Thread by @jasonhickel

A powerful intervention from the anthropologist Peter Metcalf. He shows how data on rising incomes in Borneo obscure a darker reality of dispossession and impoverishment, as Indigenous subsistence economies are ripped up for timber and palm oil. aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/…

"We’re told that growth is good. We’re told that more income lifts people out of poverty and improves their lives. This narrative is drilled into us by development institutions and echoed by media outlets. But what I have witnessed calls this simplistic story into question."

"In the 1970s, the Indigenous communities had virtually no money, but they lived well. Now they have money, and can barely feed themselves. They have been impoverished even as incomes rise. It is a story of destitution that is completely obscured by the GDP growth statistics."

"With the forests gone and the rivers polluted, the only way for the longhouse people I knew in Sarawak to make a living is by working for meagre wages on the palm oil plantations... many live in squatter settlements and comprise a new lumpen proletariat."

"Food sovereignty and economic independence has been traded for a cash dependency that they cannot now escape."

"All this is smugly reported as development, as “growth”, but this glossy narrative hides a darker reality. The World Bank reports that poverty has been reduced. But rising incomes don’t come anywhere close to compensating for the livelihoods that the longhouse people have lost."

"Nothing can compensate for the loss of food sovereignty and economic independence, and of course the loss of the rainforest. The whole narrative of poverty reduction is a charade."

"Simplistic stories of GDP growth blind us to the extraordinary social and ecological destruction that growth so often entails. We urgently need to abandon this metric and pay attention instead to what is happening in the real world."

This testimony exemplifies the power of anthropological methods, to understand people's livelihoods and lived realities, and how they change over time, to an extent that is beyond the reach of econometrics.

Of course, Indigenous activists themselves have long been telling the same story, as they resist capital's incursions, but they have been brutally repressed and their voices ignored.