Alta prioridade
Clayton Levy, para o Valor
Jornal Valor Econômico - 29/11/2006, pág. F1
Estabelecer uma política capaz de transformar a produção científica em fonte geradora de riqueza é o grande desafio para consolidar uma cultura voltada à inovação.
A receita não é nova. Desde o século 19, países desenvolvidos como EUA e Alemanha a usam com sucesso: integrar três atores que, no Brasil, andam desarticulados: pesquisadores, empresários e governo. Entre os países em desenvolvimento, Coréia do Sul e China também começaram a deslanchar depois de adotarem o mesmo modelo. Em todos eles, prevalece a mesma premissa: para haver crescimento, o investimento em pesquisa deve ocorrer dentro da indústria. Esse tema foi debatido segunda-feira em São Paulo no Seminário Inovação Tecnológica: Crescimento Industrial e Competitividade, promovido pelo Valor .
"No Brasil, esta é uma concepção ainda incipiente", diz o físico Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz. Ex-reitor da Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp) e atual diretor científico da Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (Fapesp), ele chama a atenção para o fato de 70% dos cientistas em atividade no Brasil estarem concentrados na academia. "Nos países desenvolvidos, 50% ou mais dos cientistas atuam em laboratórios industriais". O jeito brasileiro de organizar o sistema de ciência, tecnologia e inovação acaba gerando distorções. Uma delas, segundo Brito Cruz, é que 60% do financiamento à pesquisa são feitos com recursos públicos. "Nos países mais desenvolvidos a situação é inversa, com a iniciativa privada respondendo por 60% dos investimentos, chegando a 80% no caso dos EUA e do Japão", diz o físico.
Outro sintoma incômodo é o descompasso entre produção científica e patentes registradas. Nos últimos vinte anos, o número de artigos publicados por pesquisadores brasileiros saltou de dois mil para 15 mil por ano, o que coloca o país na 17ª posição do ranking mundial, segundo o Institut for Scientific Information (ISI), principal indexador de publicações científicas do mundo. Ainda assim, em 2005 o Brasil depositou apenas 77 patentes nos Estados Unidos, contra 4,3 mil da Coréia, que tem uma produção científica equivalente à brasileira.
O lado mais perverso desse descompasso é a baixa capacidade de inovação das empresas nacionais. A recente Pesquisa Nacional de Inovação Tecnológica (Pintec), divulgada pelo Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE), abrangendo 84 mil indústrias no período 2001-2003, registrou queda significativa entre as empresas que fazem pesquisa e desenvolvimento (P&D) de forma contínua. O número caiu de 3.178 em 2000 para 2.432 em 2003. Entre elas apenas 1.200 tinham produtos diferenciados capazes de colocá-las na liderança do mercado nacional e somente 177 exibiam processos inovadores de impacto mundial. Também houve queda no percentual de faturamento investido em P&D. De 3,8% em 2000 recuou para 2,5% em 2003.
"No Brasil, a inovação é principalmente atualização de produtos e processos, o que não enseja uma liderança competitiva a médio e longo prazos", pondera o engenheiro aeronáutico Hugo Resende, diretor científico da Embraer e presidente da Associação Nacional de Pesquisa, Desenvolvimento e Empreendedorismo das Empresas Inovadoras (Anpei). "Se essa trajetória permanecer no longo prazo, o Brasil tenderá a ficar cada vez mais defasado internacionalmente", constatam os economistas Mauro Arruda, Roberto Vermulm e Sandra Hollanda, autores do estudo "Inovação tecnológica no Brasil - a indústria em busca da competitividade global", que acaba de ser publicado pela Anpei. Segundo o levantamento, apenas 2,7% das empresas pesquisadas investiram em inovação de produtos direcionados para o mercado.
Ao analisar indicadores, o levantamento expõe a distância que separa o Brasil de outros países emergentes. Com investimentos em P&D da ordem de 1% do PIB, o país ocupa a quinta posição, atrás da China e da Rússia, ambas com 1,3%. Quando a comparação é feita com países desenvolvidos, o placar é ainda mais elástico. A Suécia lidera o ranking, com 6,8% do PIB para P&D, seguida de perto pelos EUA, com 6,6%. Na seqüência vêm Finlândia, 6,1%; Coréia, 5,9%; Dinamarca, 5,5% e Japão, 5,0%.
Para diminuir a diferença, Resende propõe ações que passam pela mobilização das empresas, subvenção de recursos e a consolidação de um programa nacional de desenvolvimento científico e tecnológico voltado às tecnologias emergentes, como nanotecnologia, materiais compósitos e biotecnologia. "É evidente que só a implementação dessas macro-ações não será suficiente para mudar o quadro atual, mas elas são essenciais para criar uma base sustentável e garantir o sucesso de ações futuras de longo prazo", diz o presidente da Anpei.
Os empresários, por sua vez, alegam falta de um ambiente favorável para investir em P&D. Entre as empresas entrevistadas pela Pintec, 80% apontaram os custos elevados como principal obstáculo. "As operações de crédito, que têm como encargos a TJLP (9%) acrescidas de spread de 2% a 6% ao ano, apresentam valores superiores a taxas internacionais de longo prazo como por exemplo a dos EUA (2,2%), Coréia (2,7%) e Irlanda (0,9%)", destaca o diretor do Departamento de Competitividade e Tecnologia da Federação das Indústrias do Estado de São Paulo (Fiesp), José Ricardo Roriz Coelho.
Outro problema, segundo Roriz, é a burocracia. "A legislação é complexa, as informações são pouco divulgadas e as empresas, principalmente as pequenas e médias, não sabem como participar".
Nem mesmo a Lei de Inovação, promulgada no início de 2005 para dar suporte jurídico às diversas formas de parceria, está conseguindo vencer os entraves da máquina estatal. "Passados quase dois anos, muito pouco do que a lei supostamente possibilita realmente saiu do papel", diz o economista e ex-secretário executivo do Ministério de Ciência e Tecnologia na gestão FHC, Carlos Américo Pacheco. "Os empecilhos continuam quase tão grandes como antes", completa Pacheco, que ajudou a escrever o texto da lei.
Outra reivindicação de pesquisadores e empresários é o descontingenciamento dos recursos destinados aos Fundos Setoriais. Criados no segundo mandato de FHC como instrumentos de financiamento de projetos de pesquisa, desenvolvimento e inovação, os fundos acumulam um contingenciamento de R$ 3 bilhões. Em 2006, do orçamento de R$ 2 bilhões, foi liberado cerca de R$ 1 bilhão.
O governo afirma que, apesar do contingenciamento, o crescimento tem sido constante. "Espera-se que até 2010 possamos contar com a integralidade dos recursos dos fundos", diz o superintendente da área de planejamento da Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos (Finep), Rogério Amaury de Medeiros.
Além de acenar com o fim gradual do contingenciamento dos fundos, o governo atua em outras frentes para dar novo alento ao processo de inovação. No ano passado, o Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (BNDES) lançou o Profarma, voltado para a indústria farmacêutica, e o Prosoft, para a área de software. Este ano, anunciou três novos programas voltados para o desenvolvimento tecnológico com taxas de juros reduzidas. O mais recente deles, o Fundo Tecnológico (Funtec), apoiará projetos conjuntos de empresas públicas ou privadas e entidades de pesquisa sem fins lucrativos, como universidades e institutos de pesquisa. Os recursos nãosão reembolsáveis e serão destinados a projetos que atendam aos setores estratégicos. O fundo nasce com R$ 153 milhões, mas o banco já identificou projetos que, se apoiados, somariam R$ 286 milhões.
Em outra frente, a Finep anunciou os programas Subvenção Econômica, Inovar Semente e Pró-Inovação. "O Programa de Subvenção Econômica é, dentre esses, o de maior relevância, pois permite pela primeira vez no Brasil o aporte de recursos não reembolsáveis diretamente em empresas para apoio a projetos de inovação tecnológica", explica Medeiros. Os recursos, no valor de R$ 510 milhões, entrarão nos orçamentos de 2006, 2007 e 2008.
A primeira chamada, que disponibilizou R$ 300 milhões, recebeu até o fim de outubro mais de mil propostas de 900 empresas demandando cerca de R$ 1,8 bilhão.
Lançado no fim de 2005, o Inovar Semente atende às empresas nascentes de base tecnológica. O programa quer contemplar a contratação de quatro novos fundos por ano no valor médio de R$ 12 milhões, totalizando aporte de R$ 288 milhões até 2011. Já o Pró-Inovação é um instrumento de apoio financeiro reembolsável às empresas de médio e grande portes com a possibilidade de equalização da taxa de juros nos financiamentos da inovação, com o apoio do Fundo Verde-Amarelo. Em 2005, contratou 49 operações no valor global de R$ 574 milhões. Em 2006, até setembro, foram contratadas 38 operações no valor de R$ 342 milhões. A perspectiva de desembolso é de R$ 500 milhões no ano.
"No momento, a oportunidade para o Brasil é a energia renovável, especialmente o etanol de biomassa", diz o físico Brito Cruz. O mesmo ocorre em outras áreas onde o Brasil se destaca, como exploração de petróleo em águas profundas e o agronegócio. "A biodiversidade brasileira cria um manancial de possibilidades, mas é preciso pesquisa para que isso se converta em desenvolvimento".
segunda-feira, dezembro 25, 2006
domingo, dezembro 24, 2006
173) Piadas comunistas... (alguma graca?)
Hammer&tickle
Prospect Magazine, May 2006 | 122 » Essays » Hammer & tickle
Communism is the only political system to have created its own international brand of comedy. The standard interpretation is that communist jokes were a form of resistance. But they were also a safety valve for the regimes and jokes were told by the rulers as well as the ruled—even Stalin told some good ones
Ben Lewis
Ben Lewis's film, "Hammer and Tickle: the communist joke book" shows at the Tribeca film festival in New York, 30th April-3rd May, and on BBC4 "Storyville" in September
A man dies and goes to hell. There he discovers that he has a choice: he can go to capitalist hell or to communist hell. Naturally, he wants to compare the two, so he goes over to capitalist hell. There outside the door is the devil, who looks a bit like Ronald Reagan. "What's it like in there?" asks the visitor. "Well," the devil replies, "in capitalist hell, they flay you alive, then they boil you in oil and then they cut you up into small pieces with sharp knives."
