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Peru: Survival or inviability in S. XXI

- Peru: Survival or inviability XXI century


TPSIPOL FORUM: NETWORK DEMOCRATIC
October 2004

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/eleccion/message/19226

Quehacer
# 150

Peru: Survival or inviability in the XXI century Oswaldo de Rivero
*


If we examine the statistics of the 2004 Human Development during the period 1975-2002, ie during a quarter century, we find that Peru is among the 67 countries whose average per capita income declined. During this period, this decreased -6% in the country, while the population grew an average of 2%. The result of all this is the metastasis of poverty in Peruvian society.

Today, 52% of Peruvians, some 14 million-are poor, living on two dollars a day, and 14%, some 4 million two hundred thousand, are extremely poor and living on a dollar daily. In addition, Peruvian society, according to the Gini index of inequality, is among the eleven most unequal societies in the world. In Peru, the wealthiest 20% of the company receives 51% of national income while the poorest 20% receives only 4.4%.

With such enormous levels of poverty and social exclusion, Peru is not really a viable market economy, national scale, because most of the population lives in the hell of poverty, a small middle class in the purgatory of survival and only a handful in the paradise of the consumer society and instant gratification.

This situation is not unique to Peru. There are currently over one hundred countries have failed to viable market economies and that, nevertheless, are wrongly called 'developing countries'. Experience shows that this unfeasible for development does not arrive, in all cases, to cause a terminal crisis of the underdeveloped country like about the deadly diseases in living beings. Indeed, these countries with symptoms of infeasibility can, thanks to international aid, the temporary rise in prices of raw materials, restructuring its foreign debt, remittances from immigrants and even drug trafficking, keeping for decades inviability in a stabilized situation, characterized by a sequence of economic crisis, temporary adjustments and recoveries, where the only constant is the increase in poverty and emigration abroad.

Throughout the twentieth century, only two small countries-South Korea and Taiwan, and two small city-states, Hong Kong and Singapore, have been developed. The key to success has been a major cultural transformation guided by new values \u200b\u200band state policies that favored the vocation of science, scientific research and technological innovation. The scientific culture is what makes the difference between Asian countries and the current underdevelopment of Peru and Latin America.

Asian

This experience should make us understand that underdevelopment is not an economic problem but cultural. We must put aside the simplicity of an epistemology of economics, which throughout the twentieth century managed to convince politicians and citizens that only by applying theories and economic and financial policies 'right' poor countries could begin to create wealth to converge with companies high living standards of the current 24 industrialized capitalist democracies. Such an approach is not only simplistic but has proven to be false. Our countries have experienced in the twentieth century almost all models, from statist to ultra-liberal and still underdeveloped because the root causes of underdevelopment are not economic but cultural.

Indeed, countries are underdeveloped because they are unscientific traditional societies with different cultures. That is, companies do not investigate, it discovered, do not innovate, do not invent, that they have no vocation for the natural sciences. In Peru, the critical mass of the Peruvian university is dedicated to the study of Law, Accounting, Education and Administration. Also, in our country, as in all of Latin America, the academic discourse is historical, legal, sociological, economic, artistic and literary, and almost no scientific discourse. It is preferred that the log point, deduction, induction, the rhetoric that the experiment, the belief rather than scientific doubt. In these traditional societies there is almost no discussion or scientific publications. Are cultures in which no discoveries, inventions and innovations and consequently a century ago that mostly produce and export the same: raw materials and low-tech.

Peru and other developing countries can continue testing economic models, but if they do not initiate a profound cultural change, a genuine revolution in education and fail to scientific curiosity, research, experimentation and innovation are part of the culture of the younger generation, they can never escape the trap of underdevelopment. In other words: they can not escape from a primary production and export low-technology manufacturing is unable to generate sufficient resources to meet the needs of its growing urban populations. Nor can reduce their debt, more and more expensive, because they always have to buy the valuable scientific and technological progress do not know how to produce.

unscientific

A culture is like a virus for the non-anchor us for hundreds of years in the past, which prevents us from out of primary production and low-tech manufacturing. It is a culture that is not projected into the future and therefore does not attract modern foreign investments, as these are only societies where local businesses and workers are familiar with modern technologies.

unscientific cultures live more in the past than the present and future have no idea. One example is the litany of which Peru is a potentially rich country because it is endowed with abundant natural resources. This is totally false, both present and future. Currently Switzerland, a small country of 7 million inhabitants, which has no natural resources but that is a partnership with scientific culture, exporting more value than Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay together, ie, more than all the Mercosur!

