Why Davis Gets It Wrong

Mike Davis’ subtitle, “El Nino, Famines and the Making of the Third World,” is misleading. Man-killing and man-crippling disasters did not make the “Third World.” It was already made. Nor did the European or Western presence invariably make things worse for the inhabitants of these lands. Their local rulers and fat cats already knew how to exploit, enslave and expropriate. But Davis is right to stress the role of climate and geography in the impoverishment of tropical and semitropical areas and the role of government in easing or exacerbating these effects.

To be sure, Davis knew the answers before he started; it is not an accident that the explanatory, interpretive parts of his story are to be found at the beginning of the book, before the narrative. He is an anti-imperialist by conviction and instinct. His main point is that greedy Western powers (including the United States) either manipulated and exploited the victims of natural disaster or facilitated the abuses of native exploiters and thereby increased the gap between rich and poor and aggravated global injustice. In other words, for Davis those very natural events that might seem to fall outside human control are part of the larger story of human avarice and tyranny; and the West, as every good radical knows, is the villain of the piece.

I can understand Davis’ unhappiness at the climatic record and the recurrent misery, to say nothing of deaths of the victims. On this score, he adds an important chapter to world history. But I am not at all convinced that these prisoners of nature would have done better without the Western presence. They were and are quite capable of abusing and exploiting one another. Their descendants today, still suffering, should read Davis. They would no longer try to borrow or beg from their rich neighbors, who in his view are motivated only by base greed and cold indifference.

Look how much empire has retreated in an age of growing disparity between rich and poor, strong and weak. Western nations have decided they can do better without the victims of yesterday--especially when nature continues to be cruel, nasty and expensive. If Davis is right, you can’t count on these phony philanthropists. You have to count on yourself.