"That's terrible!" he gasps. "I'm going to check out communist hell!" He goes over to communist hell, where he discovers a huge queue of people waiting to get in. He waits in line. Eventually he gets to the front and there at the door to communist hell is a little old man who looks a bit like Karl Marx. "I'm still in the free world, Karl," he says, "and before I come in, I want to know what it's like in there."
"In communist hell," says Marx impatiently, "they flay you alive, then they boil you in oil, and then they cut you up into small pieces with sharp knives."
"But… but that's the same as capitalist hell!" protests the visitor, "Why such a long queue?"
"Well," sighs Marx, "Sometimes we're out of oil, sometimes we don't have knives, sometimes no hot water…"
It was in Romania, while making a film about Ceausescu, that I first stumbled across the historical legacy of the communist joke. There I learned that a clerk from the Bucharest transport system, Calin Bogdan Stefanescu, had spent the last ten years of Ceausescu's regime collecting political jokes. He noted down which joke he heard and when, and analysed his total of over 900 jokes statistically. He measured the time gap between a political event and a joke about that event, and then drew up a graph measuring the varying velocity of Romanian communist jokes. He was also able to assert—somewhat tenuously—that there was a link between jokes and the fall of Ceausescu, since jokes about the leader doubled in the last three years of the regime. The story of Stefanescu, the statistician of jokes, was, ironically, much funnier than the jokes themselves. It seemed to capture the prosaic reality of the little man struggling against the communist universe.
I was charmed. Soon my volume of Stefanescu's Ten Years of Romanian Black Humour was joined by 30 or so other collections of communist jokes—such as Reinhard Wagner's Jokes of East Germany Volume 1-2 (1994/96), and Hammer and Tickle (1980) by Petr Beckmann. The earliest volume I found, Humour Behind the Iron Curtain, was published in 1962 by the Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal, under the pseudonym Mischka Kukin. I wondered if Wiesenthal found communist jokes a diversion from the business of tracking down Nazis, or if they represented to him another struggle against injustice. I also came across a wonderfully overwritten PhD thesis by the Stanford anthropologist Seth Benedict Graham: A Cultural Analysis of the Russo-Soviet Anekdot (anekdot is the Russian word for a political joke). Graham's earnest academic language suggests the standard theory of the joke as a tool of subversion: "An important reason for the anekdot's pre-eminence was its capacity to outflank, mimic, debunk, deconstruct, and otherwise critically engage with other genres and texts of all stripes and at all presumed points on the spectrum from resistance to complicity."
Graham gestures towards the Orwellian notion of the joke as "a tiny revolution." Jokes were an essential part of the communist experience because the monopoly of state power meant that any act of non-conformity, down to a simple turn of phrase, could be construed as a form of dissent. By the same token, a joke about any facet of life became a joke about communism. There have been political and anti-authority jokes in every era, but nowhere else did political jokes cohere into an anonymous body of folk literature as they did under communism. With the creation of the Soviet bloc after the war, communism exposed itself to Czech and Jewish traditions of humour—mutating viruses to which the system never developed the right antibodies. Some jokes that were traceable back to the Austro-Hungarian empire found their apotheosis under communism—like this one about the Hungarian communist leader Matyas Rakosi: Two friends are walking down the street. One asks the other "What do you think of Rakosi?" "I can't tell you here," he replies. "Follow me." They disappear down a side street. "Now tell me what you think of Rakosi," says the friend. "No, not here," says the other, leading him into the hallway of an apartment block. "OK here then." "No, not here. It's not safe." They walk down the stairs into the deserted basement of the building. "OK, now you can tell me what you think of our president." "Well," says the other, looking around nervously,"actually I quite like him."
There's another factor that reinforces the mode of covert protest in communist jokes—the way former citizens of the communist countries felt about them. I suggested to each interviewee that most of these jokes weren't actually very funny, or at least had dated badly. How could they laugh at so many mediocre and repetitive jokes? They were outraged by the question. "Every week there was another great new joke. The strange thing is that you always asked: where do they come from? You never knew. The author was a collective—the people," said Ernst Röhl, one of East Germany's leading satirists. "I remember, as a student, when we had to gather the harvest and we told jokes incessantly," I was told by Stefan Wolle, the author of Back in the GDR. "Then we sat in the pub until midnight telling jokes. Everyone had his special collection." "Some of these jokes are minor masterpieces," said Doina Doru, a Romanian proofreader who spent ten years checking that Ceausescu's name was spelt correctly in the daily newspaper. "What is colder in a Romanian winter than cold water?" she continued by way of illustration, "Hot water!"
So far as I know, no one was executed for telling a joke. But people routinely went to prison. The archives of the Hungarian secret police are full of the dossiers of people arrested for telling them. Day in, day out, officers of the state were taking the time and trouble to track down joke-tellers, or going out of their way to add the evidence of joke-telling to other charges, and then handing out short sentences.
Perhaps the most emblematic story of the joke-as-resistance is a report of the prosecution of a joke-teller in Czechoslovakia in 1967, which I found in the archives of Radio Free Europe, the anti-communist cold war broadcaster. An arriving refugee brought the news that a worker in a liquor factory had been arrested for telling the following joke: Why is the price of lard not going up in Hungary? So that the workers can have lard on bread for their Sunday lunch.
The joke had been overheard by the party secretary of the factory, who immediately reported the worker. The joke-teller was arrested on charges of "Incitement and defamation against the People's Democracy." After six hearings, the employee was fired. The sentence was relatively lenient because the co-workers all stood by the employee, saying that the party secretary did not hear the introductory words of the joke-teller: I heard a very stupid joke yesterday…
The joke wasn't very funny—the implication is that since there is no meat in the shops, Sunday roasts have been replaced by lard sandwiches. But the real story produces its own punchline. Communism was a humour-producing machine. Its economic theories and system of repression created inherently funny situations. There were jokes under fascism and the Nazis too, but those systems did not create an absurd, laugh-a-minute reality like communism.
Communist jokes were a way to criticise and outmanoeuvre the system, but they were also something more than this. They comprised a secret language between citizens—membership of a club to which the government was not invited (or so they thought).
The first jokes about the Russian revolution surfaced immediately after October 1917. In one, an old woman visits Moscow zoo and sees a camel for the first time. "Look what the Bolsheviks have done to that horse!" she exclaims. As the system became harsher, a distinctive communist sense of humour emerged—pithy, dark and surreal—but so did the legal machinery for repressing it. Historian Roy Medvedev looked through the files of Stalin's political prisoners and concluded that 200,000 people were imprisoned for telling jokes, such as this: Three prisoners in the gulag get to talking about why they are there. "I am here because I always got to work five minutes late, and they charged me with sabotage," says the first. "I am here because I kept getting to work five minutes early, and they charged me with spying," says the second. "I am here because I got to work on time every day," says the third, "and they charged me with owning a western watch."
Yet there is an obvious problem with the idea that communist jokes represented an act of revolt: it wasn't just opponents of the regime who told them. Stalin himself cracked them, including this one about a visit from a Georgian delegation: They come, they talk to Stalin, and then they go, heading off down the Kremlin's corridors. Stalin starts looking for his pipe. He can't find it. He calls in Beria, the dreaded head of his secret police. "Go after the delegation, and find out which one took my pipe," he says. Beria scuttles off down the corridor. Five minutes later Stalin finds his pipe under a pile of papers. He calls Beria—"Look, I've found my pipe." "It's too late," Beria says, "half the delegation admitted they took your pipe, and the other half died during questioning."
Stalin's laughter underlines the cynicism of the Soviet enterprise. But after his death the joke trials petered out. One of Khrushchev's first acts was to release all those imprisoned for minor political crimes, which included telling jokes. In his famous secret speech to the 20th party congress, Khrushchev cracked one too. He said that Stalin would have liked to have deported all the Ukrainians, but didn't know where to put them. The stenographers recording the speech noted the reaction of the party—"laughter."
In this new era, political leaders took the view that the jokes were a harmless way for people to let off steam. They believed that jokes would help people to cope with the hardships of the difficult stage of socialism, before the communist utopia arrived. They also imagined that the jokes could be used as an early warning system; problems indicated by humour could be tackled before they caused a revolution. Ilie Merce, a senior member of the Romanian Securitate, said that he used to file reports on the jokes—who was telling what—in order to convey the popular mood to the ministry of the interior.
Everyone told jokes, even the apparatchiks. Guenter Schabowski, the East German newspaper editor and later politburo member, told me: "At Neues Deutschland we told each other jokes in the canteen. We weren't blind to the failings of the system, but we convinced ourselves that this was only because it was the early days and the class enemy was perpetrating sabotage. One day, we thought, all problems will be solved and there won't be any more jokes because there won't be anything to joke about."
There were still occasional outbreaks of arrests for jokes in the 1960s and 1970s—usually linked to moments when the state felt vulnerable—when the Berlin wall was built or when there was another price hike. At these times, newspapers would publish "Outraged of Vladivostok" letters railing against the flood of jokes, like this one from Izvestia in 1964.
Dear Sir, Ten days ago I went to our savings bank. In front of the clerk's window there were five people waiting for their turn. And while standing there I heard too much. There were two of them in front of me, well fed, healthy, and really well dressed… and in a public place and with an insolent casualness they were trying to outdo each other, swapping their "best" political jokes… How can I restrain myself in front of these "jokers," who tell me mockingly a "new anecdote"? Nothing is sacred to them. They spit on everything!… We have to fight them; it is necessary to discredit, shame and dishonour them in front of honest people.
With deep respect, Nikolay Kuritsin, external student, Kadykchan village.
In the 1960s, the Soviet bloc was deluged by a flood of new jokes. There were around 20 subcategories. The most popular theme was the economy: One housewife to another: "I hear there'll be snow tomorrow"—"Well, I'm not queuing for that." There were jokes about Soviet propaganda: The capitalists are standing at the edge of the abyss. Soon communism will overtake capitalism. There were gags about Marxist-Leninist theory: Why is the individual placed in the centre of socialism? So it's easy to kick him from all sides. There were jokes about communist art: What is the difference between painters of the naturalist, impressionist and the socialist realist schools? The naturalists paint as they see, the impressionists as they feel, the socialist realists as they are told. There were jokes about communist-style democracy: When was the first Russian election? The time that God put Eve in front of Adam and said, "Go ahead, choose your wife." And, of course, there were Jewish communist jokes: "Hey Hymee, how's your brother Joseph?" "He's living in Prague and building socialism." "And didn't you have a sister, Judith—how's she doing?" "She's well too—living in Budapest and creating a communist future." "And your older brother Bernie?" "Oh he moved to Israel." "And is he building socialism there too?" "What, are you crazy? Do you think he'd do that in his own country?"
