Should We Globalize Labor Too?
Photograph by Gary Knight
TIMES MAGAZINE Tomorow
The Arniko Highway climbs out of Kathmandu in long wending loops that pay twin tribute to the impassability of Himalayan terrain and the implausibility of its development. Outside Africa, no country is poorer than Nepal. Its per capita income looks like a misprint: $270 a year. Sudan’s is more than twice as high. Nearly two-thirds of Nepalis lack electricity. Half the preschoolers are malnourished. To the list of recent woes add regicide — 10 royals slaughtered in 2001 by a suicidal prince — and a Maoist insurgency.
With few resources of its own, Nepal relies on workers who have gone abroad for 12 percent of its G.D.P.
A few hours east of the city, a gravel road juts across a talc quarry, where the work would be disturbing enough even if the workers were not under five feet tall. Scores of young teenagers, barefoot and stunted, lug rocks from a lunar pit. The journey continues through a district capital flying Communist flags and ends, 12 hours after it began, above a forlorn canyon. Halfway down the cactus-lined slope, a destitute farmer named Gure Sarki recently bought four goats.
The story of Gure Sarki’s goats involves decades of thinking about foreign aid and the type of program often seen as modern practice at its best. Two years ago, an organizer appeared in the canyon to say that the Nepal government (with money from the World Bank) was making local grants for projects of poor villagers’ choosing. First villagers had to catalog their problems. With Sarki as chairman, Chaurmuni village made its list:
“Not able to eat for the whole year.”
“Not able to send children to school.”
“Lack of proper feed and fodder for the livestock.”
“Landslide and flood.”
“Not able to get the trust of the moneylender.”
“Insecurity and danger.”
A week later, they agreed to start a microcredit fund and expand their livestock herds. Twenty villagers would buy a total of 55 goats at $50 apiece. The plan specified who would serve on the goat-buying committee, the per diem the goat buyers would get and the interest rates on the loans (just over 1 percent). Those who were literate signed their names, while others inked fingerprints, and the papers went off to Kathmandu, where officials approved a $3,700 grant. Within two months of the first meeting, Sarki had his goats. They doubled the value of his livestock holdings. He prizes them so much that he sleeps beside them inside his house to protect them from leopards. He plans to sell them next year for a profit of about $25 each.
Lant Pritchett says he has a better idea. Pritchett, a development economist and practiced iconoclast, has just left the World Bank to teach at Harvard and to help Google plan its philanthropic efforts on global poverty. In a recent trip through Chaurmuni, he praised the goats as community-driven development at its best: a fast, flexible way of delivering tangible aid to the poor. “But Nepal isn’t going to goat its way out of poverty,” he said. Nor does he think that as a small, landlocked country Nepal can soon prosper through trade.
To those standard solutions, trade and aid, Pritchett would add a third: a big upset-the-applecart idea, equally offensive to the left and the right. He wants a giant guest-worker program that would put millions of the world’s poorest people to work in its richest economies. Never mind the goats; if you really want to help Gure Sarki, he says, let him cut your lawn. Pritchett’s nearly religious passion is reflected in the title of his migration manifesto: “Let Their People Come.” It was published last year to little acclaim — none at all, in fact — but that is Pritchett’s point. In a world in which rock stars fight for debt relief and students shun sweatshop apparel, he is vexed to find no placards raised for the cause of labor migration. If goods and money can travel, why can’t workers follow? What’s so special about borders? More...
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