Give A Man A Fish

Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution

Duke University Press

Contents

Give a Man a Fish

From Patriarchal Productionism to the Revalorization of Distribution

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the world of development and global poverty policy has encountered what is perhaps the world's most widely circulated development cliché. It is the slogan (sometimes dubiously attributed as a Chinese proverb) that reads "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime." It is often proclaimed (sometimes on posters) in "helping" agencies of various kinds—from Christian missions to development agency offices to NGO training facilities. The slogan encapsulates a certain development ethos, economically expressing a core belief that the object of development work is transformation, not charity, and that recipients of aid should get productive skills and the opportunity to work, not handouts and dependency.

Critical scholars have for many years now pointed out some of the problematic assumptions embedded in the "give a man a fish" cliché. Those attentive to issues of gender inequality have been quick to question the apparent assumption that the fisher is a man. Those more oriented to political economy have noticed instead the suggestion that poverty derives from a primordial ignorance on the part of the poor and have observed that poor people are in fact far more likely to lack the material means to enter an occupation like fishing (boats, motors, nets, and access and rights to waterways) than they are to be held back by a lack of knowledge. Students of "indigenous knowledge," on the other hand, are likely to be most disturbed by the proverb's apparent faith that the external development worker is the bringer of empowering expert knowledge to benighted locals, when the truth is that people who live in local ecosystems are typically far from ignorant about the practical arts of making a living there—and, indeed, usually can put foreign would-be "helpers" to shame when it comes to such locally grounded and practical knowledge as how to catch fish.

There is, however, an even more fundamental problem with the slogan that generally goes less noticed. This more foundational issue is that the "teach a man to fish" refrain assumes that the problem of poverty is fundamentally a problem of production (not catching enough fish) and that the solution is to bring more people into productive labor (by adding, via training, more fisherfolk). It implicitly scoffs at the importance of distribution ("giving a man a fish") and implies that a durable solution must instead bring the hungry person into the world of production (by catching, and not just eating, fish).

This productionist premise (that "development" is, in essence, about catching more fish and putting more people to work) is located at a deeper epistemological level than the assumptions about knowledge and ignorance, and it is not challenged by the familiar critiques I cited above. Yet it is empirically dubious, even in the case of fishing.

Like much else in the contemporary world, fishing is not what it used to be. The growth area in today's fishing industry is aquaculture, which now contributes nearly half of the total amount of fish available for human consumption (FAO 2012, 26). Like the manufacturing industries that it increasingly resembles, the aquaculture industry is overwhelmingly located in a few countries in Asia (Asia produces some 89 percent of all world aquaculture production—and 69 percent of that is in China [FAO 2012, 27]). It is for this reason that an extraordinary 87 percent of the entire world's fishing employment (fishers and fish farmers) is located in Asia, along with fully 97 percent of the world's aquaculture employment (FAO 2012, 41). Meanwhile, in the most important fishing nations, "the share of employment in capture fisheries is stagnating or decreasing" (2012, 10). This is not because fewer fish are being caught but because it takes fewer workers to catch them when fishing is conducted, as it increasingly is, by highly capitalized private corporations (often on large specialized craft that have been termed "floating factories"). While such capital investment has led to increasing catch rates (and profits), labor demands have diminished even as production has expanded. Indeed, fishing employment in developed countries actually shrank by 11 percent from 1990 to 2008 (FAO 2010). Nor is Africa immune to these trends. The coastal towns and villages of southern Africa's Atlantic coast (for which fishing has historically been the economic mainstay) today swarm with unemployed fishermen. An allocation of quotas in one South African town (meant to increase the size of fishing enterprises to a "financially viable level") resulted in the allocation of permits to just 25 percent of the more than 4,000 applicants. The other 3,000 fishermen (who, let us remember, had followed the productionist advice of learning how to fish) remained, as one press account put it, "lounging about in the centre of [town] and at the harbor."

Teaching a man to fish in these times, then, may be just a good way of creating an unemployed fisherman, or, at best, a marginal hanger-on in an already over-saturated competitive field. It is not obvious that being trained for a nonexistent job would benefit the man in any way, and it is certainly nonsense to suppose that he would, by virtue of that training, be fed for a lifetime. Nor is it at all clear that such training would be beneficial for the fishing industry, the global ecosystem, or, indeed, the fish.