The point of this last gag seems to be not just to have a laugh at communism, but to shift the blame for it away from the central committees to the Jews. In other words, jokes could aid the system as well as undermine it. This, it seems, is what Graham's thesis on the meaning of the anekdot was grasping for when it described a "spectrum from resistance to complicity." A joke could be told about Stalin, or by Stalin; it could mock both the makers of the system and its victims. A joke could be an act of rebellion or a safety valve, an expression of revulsion against the system or of familiarity, even warmth towards it.
This is not to deny that the communist joke was often at its best in its dissident form. When Russian tanks rolled into Prague in 1968, the population fought back with wit. Every night graffiti appeared in Wenceslas Square with lines like "Soviet State Circus back in town! New attractions!" and "Soviet School for Special Needs Children—End-of-Term Outing." People cracked jokes: Why is Czechoslovakia the most neutral country in the world? Because it doesn't even interfere in its own internal affairs. And: Are the Russians our brothers or our friends? Our brothers—we can choose our friends. "We showed our intellectual superiority," one former dissident told me proudly.
Jokes under communism were shaped by the cultures that produced them, as they are anywhere else. For the Czechs, a sense of humour encapsulated a type of national resilience. East German jokes, meanwhile, tended to be touchingly self-deprecating. And yet there was a pan-communist umbrella of comedy that stood above national distinctions, just as the international socialist project itself did. What ultimately defined the genre was less the purpose it served than its style. The communist joke was by nature deadpan and absurdist—because it was born of an absurd system which created a yawning gap between everyday experience and propaganda. Yet sometimes, through jokes, both communists and their opponents could carry on a debate about the failings of communism.
The logic of this discourse led to the strangest coded conflict, as the pages of the East German satirical magazine Eulenspiegel reveal. Eulenspiegel was founded in 1954 as the state's official organ of humour. There were no censorship laws, as the East Germans were so proud of telling the west. Instead the editors had to guess what kind of jokes were permissible. Every week the magazine carried three or four pages of anti-imperialist humour, in which capitalists in top hats counted their money, GIs enslaved Africans and doves sat atop hammers and sickles. Eulenspiegel could also print anodyne comic critiques of daily life in East Germany, as long as they didn't incriminate the politburo. Ernst Röhl was able to write things like this: Man doesn't live from bread and ham alone. He needs something green. And green things have been in short supply for a long time. Cabbage has been more the subject of discussion than digestion. And the Adam's apple is the closest one gets to fruit at the dinner table. But this year Mother Nature has been particularly green. Cucumbers are no longer the shoemaker's bribe. Onions no longer raise laughs in cabaret sketches…
People like Röhl saw themselves, rather self-indulgently, as fifth columnists, eating away at the regime from the inside. But there were limits to permissible satire. Once the cover featured "young pioneers" with long hair—a decadent western fashion. The politburo was livid, but the magazine had already been sent out, so the police reclaimed all the copies they could from newsagents and post offices. Eulenspiegel once tried to make common cause with Pardon, its West German left-wing counterpart. After all, Pardon also attacked Adenauer and American imperialism. But the editors of Eulenspiegel were stung when Pardon rebuffed their advances, on the grounds that the communist satirists should criticise their own leader, Walter Ulbricht, the same way the capitalist ones went for theirs. The editors of Euelenspiegel printed a rebuttal entitled "How do we write about Walter Ulbricht?" in 1963: "We know from various reliable sources that President Ulbricht has a terrific sense of humour… [but] the transparency and virtue of our state makes it not only difficult but simply impossible to write a satire about its representatives. Where there is nothing to uncover, the satirist will find no material. So how do we satirists write about Walter Ulbricht?… We send our greetings and best wishes to the first secretary of the central committee. We wish comrade Ulbricht health, stamina and a long life."
This article could have been satirical, but wasn't. Rather, it occupies the strange socialist space where the serious and the humorous are identical. Eulenspiegel was the only place where serious criticism of the state could be published. Readers wrote in with complaints about their leaking prefab apartments and so on, and there was a column called Erledigt (Dealt With) which celebrated the grievances that the Eulenspiegel had managed to redress, and often came with printed apologies from factory managers and landlords. Nothing illustrates better the inverted reality of communism: real problems could only be presented in a context of laughter, presumably so that one could always claim one was only joking. In this realm, where humour turns out to be a complex social dance, the idea of the joke as simply subversive breaks down.
But on this side of the iron curtain, communist jokes were only interpreted as evidence of anti-communism; their wider significance was lost. In 1950-51, a group of Harvard anthropologists undertook one of the most influential research projects of the postwar era. The US government wanted to find out how Soviet citizens might react if the US invaded Russia. So the academics interviewed thousands of displaced Russian citizens living in camps in Germany. When asked to describe what Soviet society was like, the refugees told jokes: "Did you hear the one about the sheep who tried to leave the USSR? They were stopped at the border by a guard…." "Why do you wish to leave Russia?" the guard asked. "It's the secret police," replied the sheep. "Stalin has ordered them to arrest all the elephants." "But you aren't elephants." "Try telling that to the secret police."
In the 1950s, the New York Times Magazine would devote the odd page to jokes from the Harvard project. From the 1960s onwards, volumes of communist jokes were published in paperback form in Europe and North America. Willy Brandt was a renowned communist joke-teller, but there was one western politician who took the jokes more seriously than anyone else: Ronald Reagan. He ordered the state department to collect the jokes and send them to him in weekly memos. As a result, Paul Goble, head of the Balkan desk in the 1980s, assembled a collection of 15,000 communist jokes. Reagan often used Goble's gags in his speeches and negotiations. When Gorbachev came to Washington, Reagan told him a communist joke, later boasting at a press conference that he had laughed. The joke, which made fun of the communist theory that a transitional era of socialism was preceding the communist utopia, went like this: Two men are walking down a street in Moscow. One asks the other, "Is this full communism? Have we really passed through socialism and reached full communism?" The other answers "Hell, no. It's gonna get a lot worse first."
Communism ground on into the 1970s. Brezhnev and his geriatric cronies gave rise to some new jokes (Brezhnev reads a speech at the Winter Olympics "O-O-O-O-O." "No," his aide whispers to him, "that's the Olympic logo.") And the technology gap gave rise to others: The latest achievements of the East German electronics company Robotron were celebrated—they built the world's largest microchip. Meanwhile the state was seemingly less worried by the jokes. In Poland, the most liberal regime of them all, they even permitted communist jokes on television.
Jokes did not bring down communism. That was achieved by the nonsense of its economic policies, and by the decisions of the leaders of the superpowers, east and west—in the case of Reagan, by pricing the Soviets out of the arms race; in the case of Gorbachev by glasnost and perestroika. This much is well known—what isn't is the significance both leaders attached to communist jokes. Gorbachev knew the jokes, and like his predecessors, he told them. You can't imagine Stalin or Khrushchev telling a joke about his own unpopularity, but Gorbachev did. In 1996 he appeared on the Clive Anderson show in Britain and told this one, whose lineage can be traced back through the 20th century: A man is queuing for food in Moscow. Finally he's had enough. He turns round to his friend and says "That's it. I'm going to kill that Gorbachev," and marches off. Two hours later he comes back. "Well," says the friend, "did you do it?" "No," replies the other, "there was an even longer queue over there."
Gorbachev and his aides talked openly about the jokes. In 1989 he told a crowd of workers, "political jokes were our salvation," a reference to the way the jokes let out frustrations and debunked propaganda. As the first reforms faltered, one of his ministers warned him that if the new laws didn't work "the people would return to the bottle and the political joke." One could even argue that Gorbachev's policies liberalising the economy, press and politics were addressing the implicit complaints of decades of jokes.
Exactly how communist jokes functioned politically, socially or psychologically is a question as complex as the meaning of works of art. What is self-evident, however, is that since the fall of the wall the jokes have dried up. Life just isn't as funny any more. The vast enterprise of communism gave a universal quality to the meaning of the jokes that hasn't been replicated since its collapse. They subverted and they supported; they undermined and they prolonged. As Gorbachev's respect for the jokes and Reagan's obsession with them show, they were intrinsic to the whole communist experience. Jokes were to communism what myths were to ancient Greece: anonymous, oral stories which both represented and shaped people's views and actions.
Jokes may not have carried the weight of the great forces which ended communism, but they were more than mere figures of speech. Jokes kept alive in the minds of the citizens of the Soviet bloc the idea of an alternative reality, and they made light of four decades of occupation of eastern and central Europe. They may even explain why the end of communism was so sudden and so bloodless. No point anyone getting hurt over a little joke, right?
Prospect Magazine, May 2006 | 122 » Essays » Hammer & tickle
Communism is the only political system to have created its own international brand of comedy. The standard interpretation is that communist jokes were a form of resistance. But they were also a safety valve for the regimes and jokes were told by the rulers as well as the ruled—even Stalin told some good ones
Ben Lewis
Ben Lewis's film, "Hammer and Tickle: the communist joke book" shows at the Tribeca film festival in New York, 30th April-3rd May, and on BBC4 "Storyville" in September
A man dies and goes to hell. There he discovers that he has a choice: he can go to capitalist hell or to communist hell. Naturally, he wants to compare the two, so he goes over to capitalist hell. There outside the door is the devil, who looks a bit like Ronald Reagan. "What's it like in there?" asks the visitor. "Well," the devil replies, "in capitalist hell, they flay you alive, then they boil you in oil and then they cut you up into small pieces with sharp knives."
"That's terrible!" he gasps. "I'm going to check out communist hell!" He goes over to communist hell, where he discovers a huge queue of people waiting to get in. He waits in line. Eventually he gets to the front and there at the door to communist hell is a little old man who looks a bit like Karl Marx. "I'm still in the free world, Karl," he says, "and before I come in, I want to know what it's like in there."
