Looking poverty in the face

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RENE DUMONT is an expert on agricultural economics. In 1962 he wrote a book, 'False Start in Africa' , which said that the newly-independent African states were 'marking time' economically, yet underdevelopment could be conquered within 20 years.

20 years on, underdevelopment is more deeply and disastrously entrenched, and that is what Dumont's new book, written with Marie-France mottin, is about.

It is easy and true to say that Dumont's outlook is naive. He wrote in 'False Start in Africa', •The greatest obstacle to progress remains the lack of elementary morality - work, honesty, and dedication to the Two pamphlets summing up the ideas of Socialist Organiser.

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Martin Thomas review: *Stranglehold on Afric by Rene Dumont and Marie-France Mottin (Deutsch £14.95) country — of a good percentage of political leaders."

In this new book, he denounces the corruption, inefficiency, and exploitation practised by the state bourgeoisies in Zambia and Tanzania, yet expresses the warmest sympathy with their presidents, Kaunda and Nyerere. The message remains a moral one -the need for equality, hard work, and cooperation.

But this sort of naivety also ORGANISER Sociaist Te 66° Laboure Socialist the Join Party ORGANISER for Fight socialisti policiest gives the book great clarity and directness. And it certainly ranks it above a great deal of sophisticated theorisation on development. Dumont denounces both the complacent people of the rich countries, and the middle classes of African countries who cover up their own privileges with pseudo-Marxist theories ascribing • all problems to imperialism and central capitalism.

The picture is stark. Grandiose 'development' schemes, jointly sponsored by imperialist 'aid' and the African state bureaucracies, which do much more to enrich the few than to relieve the starvation of the many.

Bureaucratic bungling, short-sightedness and self-interest, leaves the peasant majority in increased misery.

In West Africa, a potentially disastrous destruction of the country's natural resources, turning larger and larger areas into desert.

Dumont's alternative, argued vigorously and with many practical examples is a sort of peasant socialism, based on selfreliance and small-scale local schemes controlled by the producers themselves.

Peasantry

The peasantry, however, by its very nature as a class, lacks the cohesion and power to impose its own solution. That is why Dumont is left looking to saviours from above - Nyerere, Kaunda - and denouncing the lack of moral qualities of the bourgeois functionaries that surround them.

Marxism should give us a better idea of who can break the stranglehold, how. But not at the cost of losing the directness and urgency with which Dumont poses the problem. a dog-fish in the shallow water of his own argument, the next Labour leader defends witch-hunting by quoting Hobsbawm on unity! Kinnock is then riotously rubbished by Dennis Skinner, who is "to political theory what Lowry is to Picasso.

At least it's all part of politics. The Tories "Blue Review" -the highlight of their week -is by contrast a dowdy mixture of village hall variety and undergraduate humour.

Perhaps even the odd Tory viewer will be struck by the way in which their co-thinkers can't think and don't even come close to bordering on a logical argument.

The voices are familiar: 'Whatever happened to good manners?" No answers. 'They come into our restaurant and buy -bone steaks with their dole money. How many of you have had a T-bone steak?" Move on before they all stick their hands up. 'What goddam right have they got to a pay rise?" Answers on a. selfaddressed postcard, please.

And some not so familiar: 'These militant nurses, most of would prevent sunlight from reaching plants in the worstaffected areas. Photosynthesis (trapping the sun's energy in food) would cease in the sea and on land. Starvation of most animals, plant-eaters and meateaters, would follow.

There would also be a drastic fall in temperature which would stop all plant growth and kill off surviving animals.

This would mainly affect the northern hemisphere, assuming that most or all of the bombs were detonated there. This is because there is little mixing of air across the equator. • What would lie in store for any life that survived these few months?

Well, they would find that the amount of harmful ultra-violet radiation reaching the earch had increased ten-fold. This would be caused by the destruction of about half the ozone in the stratosphere. Ozone is a form of oxygen that absorbs ultra-violet radiation. This effect would be felt world-wide, due to easier circulation of air in the stratosphere, and would result in the death of a sizeable proportion of GENTLEMEN, gas. One type, GB or dichlor, is colourless, odourless and kills in one minute.

By the way, the gas is going to be stored in Europe.

TRISOMY is the presence of an extra chromosome. One of the 46 pairs of chromosomes in human cells becomes a triplet, usually with devastating consequences.

The most common type of trisomy is Down's syndrome.

Up to 97% of trisomic foetuses are spontaneously aborted by week 17 of pregnancy and a research group in New York, interested in possible environmental causes of trisomy decided to look into the lives of mothers who had miscarried at this stage of pregnancy.

The only environmental factor they discovered was tobaccosmoking around the time of conception. But while in older women, smoking increased the rate of trisomy, in younger women it decreased the rate!

So far, no explanation for this puzzling finding has emerged.

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