The Toxic Soil of GDP driven Growth

Today is World Soil Day

The health of the Earth, with its’ forests, rivers, oceans, and air, is in crisis. Runaway climate change which will change life as we know it within this century. Our leaders are trying again, in COP28, to agree on how to stop it. With World Soil Day on December 5, something even more earthy is on my mind: the health of the soil which nourishes life. Seeds planted in toxic soil will not grow. The ideology of growth driving economic policies, viz. more GDP, has harmed the natural environment that sustains us. This ideology, hard to change, is preventing the necessary climate solutions and also retarding progress to reach the SDGs, which include other societal challenges along with climate change. ?

?How does Nature maintain the health of its soil? Perhaps lessons from Nature could guide us how to change the established paradigm of institutions and ideas that is driving economic growth. I begin with a teaser, about air pollution and stubble burning, which the “sons of the soil”, our farmers in the Punjab who grow food to feed us, are being made the villains for.

?Punjab’s farmers were given mass production technology and inputs to increase production of wheat and rice to feed the nation: monoculture agriculture with imported seeds and fertilizers; also water from dams, canals, and underground wells. When water tables began to fall alarmingly, seed planting times were regulated to coincide with uncertain monsoon rains. Time to remove the natural stubble of crops after harvest was reduced. Farmers resorted to burning stubble, rather than leaving it on the soil or using it around the farm. The recycling of natural waste was broken. Now farmers need new technologies to remove the stubble and convert it for other uses. They do not have the financial resources for this. Meanwhile their soil has also become toxic with chemicals.

A natural forest, and farm, has diverse plants, and birds and insects that feed on each other and provide for each other. This keeps their system healthy. All rely on Nature’s complexity to sustain their livelihoods. Humans remove whichever species they consider to be weeds (because they have not yet found any economic use for them) with mono-cultural methods to scale up economic outputs. Modern, “scientific” farming and forestry has sapped Nature’s ability to support our lives and sustain itself too. ?

Modern, scientific, economic progress is good. It has increased the span of human lives. In many countries the numbers of older persons already exceed the numbers of younger persons. Their governments are trying to induce women to have more babies so that economic growth can be maintained. Even in India, there will be more older persons than children within a few years and we must be prepared for an older India.

Older persons are not considered productive resources for the economy. Neither are women and other caregivers in families and communities. Economists want more women to be planted as producers in economic enterprises so that the GDP is boosted. And families and older persons are neglected. To meet increasing needs for care, new solutions, often for profit, are being found. They increase the GDP further, while breaking up natural organizations, of families and communities, which give and sustain our lives.

Governments, who must care for the sustainability of a complex, social and environmental system, are like farmers, instinctually responsible for diversity for sustainability of livelihoods. And, like the farmers in the Punjab short of resources for recycling the stubble, governments are short of resources to care for older persons. Older persons separated from their families must be provided with older care homes, which many cannot afford. Increased pensions to keep up with inflation require governments to increase taxes on companies and working people, which they are unwilling to pay. Efforts to push older persons back into the workforce are resisted by younger persons who need good jobs with adequate incomes. The numbers of such jobs are reducing with changing patterns of “flexible” employment in which workers are used and discarded to meet employers’ needs for profit.?

Women, older persons, and societal caregivers are very valuable resources for society. They provide services for the health and sustainability of society that the modern economy is not designed for. However, caregiving services are undervalued in money terms (and perhaps should never be valued monetarily). These invaluable societal services do not add up in the financial valuations of economic enterprises.

The Indian Prime Minister has appealed, in the G20, to global leaders to find a new model of human-centric growth that is not driven by GDP. Paradigms are hard to change. His appeal notwithstanding, India’s policymakers continue to measure and celebrate the growth of India’s GDP as the supreme measure of India’s progress. India, the world’s fastest growing economy, is also generating the least numbers of good jobs per unit of GDP growth. It has the most polluted cities, and alarming levels of water depletion compared even to other developing countries.

The fundamental conceptual flaw, in the use of GDP as the measure of any country’s (or global) health, is that it measures only what economists think matters, which is money-measured economic activities and outputs. GDP does not measure all that matters to human beings. Corporate performance measurement is focused on returns for investors. It also does not account for the impacts of business on society and nature.

The several, inter-connected, societal, environmental, and economic problems, listed in the SDGs, (and the challenge of ageing populations) require a new way of thinking about economics and public policy. New solutions for financing the deacceleration of climate change are being planted in the same ideological soil of financial institutions and corporate interests. Many solutions are founded on the same ideology. Whereas transformational solutions are snuffed by this toxic soil.

?Transformational solutions cannot be developed in the same soil of high-level conferences and the same experts. They must be found elsewhere: in deliberations amongst common people—farmers, caregivers, workers, and women—who are not yet in the economic hierarchy, and who have not yet been coopted into the establishment’s paradigm. Powerful people must come off their pedestals and listen to these people.? ??

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