"In communist hell," says Marx impatiently, "they flay you alive, then they boil you in oil, and then they cut you up into small pieces with sharp knives."
"But… but that's the same as capitalist hell!" protests the visitor, "Why such a long queue?"
"Well," sighs Marx, "Sometimes we're out of oil, sometimes we don't have knives, sometimes no hot water…"
It was in Romania, while making a film about Ceausescu, that I first stumbled across the historical legacy of the communist joke. There I learned that a clerk from the Bucharest transport system, Calin Bogdan Stefanescu, had spent the last ten years of Ceausescu's regime collecting political jokes. He noted down which joke he heard and when, and analysed his total of over 900 jokes statistically. He measured the time gap between a political event and a joke about that event, and then drew up a graph measuring the varying velocity of Romanian communist jokes. He was also able to assert—somewhat tenuously—that there was a link between jokes and the fall of Ceausescu, since jokes about the leader doubled in the last three years of the regime. The story of Stefanescu, the statistician of jokes, was, ironically, much funnier than the jokes themselves. It seemed to capture the prosaic reality of the little man struggling against the communist universe.
I was charmed. Soon my volume of Stefanescu's Ten Years of Romanian Black Humour was joined by 30 or so other collections of communist jokes—such as Reinhard Wagner's Jokes of East Germany Volume 1-2 (1994/96), and Hammer and Tickle (1980) by Petr Beckmann. The earliest volume I found, Humour Behind the Iron Curtain, was published in 1962 by the Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal, under the pseudonym Mischka Kukin. I wondered if Wiesenthal found communist jokes a diversion from the business of tracking down Nazis, or if they represented to him another struggle against injustice. I also came across a wonderfully overwritten PhD thesis by the Stanford anthropologist Seth Benedict Graham: A Cultural Analysis of the Russo-Soviet Anekdot (anekdot is the Russian word for a political joke). Graham's earnest academic language suggests the standard theory of the joke as a tool of subversion: "An important reason for the anekdot's pre-eminence was its capacity to outflank, mimic, debunk, deconstruct, and otherwise critically engage with other genres and texts of all stripes and at all presumed points on the spectrum from resistance to complicity."
Graham gestures towards the Orwellian notion of the joke as "a tiny revolution." Jokes were an essential part of the communist experience because the monopoly of state power meant that any act of non-conformity, down to a simple turn of phrase, could be construed as a form of dissent. By the same token, a joke about any facet of life became a joke about communism. There have been political and anti-authority jokes in every era, but nowhere else did political jokes cohere into an anonymous body of folk literature as they did under communism. With the creation of the Soviet bloc after the war, communism exposed itself to Czech and Jewish traditions of humour—mutating viruses to which the system never developed the right antibodies. Some jokes that were traceable back to the Austro-Hungarian empire found their apotheosis under communism—like this one about the Hungarian communist leader Matyas Rakosi: Two friends are walking down the street. One asks the other "What do you think of Rakosi?" "I can't tell you here," he replies. "Follow me." They disappear down a side street. "Now tell me what you think of Rakosi," says the friend. "No, not here," says the other, leading him into the hallway of an apartment block. "OK here then." "No, not here. It's not safe." They walk down the stairs into the deserted basement of the building. "OK, now you can tell me what you think of our president." "Well," says the other, looking around nervously,"actually I quite like him."
There's another factor that reinforces the mode of covert protest in communist jokes—the way former citizens of the communist countries felt about them. I suggested to each interviewee that most of these jokes weren't actually very funny, or at least had dated badly. How could they laugh at so many mediocre and repetitive jokes? They were outraged by the question. "Every week there was another great new joke. The strange thing is that you always asked: where do they come from? You never knew. The author was a collective—the people," said Ernst Röhl, one of East Germany's leading satirists. "I remember, as a student, when we had to gather the harvest and we told jokes incessantly," I was told by Stefan Wolle, the author of Back in the GDR. "Then we sat in the pub until midnight telling jokes. Everyone had his special collection." "Some of these jokes are minor masterpieces," said Doina Doru, a Romanian proofreader who spent ten years checking that Ceausescu's name was spelt correctly in the daily newspaper. "What is colder in a Romanian winter than cold water?" she continued by way of illustration, "Hot water!"
So far as I know, no one was executed for telling a joke. But people routinely went to prison. The archives of the Hungarian secret police are full of the dossiers of people arrested for telling them. Day in, day out, officers of the state were taking the time and trouble to track down joke-tellers, or going out of their way to add the evidence of joke-telling to other charges, and then handing out short sentences.
Perhaps the most emblematic story of the joke-as-resistance is a report of the prosecution of a joke-teller in Czechoslovakia in 1967, which I found in the archives of Radio Free Europe, the anti-communist cold war broadcaster. An arriving refugee brought the news that a worker in a liquor factory had been arrested for telling the following joke: Why is the price of lard not going up in Hungary? So that the workers can have lard on bread for their Sunday lunch.
The joke had been overheard by the party secretary of the factory, who immediately reported the worker. The joke-teller was arrested on charges of "Incitement and defamation against the People's Democracy." After six hearings, the employee was fired. The sentence was relatively lenient because the co-workers all stood by the employee, saying that the party secretary did not hear the introductory words of the joke-teller: I heard a very stupid joke yesterday…
The joke wasn't very funny—the implication is that since there is no meat in the shops, Sunday roasts have been replaced by lard sandwiches. But the real story produces its own punchline. Communism was a humour-producing machine. Its economic theories and system of repression created inherently funny situations. There were jokes under fascism and the Nazis too, but those systems did not create an absurd, laugh-a-minute reality like communism.
Communist jokes were a way to criticise and outmanoeuvre the system, but they were also something more than this. They comprised a secret language between citizens—membership of a club to which the government was not invited (or so they thought).
The first jokes about the Russian revolution surfaced immediately after October 1917. In one, an old woman visits Moscow zoo and sees a camel for the first time. "Look what the Bolsheviks have done to that horse!" she exclaims. As the system became harsher, a distinctive communist sense of humour emerged—pithy, dark and surreal—but so did the legal machinery for repressing it. Historian Roy Medvedev looked through the files of Stalin's political prisoners and concluded that 200,000 people were imprisoned for telling jokes, such as this: Three prisoners in the gulag get to talking about why they are there. "I am here because I always got to work five minutes late, and they charged me with sabotage," says the first. "I am here because I kept getting to work five minutes early, and they charged me with spying," says the second. "I am here because I got to work on time every day," says the third, "and they charged me with owning a western watch."
Yet there is an obvious problem with the idea that communist jokes represented an act of revolt: it wasn't just opponents of the regime who told them. Stalin himself cracked them, including this one about a visit from a Georgian delegation: They come, they talk to Stalin, and then they go, heading off down the Kremlin's corridors. Stalin starts looking for his pipe. He can't find it. He calls in Beria, the dreaded head of his secret police. "Go after the delegation, and find out which one took my pipe," he says. Beria scuttles off down the corridor. Five minutes later Stalin finds his pipe under a pile of papers. He calls Beria—"Look, I've found my pipe." "It's too late," Beria says, "half the delegation admitted they took your pipe, and the other half died during questioning."
Stalin's laughter underlines the cynicism of the Soviet enterprise. But after his death the joke trials petered out. One of Khrushchev's first acts was to release all those imprisoned for minor political crimes, which included telling jokes. In his famous secret speech to the 20th party congress, Khrushchev cracked one too. He said that Stalin would have liked to have deported all the Ukrainians, but didn't know where to put them. The stenographers recording the speech noted the reaction of the party—"laughter."
In this new era, political leaders took the view that the jokes were a harmless way for people to let off steam. They believed that jokes would help people to cope with the hardships of the difficult stage of socialism, before the communist utopia arrived. They also imagined that the jokes could be used as an early warning system; problems indicated by humour could be tackled before they caused a revolution. Ilie Merce, a senior member of the Romanian Securitate, said that he used to file reports on the jokes—who was telling what—in order to convey the popular mood to the ministry of the interior.
Everyone told jokes, even the apparatchiks. Guenter Schabowski, the East German newspaper editor and later politburo member, told me: "At Neues Deutschland we told each other jokes in the canteen. We weren't blind to the failings of the system, but we convinced ourselves that this was only because it was the early days and the class enemy was perpetrating sabotage. One day, we thought, all problems will be solved and there won't be any more jokes because there won't be anything to joke about."
There were still occasional outbreaks of arrests for jokes in the 1960s and 1970s—usually linked to moments when the state felt vulnerable—when the Berlin wall was built or when there was another price hike. At these times, newspapers would publish "Outraged of Vladivostok" letters railing against the flood of jokes, like this one from Izvestia in 1964.
Dear Sir, Ten days ago I went to our savings bank. In front of the clerk's window there were five people waiting for their turn. And while standing there I heard too much. There were two of them in front of me, well fed, healthy, and really well dressed… and in a public place and with an insolent casualness they were trying to outdo each other, swapping their "best" political jokes… How can I restrain myself in front of these "jokers," who tell me mockingly a "new anecdote"? Nothing is sacred to them. They spit on everything!… We have to fight them; it is necessary to discredit, shame and dishonour them in front of honest people.
With deep respect, Nikolay Kuritsin, external student, Kadykchan village.
In the 1960s, the Soviet bloc was deluged by a flood of new jokes. There were around 20 subcategories. The most popular theme was the economy: One housewife to another: "I hear there'll be snow tomorrow"—"Well, I'm not queuing for that." There were jokes about Soviet propaganda: The capitalists are standing at the edge of the abyss. Soon communism will overtake capitalism. There were gags about Marxist-Leninist theory: Why is the individual placed in the centre of socialism? So it's easy to kick him from all sides. There were jokes about communist art: What is the difference between painters of the naturalist, impressionist and the socialist realist schools? The naturalists paint as they see, the impressionists as they feel, the socialist realists as they are told. There were jokes about communist-style democracy: When was the first Russian election? The time that God put Eve in front of Adam and said, "Go ahead, choose your wife." And, of course, there were Jewish communist jokes: "Hey Hymee, how's your brother Joseph?" "He's living in Prague and building socialism." "And didn't you have a sister, Judith—how's she doing?" "She's well too—living in Budapest and creating a communist future." "And your older brother Bernie?" "Oh he moved to Israel." "And is he building socialism there too?" "What, are you crazy? Do you think he'd do that in his own country?"