What is it about Switzerland? Simply intangible cultural resources, scientific and technological knowledge as reflected in the high degree of accuracy thereof, in the constant innovation of its chemical and pharmaceutical industry and the high efficiency of its financial services, engineering, consulting, tourism , while Mercosur is trapped, mostly in products and low-tech manufacturing and low value.

In short, wealth and the viability of nations does not depend on natural resources but of scientific and technological knowledge. Just watch the OPEC oil countries, although export the most valuable natural resource and strategic in our civilization, remain, after fifty years, underdeveloped. Moreover, many such as Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iraq, Algeria, Iran, Indonesia, Nigeria and Ecuador, have been depleted.

As the third millennium, it is clear that humanity is moving towards a dual planetary society, divided between a minority of companies who live on the accumulated knowledge of science and technology, and a majority of companies unscientific getting poorer because only living natural resources and industrial activities of very low-tech . The first research, invent, innovate, dematerialized production, purchasing second scientific-technological progress, and plunge into debt in the economic infeasibility.

Today

trapped in a low-technology exports uncompetitive, the product of a culture unscientific, Lima and other cities underdeveloped are growing at a rate of almost 150 000 inhabitants per year, full of unemployed and underemployed. Today about 34 million young people seeking employment in underdeveloped cities. In 2025 the world's poor are concentrated in hundreds of cities with more than 5 million to tens of mega-cities that easily exceed 8 million. Such abundance urban population coupled with the aforementioned scientific and technological poverty will almost inevitable national economic infeasibility of many countries.

Urbanization in poverty also raises another serious problem because it is oriented cultural by environmentally unsustainable consumption patterns. This unsustainable urban model, which we might call 'California', is an expansion citadina gargantuan, devouring millions of tons of water, food and highly polluting fossil energy. The city expanded with the ideology of a cancer cell, sucking water, eliminating agricultural land, destroying their own living environment.

cultural patterns of the model are already inoculated California in Mexico, Lima, Sao Paulo, Rio, Bogotá, Lagos, Abidjan, Dhaka. Karachi, Manila, Bangkok, Dakar, Nairobi and, one could say in all cities and poor expanding megalopolis. Hundreds of cities are spread across the planet following the California model unsustainable, ie, creating an enormous physical and social imbalance as a result of lack of access of the urban poor to resources such as water, food and energy.

Without doubt, this imbalance incurred in the future major socio-political turmoil. A recent Pentagon study finds that the physical and social urban imbalance is one of the most serious threats to global stability. It seems that to know strategically where the world goes, you need to know more about ecology than in economics. However, this new cultural approach is almost nonexistent in underdeveloped societies still prisoners unscientific beliefs, predictions and economic utopias of the twentieth century, all based on GDP growth using ecology as a raw material, and call this barbarism unsustainable national wealth!

With urban population explosion in poverty and without food security, energy and water in cities, the development prospects evaporate completely. Without water you can produce food, no education may be given to malnourished children, no factory will have high energy and water productivity with faces. No family can live a healthy and active life with shortages and rising food, energy and water. Poverty, unemployment and disease will be perpetuated and the social fabric will disintegrate.

Peru is today among the 45 countries that have greater physical and social imbalance, ie, combining one of the highest rates of urban growth with one of the lowest consumption per capita in the world of water food and energy. If not produced a strategic plan to stabilize and to decentralize Peruvian urban population, concentrated in the thirsty antiecological deserts of the coast, giving access to water, food and energy, socio-political instability in Peru will continue to increase.

To survive as a nation state in the twenty-first century needs a scientific society with cultural vocation, to launch a major educational revolution driven by the natural sciences, increase investment in research and development exports with higher technological intensity and, simultaneously, to achieve physical and social balance to the urban population has water security food and energy.

In the XXI century will no longer be necessary to observe the growth of GNP for whether a country is viable, but rather to see if investment in scientific research and development increases, if the number of graduates in natural sciences and accurate increases, if exports are modernized with high technological content, if the middle class grows and, especially, if migration to other countries decreases. Is this happening in Peru?

New York, October 2004
* Ambassador of Peru to the UN.