A Fate Worst than Debt: A Review by the New Internationalist

A Fate Worse than Debt: A Radical Analysis of the Third World Debt Crisis
Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1988 (290pp)
ISBN: 0-14-022789-x

Susan George, who explained world hunger in her classic How the other half dies (Penguin, 1976), has pulled it off again with A fate worse than debt. She manages to put over a comprehensive and radical analysis of the Third World debt crisis and make it easy to read. Cutting through the complexities and technical language, George’s gift is to call a spade a spade. She argues that there is a consortium of rich nations and banks using the one trillion dollar debt burden - that‘s a hundred billion dollars - to keep the Third World in line. The International Monetary Fund is their instrument, imposing austerity measures and adjustment policies on debtor nations in exchange for further loans. Seldom mentioned in the same breath, the US owes two trillion dollars - which it has borrowed to finance its military spending. Washington can only borrow by pushing up interest rates worldwide, effectively making the other debtor nations pay for the US arms race, George argues. She reports on the brutal impact of the debt crisis at the grass roots, from Mexico to Zaire. In one Zaire town, for example, where a family needs 80 zaires a day just to buy food, the teachers’ salary is 20 zaires a day. A kind of "Financial Low-Intensity Conflict" is being fought by the consortium against the underdeveloped world. Its aim? Similar to President Reagan’s war in Nicaragua, not to win but to keep the adversary dependent, weak and subservient.

Inevitably the book has been partly overtaken by events, notably the stock market crash which happened after it went to press. But everyone who wants to see a tourniquet applied to the flow of funds from the nations of the South to the North should read it.

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