The point of this last gag seems to be not just to have a laugh at communism, but to shift the blame for it away from the central committees to the Jews. In other words, jokes could aid the system as well as undermine it. This, it seems, is what Graham's thesis on the meaning of the anekdot was grasping for when it described a "spectrum from resistance to complicity." A joke could be told about Stalin, or by Stalin; it could mock both the makers of the system and its victims. A joke could be an act of rebellion or a safety valve, an expression of revulsion against the system or of familiarity, even warmth towards it.
This is not to deny that the communist joke was often at its best in its dissident form. When Russian tanks rolled into Prague in 1968, the population fought back with wit. Every night graffiti appeared in Wenceslas Square with lines like "Soviet State Circus back in town! New attractions!" and "Soviet School for Special Needs Children—End-of-Term Outing." People cracked jokes: Why is Czechoslovakia the most neutral country in the world? Because it doesn't even interfere in its own internal affairs. And: Are the Russians our brothers or our friends? Our brothers—we can choose our friends. "We showed our intellectual superiority," one former dissident told me proudly.
Jokes under communism were shaped by the cultures that produced them, as they are anywhere else. For the Czechs, a sense of humour encapsulated a type of national resilience. East German jokes, meanwhile, tended to be touchingly self-deprecating. And yet there was a pan-communist umbrella of comedy that stood above national distinctions, just as the international socialist project itself did. What ultimately defined the genre was less the purpose it served than its style. The communist joke was by nature deadpan and absurdist—because it was born of an absurd system which created a yawning gap between everyday experience and propaganda. Yet sometimes, through jokes, both communists and their opponents could carry on a debate about the failings of communism.
The logic of this discourse led to the strangest coded conflict, as the pages of the East German satirical magazine Eulenspiegel reveal. Eulenspiegel was founded in 1954 as the state's official organ of humour. There were no censorship laws, as the East Germans were so proud of telling the west. Instead the editors had to guess what kind of jokes were permissible. Every week the magazine carried three or four pages of anti-imperialist humour, in which capitalists in top hats counted their money, GIs enslaved Africans and doves sat atop hammers and sickles. Eulenspiegel could also print anodyne comic critiques of daily life in East Germany, as long as they didn't incriminate the politburo. Ernst Röhl was able to write things like this: Man doesn't live from bread and ham alone. He needs something green. And green things have been in short supply for a long time. Cabbage has been more the subject of discussion than digestion. And the Adam's apple is the closest one gets to fruit at the dinner table. But this year Mother Nature has been particularly green. Cucumbers are no longer the shoemaker's bribe. Onions no longer raise laughs in cabaret sketches…
People like Röhl saw themselves, rather self-indulgently, as fifth columnists, eating away at the regime from the inside. But there were limits to permissible satire. Once the cover featured "young pioneers" with long hair—a decadent western fashion. The politburo was livid, but the magazine had already been sent out, so the police reclaimed all the copies they could from newsagents and post offices. Eulenspiegel once tried to make common cause with Pardon, its West German left-wing counterpart. After all, Pardon also attacked Adenauer and American imperialism. But the editors of Eulenspiegel were stung when Pardon rebuffed their advances, on the grounds that the communist satirists should criticise their own leader, Walter Ulbricht, the same way the capitalist ones went for theirs. The editors of Euelenspiegel printed a rebuttal entitled "How do we write about Walter Ulbricht?" in 1963: "We know from various reliable sources that President Ulbricht has a terrific sense of humour… [but] the transparency and virtue of our state makes it not only difficult but simply impossible to write a satire about its representatives. Where there is nothing to uncover, the satirist will find no material. So how do we satirists write about Walter Ulbricht?… We send our greetings and best wishes to the first secretary of the central committee. We wish comrade Ulbricht health, stamina and a long life."
This article could have been satirical, but wasn't. Rather, it occupies the strange socialist space where the serious and the humorous are identical. Eulenspiegel was the only place where serious criticism of the state could be published. Readers wrote in with complaints about their leaking prefab apartments and so on, and there was a column called Erledigt (Dealt With) which celebrated the grievances that the Eulenspiegel had managed to redress, and often came with printed apologies from factory managers and landlords. Nothing illustrates better the inverted reality of communism: real problems could only be presented in a context of laughter, presumably so that one could always claim one was only joking. In this realm, where humour turns out to be a complex social dance, the idea of the joke as simply subversive breaks down.
But on this side of the iron curtain, communist jokes were only interpreted as evidence of anti-communism; their wider significance was lost. In 1950-51, a group of Harvard anthropologists undertook one of the most influential research projects of the postwar era. The US government wanted to find out how Soviet citizens might react if the US invaded Russia. So the academics interviewed thousands of displaced Russian citizens living in camps in Germany. When asked to describe what Soviet society was like, the refugees told jokes: "Did you hear the one about the sheep who tried to leave the USSR? They were stopped at the border by a guard…." "Why do you wish to leave Russia?" the guard asked. "It's the secret police," replied the sheep. "Stalin has ordered them to arrest all the elephants." "But you aren't elephants." "Try telling that to the secret police."
In the 1950s, the New York Times Magazine would devote the odd page to jokes from the Harvard project. From the 1960s onwards, volumes of communist jokes were published in paperback form in Europe and North America. Willy Brandt was a renowned communist joke-teller, but there was one western politician who took the jokes more seriously than anyone else: Ronald Reagan. He ordered the state department to collect the jokes and send them to him in weekly memos. As a result, Paul Goble, head of the Balkan desk in the 1980s, assembled a collection of 15,000 communist jokes. Reagan often used Goble's gags in his speeches and negotiations. When Gorbachev came to Washington, Reagan told him a communist joke, later boasting at a press conference that he had laughed. The joke, which made fun of the communist theory that a transitional era of socialism was preceding the communist utopia, went like this: Two men are walking down a street in Moscow. One asks the other, "Is this full communism? Have we really passed through socialism and reached full communism?" The other answers "Hell, no. It's gonna get a lot worse first."
Communism ground on into the 1970s. Brezhnev and his geriatric cronies gave rise to some new jokes (Brezhnev reads a speech at the Winter Olympics "O-O-O-O-O." "No," his aide whispers to him, "that's the Olympic logo.") And the technology gap gave rise to others: The latest achievements of the East German electronics company Robotron were celebrated—they built the world's largest microchip. Meanwhile the state was seemingly less worried by the jokes. In Poland, the most liberal regime of them all, they even permitted communist jokes on television.
Jokes did not bring down communism. That was achieved by the nonsense of its economic policies, and by the decisions of the leaders of the superpowers, east and west—in the case of Reagan, by pricing the Soviets out of the arms race; in the case of Gorbachev by glasnost and perestroika. This much is well known—what isn't is the significance both leaders attached to communist jokes. Gorbachev knew the jokes, and like his predecessors, he told them. You can't imagine Stalin or Khrushchev telling a joke about his own unpopularity, but Gorbachev did. In 1996 he appeared on the Clive Anderson show in Britain and told this one, whose lineage can be traced back through the 20th century: A man is queuing for food in Moscow. Finally he's had enough. He turns round to his friend and says "That's it. I'm going to kill that Gorbachev," and marches off. Two hours later he comes back. "Well," says the friend, "did you do it?" "No," replies the other, "there was an even longer queue over there."
Gorbachev and his aides talked openly about the jokes. In 1989 he told a crowd of workers, "political jokes were our salvation," a reference to the way the jokes let out frustrations and debunked propaganda. As the first reforms faltered, one of his ministers warned him that if the new laws didn't work "the people would return to the bottle and the political joke." One could even argue that Gorbachev's policies liberalising the economy, press and politics were addressing the implicit complaints of decades of jokes.
Exactly how communist jokes functioned politically, socially or psychologically is a question as complex as the meaning of works of art. What is self-evident, however, is that since the fall of the wall the jokes have dried up. Life just isn't as funny any more. The vast enterprise of communism gave a universal quality to the meaning of the jokes that hasn't been replicated since its collapse. They subverted and they supported; they undermined and they prolonged. As Gorbachev's respect for the jokes and Reagan's obsession with them show, they were intrinsic to the whole communist experience. Jokes were to communism what myths were to ancient Greece: anonymous, oral stories which both represented and shaped people's views and actions.
Jokes may not have carried the weight of the great forces which ended communism, but they were more than mere figures of speech. Jokes kept alive in the minds of the citizens of the Soviet bloc the idea of an alternative reality, and they made light of four decades of occupation of eastern and central Europe. They may even explain why the end of communism was so sudden and so bloodless. No point anyone getting hurt over a little joke, right?
172) Indicadores Sociodemográficos do IBGE
Indicadores Sóciodemográficos
Fonte IBGE
Base: 1991-2030
IBGE mostra o perfil sociodemógráfico do país e estados nos próximos 25 anos
O processo de envelhecimento da população e a persistência das desigualdades sociais e regionais nas próximas duas décadas são algumas das principais conclusões do estudo Indicadores Sociodemográficos Prospectivos para o Brasil 1991-2030, projeto inédito do IBGE, em parceria com o Fundo de População das Nações Unidas (ONU). O estudo demonstra que os indicadores de fecundidade e de mortalidade correspondentes às regiões Sudeste, Sul e Centro-Oeste permanecerão, nos próximos anos, em níveis mais baixos que os das regiões Norte e Nordeste. Em relação à esperança de vida ao nascer, todas as grandes regiões estarão em níveis próximos aos 80 anos. Já com relação à fecundidade, os números médios de filhos por mulher tenderão a não garantir a reposição das gerações, sobretudo nas Regiões Nordeste e Sul, que deverão permanecer com balanço negativo entre entradas e saídas de pessoas devido à migração. A fecundidade também deverá ter aumento entre as mulheres jovens. As mortalidades no primeiro ano de vida e dos menores de 5 anos de idade continuarão em suas trajetórias de declínio, atingindo níveis abaixo de 10%o (dez mortes a cada mil nascidos vivos), no Sudeste, Sul e Centro-Oeste brasileiros, e patamares superiores a este no Norte e Nordeste. Para o total do país, a taxa de mortalidade infantil, bem como a probabilidade de um recém-nascido falecer antes de completar o quinto ano de vida alcançarão, em 2030, 11,53%o e 15,98%o, respectivamente, cifras que garantem, ao menos se considerada a média nacional, o cumprimento do Quarto Objetivo do Milênio1, que diz respeito à redução da mortalidade na infância. O estudo demonstrou que, se não forem tomadas medidas eficazes de redução da violência e dos acidentes de trânsito, a mortalidade masculina poderá se tornar cinco vezes maior que a mortalidade feminina, no Sudeste.
