Hollywood Blood Diamonds
Blogs are for less formal notes. Part of researching African economic development is less formal too. Watching movies instead of academic research.
The first few minutes of Blood Diamonds show a poor fishing village where father works and all hope of future progress rests on his children (or at least, his son) going to school to become a doctor. In Hollywood, all parents seems to hope their child will become a doctor. Why not have a movie where children are interested in history, in learning why some countries are poor and others rich. Italians in the 1500s studied arithmetic and accounting along with other studies, and were highly valued across Europe.
The fishing village is a story in itself. Why in 2006 are villagers fishing with old wooden boats and returning with six fish on a single line? That is what American audiences expect in a movie about Africa. Why not have a movie chronicling a dozen African entrepreneurs fighting to establish and defend new enterprises? Private cell phones enterprises in Tanzania and Zimbabwe, modern fishing boats on Lake Victoria, tomato processing plants in Ghana. Each of these enterprises were disrupted by government bureaucrats or twisted by foreign aid funding.
Highly-recommended recent books on African enterprise and conflict include Robert Guest's The Shackled Continent, listed, with others on our Africa page (www.EconomicThinking.org/Africa).
From African chaos Blood Diamonds shifts scenes to European diplomats committed to solving Africa's economic and political problems, which are described this way:
"Throughout the history of Africa, whenever a substance of value is found, the locals die. In great number and in misery. This was true of ivory, rubber, gold, and oil. It is now true of diamonds." (Actors lines at European summit early in "Blood Diamonds") Next line "We must act to prohibit..."
This sweeping generalization is for rhetorical flair, but it is worth examining critically.
One could say equally of the United States: "Throughout its history, whenever a substance of value is found the locals prosper and flourish. English common law traditions of secure property rights, limited government, and the rule of law, encourage and protect production of agricultural crops and resources valued elsewhere in the world." It is true that American native populations died in great numbers as Europeans brought new diseases. And of course U.S. government laws were not just to either African slaves or the American indians that survived smallpox and other diseases.
It is true too that treasure resources like gold, diamonds and oil create different incentives than do minerals, crops and forests that take hard work to dig or grow, harvest, and transport. West Africa prospered for decades as Africans, temporarily enjoying secure property rights, vastly expanded production of cocoa, tea, palm oil, and other agricultural products. From 1900 to 1960, as population quadrupled in West Africa, average wealth also quadrupled.
In Ghana, though an English colony during this period, it was African entrepreneurs that were responsible for the astonishing expansion of cocoa plantations. Nigerian immigrants were the first to rapidly expand cocoa production on forest land distant from local villages. As production expanded, workers were hired from local tribes. As more and more workers learned the trade, purchased their own property, and improved production, more workers came from many miles away to try their hand at these new enterprises.
The British neither funded nor managed cocoa production. They were mostly sipping tea and scarcely knew of the complex agricultural revolution taking place away from British outposts. Anthropologist Polly Hill did the original field research and uncovered the astonishing story of migration, enterprise, and prosperity that followed the discovery of a "substance of value": cocoa. Just as tobacco production brought rapid prosperity to the early immigrants in Virginia, encouraging rapidly expanded immigration from Europe, so cocoa was a magnet for migration to Ghana, northern Nigeria, and other cocoa-producing area in West Africa.
So what happened next? How come West Africa's natural advantage in growing crops did not continue to raise living standards after the 1960s. That is the bigger story that explains far more of why much of Africa is poorer today than it was in 1960. But it is not as simple a story as claiming that diamonds, ivory, and oil cause turmoil and poverty in Africa.
Oil discovered in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas and California brought thousands of jobs and vast wealth to millions of American wildcatters, geologists, speculators, and stockholders. And today in Pittsburgh, Houston, Austin, and other cities, dozens of hospitals, universities, office complexes, and factories were funded on oil weath either invested or donated.
Oil wealth accumulated by John D. Rockefeller in fact brought major advances in public health around the world. Then, as today, the richest man in the world spent vast amounts of her personal wealth to try to reduce diseases like hookworm, Yellow Fever, and malaria. (I am reading To Cast Out Disease: A History of the International Health Division of Rockefeller Foundation (1913-1951))
The bigger problems for Africa have been European bureaucrats who think speeches at conferences and international agreements banning ivory or conflict-diamond sales will solve Africa's problems. European and American government officials could do much more to help Africa by removing quotas, tariffs, and import bans on goods produced in Africa. And after early centuries of taking Africans as slaves to the new world, now Europeans ban most Africans from leaving chaos at home to live and world for a time in Europe or America.