False Economy - Alan Beattie [113]
It was not surprising that a kilo of vegetables that cost two pesos at the farm had quintupled in price by the time it arrived at the market in Manila. Meanwhile, Chinese vegetables were arriving in Manila by sea in the ubiquitous standard container. The 40 percent import tariff that the Philippines was imposing on some vegetables could not hope to compensate for the weaknesses in the supply chain.
Still, it is African countries that seem to suffer most from weak infrastructure: not just bad roads, but the lack of an efficient economic system. As we have seen, trade needs suppliers to trust that they will get paid, and legal and judicial systems that help rather than hinder business. A recent World Bank study that asked four big freight companies about shipping times around the world found that three-quarters of the delays in transport were administrative procedures—customs clearance, tax, cargo inspections, and the like—and not potholed roads or crumbling ports.
But how did African countries end up like this? Part of the answer is where they started off; part is how they got to where they are; and part is what they are doing, or not doing, now.
To begin with, it would be a mistake to think that all of Africa has always been undeveloped in relation to the rest of the world. During medieval times, there were powerful empires in West Africa that traded salt, gold, and slaves across the Sahara. An empire centered on what is now Mali built a spectacular university at Timbuktu that became a great center of Islamic scholarship.
But the durability and reach of such civilizations were limited. As the physiologist and biogeographer Jared Diamond persuasively argued in his grand essay on why some peoples are rich and some are not, Guns, Germs, and Steel, Africa had some intrinsic challenges when it came to development. The continent's north-south orientation gave it a huge variety of climatic conditions, which meant that crop types and technologies could not easily be transferred from one region to another. The farming techniques of Mediterranean North Africa, even if they could be transplanted across the Sahara, do not work well in the semiarid savanna grassland of the Sahel region at the desert's southern edge, still less in the steamy tropical equatorial regions further down. And over much of Africa around the equator, diseases carried by the tsetse fly prevented the spread of domesticated animals, including the horse, which was, after all, the container ship of medieval transport in Europe.
Then came the impact of slavery and empire. As we have seen, particularly in the history of the East India Company, modern European empires often started off as trade routes and just grew. Having established territorial control well beyond simple trading posts, as we will see in the next chapter, the Company was essentially a contracted-out colonial power running India on behalf of the British crown. Indeed, the growth of empire can be regarded as a coercive mechanism for establishing a supply chain, often with the aim of affecting the balance of power between the parties in addition to simply making transport easier. If granting a monopoly to a trading company was one way of securing the benefits of trade with a distant land, actually owning the place in question was even more so.
The first great era of globalization, between 1880 and 1914, was also the age of what some historians have called High Imperialism—the apotheosis of the dominance of European colonial powers over the rest of the world. During that time, countries that had been colonized saw roughly twice the trade of those that had not. It does not seem to have mattered