present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”

• So development that increases pollution, reduces the resource base, reduces biodiversity or changes the global environment is unacceptable because it cannot be sustained in the long-term.

Identifies barriers to development

1. Heavy reliance on fossil fuels

(acid rain, global warming, deforestation, health problems, TNCs more powerful than nation-states).

2. Population growth

(Development is only possible if population grows in a way that is in harmony with the changing productive capacity of the world´s ecosystems).

3. Lack of a strong institutional framework to oversee the process of development, in other words of ecological and environmental decision-making).

(Governments often argue that concern for the environment is a luxury enjoyed by those who are already wealthy).