- It is the prevailing determinants of the social and economic conditions of a society that lead to the violation of the rights of a sizeable sector of the population; these we consider to be the basic determinants. The more proximate causes resulting in the host of human rights (HR) violations we see on a daily basis we consider to be immediate determinants.
- Basic (structural) causes explain most HR violations in societies around the world.
They usually relate to the major dialectical contradictions in a given society; they are not removed or even touched by traditional development programs or projects. Therefore, in the long run, the fight against the violations of the right to food, for example, becomes an eminently political struggle and not a technical one. Technology cannot achieve the fundamental structural changes needed to end hunger and malnutrition…or, for that matter, end most HR violations. Removal of a few (or even one) of the main basic causes is more likely to secure the right to food than acting on many immediate determinants simultaneously.
- Nowadays, basic determinants are more frequently than not indeed mentioned and identified by development planners analyzing specific situations, but the plans they devise seldom address these determinants frontally.
- Immediate determinants are more directly related to the actual conditions that result in violated rights. Among other, they include health, nutritional, environmental, and educational determinants, which are those most frequently identified and selected for direct intervention by Western (Northern) development planning approaches. In the past, emphasis on these technical approaches has also justified the need for Western-trained experts who often come with ready-made analyses.
- Taken together, any attack on the immediate determinants only leads to a package of solutions or interventions that pretend to be apolitical and free of ideological connotations or influence.
- However, in the final analysis, one is either bowing to the system or objecting to it, totally or partially. Any of these are political stances.
- Development planners keep inventing new “more comprehensive” or “multisectoral” approaches to old problems as if these would change the major contradictions and the distribution of power within the system that is at the root of the many HR violations to begin with.
- The following are but some examples of national-level consequences of basic causes: Low percentage of national income received by the lowest 20 percent of the population (income maldistribution); land maldistribution; high percentage of landless agricultural laborers; rural unemployment; urban migration and urban unemployment; low minimum wage policies in all sectors of the economy –not in tune with the cost of a minimum food basket and not following food price inflation; low farm-gate prices for food crops as opposed to their urban retail prices; agricultural marketing boards’ exploitative practices towards small farmers, imbalance between cash and food crops (biased land allocation and incentives in favor of the former); low percentage of foreign agricultural export earnings reinvested in agriculture; food import policies contradicting national efforts to increase local food production; neglect of the primary (agricultural) sector with the share of agriculture in the national GDP slipping in favor of the secondary (industry) and tertiary (services) sectors of the economy; credit bias towards the modern agricultural sector as opposed to the traditional agricultural sector; lack of agricultural input subsidization for small farmers, especially for food crops; foreign aid not reaching the neediest; women left outside development programs with little incentive to incorporate them in the money economy; little emphasis and scanty budgets for genuine community development and for rural cooperatives; low primary school enrolment rates especially for girls; feeble efforts to increase adult literacy –especially for women; and, scanty budgets for preventive health services.
- What is here being emphasized is that, in the same example, malnutrition as a social disease cannot be cured through medical interventions (not even in a wide comprehensive package) nor can it be cured through the latter plus a package of agricultural interventions: redistribution of resources and the consequent increase in purchasing power of the needy masses is a necessary, though not sufficient, solution to this problem so much at the center of a host of HR violations.
- Many development planners have artificially divided the remedial actions they finally propose into two groups: recommendations and interventions. The former, which often concern basic determinants and the need to change or remove them, are worded in very vague, general terms and have no specific implementation timetable or budgets assigned; the latter, which often concern immediate determinants, are prepared in more detail, have a fixed implementation deadline, and are usually budgeted for.
- The directness with which these planners state the need for (and carry out) corrective measures directed at the basic determinants will depend on the political environment in which they work. Political and ideological constraints, as well as the attitude and commitment of decision-makers towards eradicating HR violations of any kind, will ultimately determine how far the planning team can go in its recommendations. (Do not assume that decision-makers are rational, righteous and pious, and will accept hard scientific evidence in their decision-making…or react to outrageous or more hidden injustice and HR violations!).
- Human Rights work thus is as good an entry point as any other (employment, health, nutrition, education, energy, natural resources, ecology, etc.) for getting involved in questions of equity in our societies. Any of these can lead to global and structural considerations if they are not seen as isolated domains.
- The ideology and outlook on world affairs of the individual searching for the determinants of HR violations (largely determined by one’s social class extraction) play a vital role in one’s selection of the contents of the final in-depth situation analysis one makes: ultimately, one only sees what one wants to see…
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org