Is the fishing industry really hungering for new armies of trained and ready labor? Or is the problem not, in reality, precisely the opposite—a massive oversupply of labor and an industry utterly unable to absorb it? A recent event in Zambia is illuminating on this point. A fishing company in the small town of Mpulungu on the shores of Lake Tanganyika let it be known that they would be hiring a small number of temporary casual workers. As the owner of the firm (Great Lakes Products, Limited) arrived in Mpulungu to do the hiring, the news spread, and before long more than 5,000 desperate job-seekers had gathered at the company gates (in a town whose total population is only 10,000). A frantic jostling for position resulted in a horrific stampede that killed nine people and injured another thirty-eight.

The "teach a man to fish" slogan seems to come from a world where the labor of poor people was needed by the apparatuses of production and where the central problem was creating enough trained and willing workers to meet labor needs. That is not the world that we live in today. And do we really need to catch more fish? The world's fishing catch is now about 154 million tons per year. Per capita production for human food amounts to more than 41 pounds of fish per year for every man, woman, and child in the world (FAO 2012, 3). That does not sound like a shortage. We must look elsewhere, then, to understand why so many go without. We must look to the realm of distribution. In a world of massive overproduction and widespread poverty, it seems almost embarrassingly obvious that what is needed most is neither more fish nor more fishermen and -women but rather better ways of making sure that the abundant yield of this global industry gets properly spread around to those who are, at present, not getting their share.

But surely, says our productionist common sense, this would be to treat only the symptoms of poverty without getting at its underlying causes—causes that can only be addressed through providing things like education and training. Yet the fishing example shows what many across the region already know, which is that in these times having training or education is no guarantee of a job, and having a job no guarantee of a decent living. Under such circumstances, one begins to wonder whether the real underlying cause of the deprivation of those with only their labor to sell is not their own failures of preparation (not knowing how to fish) but simply that they have been abruptly cut out of a distributive deal that used to include them. In such a view, getting cut back in to the distributive deal is not treating the "symptom" but goes, in fact, to the very root of the matter: the lack of any distributive entitlement is the underlying cause. Indeed, a distributionist (rather than productionist) analysis might revise the "fish" formula as follows: if the proverbial "man" were to receive neither a fish nor a fishing lesson but instead a binding entitlement to some specified share of the total global production, then (and only then) would he really be fed "for a lifetime."

Give a Man a Fish? Productionist Fundamentalism and the Bogey of "Dependency"

This idea—that transforming the situation of the poorest is a fundamentally distributive problem—has a long pedigree in the region, from long-established kinship-based traditions of sharing to the latest forms of nationalist populism. Yet an idea that seems at first blush almost self-evident—that those who have too little should be given more—has long provoked a kind of horror among those who make it their business to "uplift" and "develop" the poor. It has been a kind of truism in such quarters that "you can't just give money to the poor!" (Indeed, this refrain is such a familiar one that it was able to furnish the ironic title of a recent text celebrating the rise of cash transfers: Just Give Money to the Poor [Hanlon, Barrientos, and Hulme 2010]). But why not? The usual answers have involved arguments that if money or other resources are simply given away, the recipients will misuse them ("They'll just drink it away") or use them unproductively ("wasting" them, and leaving the poor recipient in an untransformed condition, "right back where they started"). Worse, recipients may fall victim to "dependency," losing the incentive to work and coming to expect that they will be provisioned by the state. (The history of ideas of "dependency" in the United States is traced in Fraser and Gordon 1994; for the South African case, see Meth 2004; Davie 2005.) Against this, "teaching a man to fish" seems to promise something more substantial, more lasting, more fundamental than simply being fed. Instead of "dependency," a job promises independence and the opportunity to autonomously provide for oneself and one's family. Instead of passively "taking" from productive others, a person in productive labor makes a contribution to society, thus gaining a well-earned sense of pride and dignity. And by contributing to the production system, the person helps to create the wealth that is the true foundation of the economic system, since any distribution presupposes a prior production. Direct distribution of goods may meet a poor person's immediate needs, but it brings about no real change; in altering a person's relation to the system of production, on the other hand, one has produced a transformation far more profound, more "structural."