O estudo demonstra as principais características do processo de transformação do perfil demográfico brasileiro, no horizonte até 2030, tanto no nível nacional, como no contexto das unidades da federação. Entre as informações, destacam-se a redução das taxas de mortalidade, o aumento da esperança de vida, a queda na taxa de fecundidade, entre outros. A partir destes indicadores, o IBGE poderá estruturar um Sistema de Projeções Populacionais por Sexo e por Idade para o período 1991-2030, incorporando os 26 estados e o Distrito Federal. O estudo objetiva fornecer indicativos da provável trajetória dos principais parâmetros, tendo em vista as conquistas já obtidas até o início da presente década. Também auxilia na avaliação das políticas sociais, particularmente no tocante à redução da mortalidade na infância e nas ações para amenizar as desigualdades sociais.
Em 2030, esperança de vida ao nascer será maior em Santa Catarina
Em 2030, enquanto os estados do Maranhão (75,70) e Alagoas (75,16) possuirão esperanças de vida ao nascer de pouco mais de 75 anos, em Santa Catarina (79,76), no Distrito Federal (79,63) e no Rio Grande do Sul (79,59) as respectivas vidas médias ao nascer projetadas ultrapassarão os 79,50 anos. Neste caso, o indicador que representa a média nacional (78,33 anos) estará refletindo a realidade dos estados de maior desenvolvimento econômico e social. Basta verificar as taxas de mortalidade infantil médias para os três estados citados do centro-sul, em torno de 8%o, em 2030, contrastando com as projetadas para Maranhão e Alagoas, respectivamente, 16,10%o e 19,40%.
Em 1991, para a população como um todo, a esperança de vida ao nascer era de 66,93 anos, com uma diferença expressiva entre os sexos: 7,75 anos em favor das mulheres e apresentando um diferencial significativo se o indicador em questão era referido à região Sul ou ao Nordeste. No Sul, a vida média era de 70,40 anos contra 62,83 anos no Nordeste, mostrando um intervalo de 7,57 anos entre ambas. Uma pessoa nascida em Alagoas, por exemplo, esperaria viver em média 59,72 anos, ao passo que no Rio Grande do Sul a média de vida superava os 71,00 anos, evidenciando um distanciamento de 11,38 anos entre ambos os estados.
Em 2000, o Distrito Federal passou a ocupar a primeira posição no ranking das unidades da federação com a mais elevada esperança de vida ao nascer (73,64 anos), enquanto Alagoas permaneceu no último posto (63,84 anos), representando uma diferença de 9,80 anos, menor que a observada no início da década de 1990.
De acordo com as projeções, Santa Catarina passa à liderança a partir de 2015, mantendo-se neste patamar até 2030. Por outro lado, as perspectivas para Alagoas mantêm-se desfavoráveis ao longo das três décadas analisadas, com sua esperança de vida ao nascer posicionando-se em último lugar. Contudo, a diferença entre os dois estados experimentará redução paulatina, atingindo 4,60 anos, em 2030.
Ao considerar cada sexo em separado, os diferenciais interestaduais nas vidas médias masculinas são de 5,16 anos, correspondentes a Santa Catarina em relação a Alagoas, e de 4,12 anos a mais para as mulheres do Distrito Federal, comparativamente às de Alagoas, mostrando que a longo prazo existe uma certa tendência de aproximação entre os níveis de mortalidade inter-regionais. Ainda que apontando para uma diminuição, as diferenças entre as vidas médias ao nascer de homens e mulheres permanecerão relativamente elevadas até 2030, como mostram os resultados para as seguintes unidades da federação: Amapá (7,29 anos), Maranhão (7,38 anos), Ceará (7,64 anos), Rio Grande do Norte (7,17 anos), Alagoas (7,50 anos), Rio de Janeiro (7,46 anos) e São Paulo (7,21 anos). Os aumentos nas esperanças de vida ao nascer da população residente em estados como Rio de Janeiro e São Paulo, por exemplo, poderiam ter sido mais animadores, se não fosse a incidência de elevadas taxas de mortalidade por causas externas sobre o segmento populacional composto por jovens e adultos jovens do sexo masculino.
A esperança de vida projetada para 2005 (72,05 anos) coloca o Brasil em situação um tanto quanto desconfortável, comparativamente aos países latino-americanos e caribenhos. Por exemplo, Costa Rica (78,10), Chile (77,90), Cuba (77,20), Porto Rico (76,00), Uruguai (75,30), Guiana Francesa (75,20), Barbados (74,90), México (74,90), Panamá (74,70), Argentina (74,30), Equador (74,20), Venezuela (72,80), Santa Lúcia (72,30), Colômbia (72,20), possuem esperanças de vida ao nascer superiores a do Brasil. Os países desta região com esperança de vida ao nascer abaixo da estimada para o Brasil são Belize, Paraguai, El Salvador, Jamaica, Trinidad y Tobago, Peru, Bahamas, Nicarágua, Suriname, Honduras, República Dominicana, Guatemala, Bolívia, Guiana e Haiti. De acordo com o rol de estimativas apresentadas pelas Nações Unidas para o período 2000-2005, verifica-se que o Brasil ainda ocupa a 80ª posição no ranking de 192 países ou áreas, liderado pelo Japão, com 81,90 anos de vida média para sua população.
Rio de Janeiro terá menor taxa de fecundidade e Amapá a maior em 2030
As taxas específicas de fecundidade por idade, para todas as unidades da federação, bem como os padrões etários da fecundidade, revelam que, se mantidos os padrões reprodutivos observados até o fim da década de 1990, haverá, nos próximos anos, redução dos nascimentos a partir dos 30 ou 35 anos de idade, e taxas de fecundidade de expressivas magnitudes na faixa etária que vai até os 24 anos.
Em 2000, de cada mil mulheres de 15 a 19 anos, 89,3 tiveram filhos nos 12 meses anteriores à data de referência do Censo Demográfico daquele ano; na região Norte foram 137,7 para cada mil mulheres e na Sudeste, 70,7. Muito embora a hipótese implícita na projeção considere a diminuição paulatina das taxas de fecundidade correspondentes a todos os grupos de idade, a fecundidade do segmento jovem de mulheres ganhará cada vez mais representação. Já as mulheres com idades entre os 35 e 49 anos que foram mães pela primeira vez, representavam, em 1991, 8,00% do total de mulheres (363.489), nesta faixa etária, e que tiveram filhos nos doze meses que antecederam o Censo Demográfico daquele ano. Já em 2000, este percentual eleva-se para 13,05% do efetivo de mulheres que deram à luz por volta de 2000 (335.974).
Entre 2000 e 2030, a idade média da fecundidade diminuirá em quase 3 anos no Ceará, São Paulo e Rio Grande do Sul. No mesmo período, à exceção do Espírito Santo, todas as demais unidades da federação das regiões Sudeste e Sul experimentarão reduções de mais de 2 anos. No Centro-Oeste, apenas o Distrito Federal apresentará uma diminuição significativa na idade média da fecundidade, ao passar de 26,10 anos, em 2000, para 23,92 anos, em 2030. No Nordeste, os estados do Maranhão e Piauí, com um rejuvenescimento da fecundidade em torno de 1,6 ano, contrastarão com os outros sete estados, para os quais projetam-se diminuições que superam os dois anos. Na região Norte, somente o Amapá passaria pelo processo de continuado rejuvenescimento da fecundidade, com deslocamento da idade média em, aproximadamente, 2,5 anos.
Fecundidade feminina estará concentrada entre os 15 e 34 anos de idade
Se no transcurso do período que compreende a projeção da fecundidade para o Brasil for realmente constatado este padrão de comportamento reprodutivo, mais de 95% da fecundidade feminina estará concentrada entre os 15 e os 34 anos de idade, em 2030. Ao considerar o grupo etário 20 a 34 anos isoladamente, o estado de Alagoas possuirá a menor concentração da fecundidade (70,95%), ao passo que nas demais unidades da federação (excetuando-se o Acre, com 71,26% e Roraima, com 71,43%) serão verificadas concentrações acima de 71,50%.
Os mais baixos níveis de fecundidade em 2030 estarão concentrados nas regiões Sudeste, Sul e Centro-Oeste, variando entre 1,20 filho por mulher (Rio de Janeiro), e 1,72 filho por mulher (Espírito Santo). Os mais elevados estarão na Região Norte, com destaque para Amapá (2,75), Roraima (2,73) e Acre (2,06 filhos por mulher), Os estados do Ceará e Pará deverão possuir as mais reduzidas taxas de fecundidade das Regiões Nordeste e Norte (1,75 filho por mulher).
Rio Grande do Sul terá a menor e Alagoas a maior taxa de mortalidade em 2030
A mortalidade das crianças com menos de 1 ano de vida, apesar de toda a diminuição experimentada até a década de 1980 ainda posicionou-se em níveis elevados em 1991. Naquele ano, no Brasil, foram contabilizados, aproximadamente, 45 óbitos de menores de 1 ano para cada mil nascidos vivos. Acima da média nacional encontrava-se a Região Nordeste com uma taxa de 71,50%o, e em outro extremo a Sul, com 27,40%o. É durante a década de 1990 que se verificam declínios significativos na mortalidade desta faixa de idade. A taxa registrada para o Brasil em 2000, 30,43%0, foi 32,66% menor que a de 1991, e os maiores declínios destes níveis, no período, foram observados em unidades da federação das regiões Norte e Nordeste, como o Ceará, Roraima e Piauí, com 46,40%, 44,00% e 41,00% de redução, respectivamente. Em 2030, todos os estados das regiões Sudeste, Sul e mais os Estados de Goiás e Mato Grosso do Sul apresentarão taxas inferiores ou iguais a 10%o. Porém, países como Chile, Cuba e Porto Rico, apenas para ilustrar o contexto latino-americano e caribenho, já apresentam nesta primeira década do século XXI taxas inferiores a este valor.
