Development Must Start at the Base: Why Northern Solutions Keep Failing the Global South

By Benny Dembitzer

Every year, world leaders gather at the UN's Conference of the Parties to discuss climate change. Every year, the conversation follows a familiar script: poor countries need to transition away from fossil fuels, adopt renewable energy, reduce emissions.

There's just one problem. This script was written for countries that have already developed.

In places where homes aren't centrally heated or air conditioned, where mechanised transport barely exists, where the only fuel is bits of trees and bushes, telling people to "reduce consumption" is absurd. Their consumption is already too low to reduce.

What poor countries actually need is radically different: reinforced riverbanks, reforestation to halt desertification, water reservoirs, protection of soil from run-off. They need help starting from where they are, not from some mythical starting point imagined by the North.

But that's not what they're offered.

The Debt Trap

In wealthy OECD countries, money is the fuel of everything. Need food? Buy it. Need energy? Buy it. Need a school or hospital? Finance it through tax revenue.

Poor countries can't do this. There's no tax base to draw from. So the rich world offers an alternative: loans.

On the surface, this looks like help. In practice, it's a trap.

Borrowers must repay loans with interest. Poor countries, unable to generate their own capital, get stuck in cycles of ever-growing debt. The numbers are staggering: most sub-Saharan countries now pay more in debt repayment to international institutions than they spend on healthcare or education. Many pay more than they spend on both services combined.

Their governments need to repay these loans, which leaves less money for services, which creates discontent, which is met with repression. And the rich world's solution? Offer more loans.

This is not development. This is entrapment with a smile.

The Commodities Trap

The main source of income for poor countries is growing things for export: coffee, tea, cocoa, tobacco, cotton, sugar, vanilla. To a degree, it works. But the system was never designed to benefit them.

The colonial powers created this arrangement in the early 20th century. The entire point of colonisation was to get people in other countries to produce commodities for Western consumption. Crucially, colonies were set up to compete with each other, driving down prices, keeping producers desperate.

That system never really ended.

In 2001, the EU announced it would accept "everything but arms" from the least developed countries. What they didn't advertise: any processing would be taxed at progressively higher rates. In other words, poor countries are welcome to export raw materials. But if they try to add value, if they try to climb the economic ladder, they'll be penalised.

The producers of primary commodities remain stuck exactly where colonial powers put them.

The Perils of Being a Poor Farmer

Consider coffee. Ethiopia has always been the main producer of arabica, a premium variety. Thousands of small-scale farmers depend on it for survival.

But they don't control their destiny. Western advertising campaigns drive consumer tastes. If preferences shift, toward a new flavour, a different blend, a competing origin, the Western coffee companies simply buy from someone else. They won't hesitate to drop suppliers at the drop of a hat.

The farmers absorb all the risk. The corporations absorb none.

This pattern repeats across commodities. As global transport costs have fallen, more countries now compete to supply our bananas, avocados, pineapples, and greens. Good for consumers. Catastrophic for any farmer whose market suddenly evaporates.

The Frailty of Water and Land

And then there's the environmental cost, paid entirely by the poor.

In Kenya, Lake Victoria has served 40 million people for generations. Now it's increasingly poisoned by pollutants from export agriculture. Lake Naivasha faces the same fate. Fish species that fed local communities for centuries have disappeared. Biodiversity is collapsing. Drinking water is becoming toxic.

Land tells a similar story. Export production demands more and more acreage, at exactly the moment when local families don't have enough land to grow vegetables for themselves. Small farmers can't afford the seeds, pesticides, and fertilisers that large estates use. They're pushed onto marginal land that can't sustain them.

Meanwhile, water is diverted for commercial crops, lowering the water table, threatening the survival of communities who had nothing to do with the export economy in the first place.

The Brutal Arithmetic

Here's the summary:

We have set poor country against poor country. The more they produce, the less money they get for their produce.

The more we consume, the more we degrade their environment and their food security.

We win either way. They lose either way.

This isn't a bug in the system. It's the system working exactly as designed, just not for the people at the bottom.

What Would Real Development Look Like?

It would start at the base.

It would help communities reinforce their own water sources, build their own food security, restore their own soil. It would recognise that development in places without electricity grids or paved roads looks nothing like development in London or New York.

It would stop offering loans that trap countries in debt. It would stop penalising poor nations for trying to process their own raw materials. It would stop pretending that solutions designed for the rich world can simply be exported elsewhere.

Most of all, it would require the North to ask a different question.

Not: "How can we help poor countries develop?"

But: "How do we stop making it impossible for them to?"

I spent fifty years working on the ground in developing countries.

The book, The Global Famine Game, examines why international aid systems continue to fail the world's poorest people and what genuine development from the base would look like. Available now on Amazon. https://bit.ly/TheGlobalFamineGame

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