As we shall see, there are very good grounds for doubting each one of these arguments. Those in wage labor are just as dependent on others for their livelihoods as anyone else, as they often find out when plants abruptly shut down, or mines close, and workers find themselves "right back where they started." Indeed, Fraser and Gordon (1994, 313) have pointed out that being "dependent," in preindustrial Western societies, meant precisely "to gain one's livelihood working for someone else." Nor are those who receive wages noticeably less likely to "drink them away" than those who receive social payments. In fact, wage labor and alcoholism have long enjoyed an extraordinarily intimate embrace across the region, as is well documented (see van Onselen 1976; Crush and Ambler 1992). As for the idea that potential workers are on the brink of losing their will to work, that seems an even less plausible worry in these times. The would-be workers who stampeded the gates of the Mpulungu fish plant did lack many things, but the motivation to work for wages was surely not one of them. And as for making a contribution to society, there is simply no basis at all for the idea that those not in wage labor make no such contribution. As a long history of feminist critique has pointed out, "housewives" and other women who perform non-waged work in domestic setting are not only among society's hardest workers, they have always been charged with "contributing" many of the things that are most highly valued by society (not least the society's—and the labor force's—own reproduction). In the same way, elders and others not in the waged workforce are widely acknowledged to perform extraordinarily valuable services of caregiving to the young and the sick across the region—perhaps never more than in recent years, as southern Africa has endured its time of AIDS. And if it is true that all acts of distribution require a prior "structural" process of production (else there would be nothing to distribute), it is equally true that all production requires prior, and equally "structural," processes of distribution, since workers do not, after all, spring into the world fully formed and ready to report to work but instead in a logically and temporally prior state of utter dependence on others.

To appreciate these arguments fully, however, it is necessary to understand that the horror over giving a man a fish has never, in fact, been simply about poor people being given money or goods. In fact, giving to those in need has always had its approved place in state social programs and private charity alike. But for whom has it been considered appropriate to receive such distributions? As discussed in greater length in chapter 2, both the European social democracies and their colonial extensions were built on the putatively universal figure of "the worker," and the domain we have come to know as "the social" was constructed on the foundation of an idealized, able-bodied male "breadwinner." Indeed, the list of those requiring "social" intervention (the elderly, the infirm, the child, the disabled, the dependent reproductive woman) sketches a kind of photographic negative of the figure of the wage-earning man. It is only the other-than-worker, other-than-man, other-than-able-bodied who is fully authorized to be "dependent"—precisely because the able-bodied man must be, above all, "independent," which is to say, employed. For this reason, systems of social assistance have long been designed as if for an imaginary world where "able-bodied men" are all employed "breadwinners," women and children their presumed dependents, and the state the residual provider for those who (through accident, bad luck, or old age) require a different sort of "dependence."

The fact that the "give a man a fish" slogan renders the fisher a man is not, then, just an unfortunate oversight (to be fixed by changing to gender-neutral language). On the contrary, giving metaphorical "fish" to a woman (or a child, or a disabled person) has long been understood as legitimate provisioning (with the state taking the traditional role of husband or parent, and the woman cast as mother, dependent, or both). It's giving a man a fish that has really been the taboo—precisely because the man was presumed to be properly a worker. The disdain for distribution, then, is not just about giving away fish; it is about the fish being received by someone who is "supposed" to be a worker and not a "dependent." In the disapproval of "giving a man a fish," that is, it is the "man," quite as much as the giving, that is the problem.

Give a Man a Fish?! The Denigration of Distribution and the Gendered Politics of Social Assistance

As was noted in the introduction, the new cash transfer programs that are sweeping the globe are, in one respect at least, entirely conventional. Even though they are typically inserted into contexts where few if any of the premises that governed the creation of the prototypical European welfare states apply, they still (nearly all) are structured in ways that counterfactually presume universal male wage labor. Both South Africa's child support grants and the broader array of cash transfer schemes developed in Latin America and elsewhere understand cash support as something appropriate principally for those categories of people who have long been understood as "dependents" (i.e., children, mothers, old people, the disabled). They proceed as if "able-bodied" men can be presumed to be wage-earners, even under circumstances, such as in southern Africa, where it is plain for all to see just how far that ideal is from the reality. Indeed, in privileging the mother-and-child figure as the key recipients of cash transfers, they have arguably fed a global renewal of a kind of paternalism (Molyneux 2007a)—albeit a paternalism for which actual paters appear to be dispensable.