A taxa de mortalidade infantil do Brasil, de 25,88%o, em 2005, coloca o país na 98º posição no ranking dos países ou áreas com as mais baixas taxas estimadas pelas Nações Unidas. Neste caso, a Islândia e o Japão lideram a lista, com 3,2 óbitos de menores de 1 ano para cada 1.000 nascidos vivos. Em 2000, o Brasil, com o indicador estimado em 30,43%o, ocupava o 100º lugar.
Nota:
1. O Quarto Objetivo do Milênio tem como meta a redução em dois terços, até 2015, da mortalidade na infância verificada ao começo da década de 1990.
Fonte IBGE
Base: 1991-2030
IBGE mostra o perfil sociodemógráfico do país e estados nos próximos 25 anos
O processo de envelhecimento da população e a persistência das desigualdades sociais e regionais nas próximas duas décadas são algumas das principais conclusões do estudo Indicadores Sociodemográficos Prospectivos para o Brasil 1991-2030, projeto inédito do IBGE, em parceria com o Fundo de População das Nações Unidas (ONU). O estudo demonstra que os indicadores de fecundidade e de mortalidade correspondentes às regiões Sudeste, Sul e Centro-Oeste permanecerão, nos próximos anos, em níveis mais baixos que os das regiões Norte e Nordeste. Em relação à esperança de vida ao nascer, todas as grandes regiões estarão em níveis próximos aos 80 anos. Já com relação à fecundidade, os números médios de filhos por mulher tenderão a não garantir a reposição das gerações, sobretudo nas Regiões Nordeste e Sul, que deverão permanecer com balanço negativo entre entradas e saídas de pessoas devido à migração. A fecundidade também deverá ter aumento entre as mulheres jovens. As mortalidades no primeiro ano de vida e dos menores de 5 anos de idade continuarão em suas trajetórias de declínio, atingindo níveis abaixo de 10%o (dez mortes a cada mil nascidos vivos), no Sudeste, Sul e Centro-Oeste brasileiros, e patamares superiores a este no Norte e Nordeste. Para o total do país, a taxa de mortalidade infantil, bem como a probabilidade de um recém-nascido falecer antes de completar o quinto ano de vida alcançarão, em 2030, 11,53%o e 15,98%o, respectivamente, cifras que garantem, ao menos se considerada a média nacional, o cumprimento do Quarto Objetivo do Milênio1, que diz respeito à redução da mortalidade na infância. O estudo demonstrou que, se não forem tomadas medidas eficazes de redução da violência e dos acidentes de trânsito, a mortalidade masculina poderá se tornar cinco vezes maior que a mortalidade feminina, no Sudeste.
O estudo demonstra as principais características do processo de transformação do perfil demográfico brasileiro, no horizonte até 2030, tanto no nível nacional, como no contexto das unidades da federação. Entre as informações, destacam-se a redução das taxas de mortalidade, o aumento da esperança de vida, a queda na taxa de fecundidade, entre outros. A partir destes indicadores, o IBGE poderá estruturar um Sistema de Projeções Populacionais por Sexo e por Idade para o período 1991-2030, incorporando os 26 estados e o Distrito Federal. O estudo objetiva fornecer indicativos da provável trajetória dos principais parâmetros, tendo em vista as conquistas já obtidas até o início da presente década. Também auxilia na avaliação das políticas sociais, particularmente no tocante à redução da mortalidade na infância e nas ações para amenizar as desigualdades sociais.
Em 2030, esperança de vida ao nascer será maior em Santa Catarina
Em 2030, enquanto os estados do Maranhão (75,70) e Alagoas (75,16) possuirão esperanças de vida ao nascer de pouco mais de 75 anos, em Santa Catarina (79,76), no Distrito Federal (79,63) e no Rio Grande do Sul (79,59) as respectivas vidas médias ao nascer projetadas ultrapassarão os 79,50 anos. Neste caso, o indicador que representa a média nacional (78,33 anos) estará refletindo a realidade dos estados de maior desenvolvimento econômico e social. Basta verificar as taxas de mortalidade infantil médias para os três estados citados do centro-sul, em torno de 8%o, em 2030, contrastando com as projetadas para Maranhão e Alagoas, respectivamente, 16,10%o e 19,40%.
Em 1991, para a população como um todo, a esperança de vida ao nascer era de 66,93 anos, com uma diferença expressiva entre os sexos: 7,75 anos em favor das mulheres e apresentando um diferencial significativo se o indicador em questão era referido à região Sul ou ao Nordeste. No Sul, a vida média era de 70,40 anos contra 62,83 anos no Nordeste, mostrando um intervalo de 7,57 anos entre ambas. Uma pessoa nascida em Alagoas, por exemplo, esperaria viver em média 59,72 anos, ao passo que no Rio Grande do Sul a média de vida superava os 71,00 anos, evidenciando um distanciamento de 11,38 anos entre ambos os estados.
Em 2000, o Distrito Federal passou a ocupar a primeira posição no ranking das unidades da federação com a mais elevada esperança de vida ao nascer (73,64 anos), enquanto Alagoas permaneceu no último posto (63,84 anos), representando uma diferença de 9,80 anos, menor que a observada no início da década de 1990.
De acordo com as projeções, Santa Catarina passa à liderança a partir de 2015, mantendo-se neste patamar até 2030. Por outro lado, as perspectivas para Alagoas mantêm-se desfavoráveis ao longo das três décadas analisadas, com sua esperança de vida ao nascer posicionando-se em último lugar. Contudo, a diferença entre os dois estados experimentará redução paulatina, atingindo 4,60 anos, em 2030.
Ao considerar cada sexo em separado, os diferenciais interestaduais nas vidas médias masculinas são de 5,16 anos, correspondentes a Santa Catarina em relação a Alagoas, e de 4,12 anos a mais para as mulheres do Distrito Federal, comparativamente às de Alagoas, mostrando que a longo prazo existe uma certa tendência de aproximação entre os níveis de mortalidade inter-regionais. Ainda que apontando para uma diminuição, as diferenças entre as vidas médias ao nascer de homens e mulheres permanecerão relativamente elevadas até 2030, como mostram os resultados para as seguintes unidades da federação: Amapá (7,29 anos), Maranhão (7,38 anos), Ceará (7,64 anos), Rio Grande do Norte (7,17 anos), Alagoas (7,50 anos), Rio de Janeiro (7,46 anos) e São Paulo (7,21 anos). Os aumentos nas esperanças de vida ao nascer da população residente em estados como Rio de Janeiro e São Paulo, por exemplo, poderiam ter sido mais animadores, se não fosse a incidência de elevadas taxas de mortalidade por causas externas sobre o segmento populacional composto por jovens e adultos jovens do sexo masculino.
A esperança de vida projetada para 2005 (72,05 anos) coloca o Brasil em situação um tanto quanto desconfortável, comparativamente aos países latino-americanos e caribenhos. Por exemplo, Costa Rica (78,10), Chile (77,90), Cuba (77,20), Porto Rico (76,00), Uruguai (75,30), Guiana Francesa (75,20), Barbados (74,90), México (74,90), Panamá (74,70), Argentina (74,30), Equador (74,20), Venezuela (72,80), Santa Lúcia (72,30), Colômbia (72,20), possuem esperanças de vida ao nascer superiores a do Brasil. Os países desta região com esperança de vida ao nascer abaixo da estimada para o Brasil são Belize, Paraguai, El Salvador, Jamaica, Trinidad y Tobago, Peru, Bahamas, Nicarágua, Suriname, Honduras, República Dominicana, Guatemala, Bolívia, Guiana e Haiti. De acordo com o rol de estimativas apresentadas pelas Nações Unidas para o período 2000-2005, verifica-se que o Brasil ainda ocupa a 80ª posição no ranking de 192 países ou áreas, liderado pelo Japão, com 81,90 anos de vida média para sua população.
Rio de Janeiro terá menor taxa de fecundidade e Amapá a maior em 2030
As taxas específicas de fecundidade por idade, para todas as unidades da federação, bem como os padrões etários da fecundidade, revelam que, se mantidos os padrões reprodutivos observados até o fim da década de 1990, haverá, nos próximos anos, redução dos nascimentos a partir dos 30 ou 35 anos de idade, e taxas de fecundidade de expressivas magnitudes na faixa etária que vai até os 24 anos.
Em 2000, de cada mil mulheres de 15 a 19 anos, 89,3 tiveram filhos nos 12 meses anteriores à data de referência do Censo Demográfico daquele ano; na região Norte foram 137,7 para cada mil mulheres e na Sudeste, 70,7. Muito embora a hipótese implícita na projeção considere a diminuição paulatina das taxas de fecundidade correspondentes a todos os grupos de idade, a fecundidade do segmento jovem de mulheres ganhará cada vez mais representação. Já as mulheres com idades entre os 35 e 49 anos que foram mães pela primeira vez, representavam, em 1991, 8,00% do total de mulheres (363.489), nesta faixa etária, e que tiveram filhos nos doze meses que antecederam o Censo Demográfico daquele ano. Já em 2000, este percentual eleva-se para 13,05% do efetivo de mulheres que deram à luz por volta de 2000 (335.974).
Entre 2000 e 2030, a idade média da fecundidade diminuirá em quase 3 anos no Ceará, São Paulo e Rio Grande do Sul. No mesmo período, à exceção do Espírito Santo, todas as demais unidades da federação das regiões Sudeste e Sul experimentarão reduções de mais de 2 anos. No Centro-Oeste, apenas o Distrito Federal apresentará uma diminuição significativa na idade média da fecundidade, ao passar de 26,10 anos, em 2000, para 23,92 anos, em 2030. No Nordeste, os estados do Maranhão e Piauí, com um rejuvenescimento da fecundidade em torno de 1,6 ano, contrastarão com os outros sete estados, para os quais projetam-se diminuições que superam os dois anos. Na região Norte, somente o Amapá passaria pelo processo de continuado rejuvenescimento da fecundidade, com deslocamento da idade média em, aproximadamente, 2,5 anos.
Fecundidade feminina estará concentrada entre os 15 e 34 anos de idade
Se no transcurso do período que compreende a projeção da fecundidade para o Brasil for realmente constatado este padrão de comportamento reprodutivo, mais de 95% da fecundidade feminina estará concentrada entre os 15 e os 34 anos de idade, em 2030. Ao considerar o grupo etário 20 a 34 anos isoladamente, o estado de Alagoas possuirá a menor concentração da fecundidade (70,95%), ao passo que nas demais unidades da federação (excetuando-se o Acre, com 71,26% e Roraima, com 71,43%) serão verificadas concentrações acima de 71,50%.
Os mais baixos níveis de fecundidade em 2030 estarão concentrados nas regiões Sudeste, Sul e Centro-Oeste, variando entre 1,20 filho por mulher (Rio de Janeiro), e 1,72 filho por mulher (Espírito Santo). Os mais elevados estarão na Região Norte, com destaque para Amapá (2,75), Roraima (2,73) e Acre (2,06 filhos por mulher), Os estados do Ceará e Pará deverão possuir as mais reduzidas taxas de fecundidade das Regiões Nordeste e Norte (1,75 filho por mulher).
Rio Grande do Sul terá a menor e Alagoas a maior taxa de mortalidade em 2030
A mortalidade das crianças com menos de 1 ano de vida, apesar de toda a diminuição experimentada até a década de 1980 ainda posicionou-se em níveis elevados em 1991. Naquele ano, no Brasil, foram contabilizados, aproximadamente, 45 óbitos de menores de 1 ano para cada mil nascidos vivos. Acima da média nacional encontrava-se a Região Nordeste com uma taxa de 71,50%o, e em outro extremo a Sul, com 27,40%o. É durante a década de 1990 que se verificam declínios significativos na mortalidade desta faixa de idade. A taxa registrada para o Brasil em 2000, 30,43%0, foi 32,66% menor que a de 1991, e os maiores declínios destes níveis, no período, foram observados em unidades da federação das regiões Norte e Nordeste, como o Ceará, Roraima e Piauí, com 46,40%, 44,00% e 41,00% de redução, respectivamente. Em 2030, todos os estados das regiões Sudeste, Sul e mais os Estados de Goiás e Mato Grosso do Sul apresentarão taxas inferiores ou iguais a 10%o. Porém, países como Chile, Cuba e Porto Rico, apenas para ilustrar o contexto latino-americano e caribenho, já apresentam nesta primeira década do século XXI taxas inferiores a este valor.
A taxa de mortalidade infantil do Brasil, de 25,88%o, em 2005, coloca o país na 98º posição no ranking dos países ou áreas com as mais baixas taxas estimadas pelas Nações Unidas. Neste caso, a Islândia e o Japão lideram a lista, com 3,2 óbitos de menores de 1 ano para cada 1.000 nascidos vivos. Em 2000, o Brasil, com o indicador estimado em 30,43%o, ocupava o 100º lugar.
Nota:
1. O Quarto Objetivo do Milênio tem como meta a redução em dois terços, até 2015, da mortalidade na infância verificada ao começo da década de 1990.
sexta-feira, dezembro 22, 2006
171) Colhendo subsidios: o generoso pagamento a ricos agricultores nos EUA
Uma materia especial, que remete a diversas outras materias, na verdade uma serie inteira de reportagens do Washington Post sobre a questao dos subsidios agricolas, altamente pornograficos.
FarmsubsidiesWPost21Dez06.doc
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/20/AR2006122001591.html?referrer=email
Acesso 22 Dez 2006
Special Report:
Harvesting Cash
Working a Farm Subsidy
As Congress prepares to debate a farm bill in 2007, The Washington Post is examining federal agriculture subsidies that grew to more than $25 billion in 2005, despite near-record farm revenue.
• Farm Program Pays $1.3 Billion to People Who Don't Farm, July 2
• Growers Reap Benefits Even in Good Year, July 3
• No Drought Required For Federal Drought Aid, July 18
• Benefit for Ranchers Was Created to Help GOP Candidate, July 18
• When Feed Was Cheap, Catfish Farmers Got Help Buying It, July 18
• Aid to Ranchers Was Diverted For Big Profits, July 19
• Aid Is a Bumper Crop for Farmers, October 15
• 'Farming Your Insurance', October 15
• Too Big for Disaster Aid, Farmer Chooses to Divide and Conquer, October 15
• Most Farmers Skipping Subsidized Loans and Going for the Cash, October 15
• Crop Insurers Piling Up Record Profits, October 16
• Dairy Industry Crushed Innovator Who Bested Price-Control System, December 10
• Federal Subsidies Turn Farms Into Big Business, December 21
• A Big Farm, but Not So Big It Could Get By Without Subsidies, December 21
• Powerful Interests Ally to Restructure Agriculture Subsidies, December 22
» FULL COVERAGE
Graphic
The Changing Family Farm
Many American family farms have been transformed from small, self-contained businesses to complex enterprises. That change has been helped along by government agricultural payments that guarantee crop prices or prop up farmers' incomes - payments that increasingly go to the largest farms.
Federal Subsidies Turn Farms Into Big Business
By Gilbert M. Gaul, Sarah Cohen and Dan Morgan
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, December 21, 2006; A01
The cornerstone of the multibillion-dollar system of federal farm subsidies is an iconic image of the struggling family farmer: small, powerless against Mother Nature, tied to the land by blood.
Without generous government help, farm-state politicians say, thousands of these hardworking families would fail, threatening the nation's abundant food supply.
"In today's fast-paced, interconnected world, there are few industries where sons and daughters can work side-by-side with moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas," Rep. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) said last year. "But we still find that today in agriculture. . . . It is a celebration of what too many in our country have forgotten, an endangered way of life that we must work each and every day to preserve."
This imagery secures billions annually in what one grower called "empathy payments" for farmers. But it is misleading.
Today, most of the nation's food is produced by modern family farms that are large operations using state-of-the-art computers, marketing consultants and technologies that cut labor, time and costs. The owners are frequently college graduates who are as comfortable with a spreadsheet as with a tractor. They cover more acres and produce more crops with fewer workers than ever before.
The very policies touted by Congress as a way to save small family farms are instead helping to accelerate their demise, economists, analysts and farmers say. That's because owners of large farms receive the largest share of government subsidies. They often use the money to acquire more land, pushing aside small and medium-size farms as well as young farmers starting out.
"Historically, when you think of family farms, you think of Mom and Dad and three generations working a small or mid-sized farm. It gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling," said Alex White, a professor of agricultural economics at Virginia Tech. "In the real world, it might be a mid-sized farm. But it also might be a huge farm. It might be a corporation."
Large family farms, defined as those with revenue of more than $250,000, account for nearly 60 percent of all agricultural production but just 7 percent of all farms. They receive more than 54 percent of government subsidies. And their share of federal payments is growing -- more than doubling over the past decade for the biggest farms.
Two farms help to tell the tale.
John Phipps of Chrisman, Ill., harvested nearly 170,000 bushels of corn and soybeans last year on two square miles of fertile soil. He grossed nearly $500,000, putting his farm in the nation's top 3 percent. Still, he received $120,000 in subsidies.
"It's embarrassing," Phipps said. "My government is basically saying I am incompetent and need help."
Several hundred miles northwest, Thomas Oswald farms the same Iowa fields that his relatives worked more than a century ago. The land he rents is about one-third the size of Phipps's, and Oswald's subsidies are much smaller. Oswald contends that federal payments are helping to fuel a spike in land prices that favors the wealthy.
"If the purpose of farm policy was to save the family farm and help stabilize rural communities, then it hasn't worked," Oswald said. "What the government is really doing is subsidizing land and assets, not people."
A New Era in Farming
The transformation of the family farm from a small, self-contained business to a complex, technology-driven enterprise is seen today in a rapidly changing rural landscape dominated by larger and wealthier farms. That landscape shows a vastly different picture of family farms than the one often evoked by legislators and industry groups: bigger, more industrial than agrarian, with owners wealthier than most Main Street Americans.
In a late-October speech in Indianapolis, Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said that, in the face of higher energy prices and natural disasters, "our farmers' resiliency is evident": Agricultural exports are at a record $68 billion; farm equity has swelled to $1.6 trillion, another record; and farmers' debt-to-assets ratio is at a 45-year low.
"Today, producers grow more crops and handle more livestock more efficiently than at any time in the history of mankind," Johanns said.
Nevertheless, just last year the government paid out about $15 billion in income support or price guarantees, which increasingly are going to the largest farms -- those with annual sales of $500,000 or more. Between 1989 and 2003, the share of federal payments for those farms jumped from 13 percent to 32 percent while the share going to small and medium-size farms -- those with $250,000 or less in sales -- dropped from 63 percent to 43 percent.
In 2003, the owners of the biggest family farms reported an average household income of $214,200, more than three times that of U.S. households on average. "Farm households are not, in general, poor," government researchers concluded.
To be sure, there are still many small and medium-size family farms. In fact, they account for nine of every 10 farms nationwide -- 1.9 million farms in all, according to the Agriculture Department's definition. But about a million of those farms are "hobby" or "residential" farms that produce little or no income from crops or livestock. The government's definition of a farm includes any operation that has or could have $1,000 annually in sales.
By including "these very, very small hobby farms" in its overall count, the USDA is "masking the tremendous consolidation" that has occurred, said Iowa State University economist Michael D. Duffy.
The shift in subsidies to wealthier farmers is helping to fuel this consolidation of farmland. The largest farms' share of agricultural production has climbed from 32 percent to 45 percent while the number for small and medium-size farms has tumbled from 42 percent to 27 percent.
As in many states, farmland in Iowa is being gathered up into ever-larger farms. In many cases, the owners are families buying up neighboring tracts. But increasingly, outside investors are also buying Iowa farmland, with "one in five acres of farmland in Iowa now owned by someone who doesn't live here," Duffy said. Many of the outside landlords rent their land to the highest bidders.
Nationally, the average size of a farm has more than doubled in the past two decades, to 441 acres. Many farms now cover thousands of acres, some tens of thousands.
"It seems as though conventional agricultural policy is to get big or get out," said Traci Bruckner, a policy analyst at the Center for Rural Affairs in Lyons, Neb., which works to preserve small farms and rural communities. "To me, that seems backwards."
'Farming Is a Science'
From the perch of his $180,000 six-row combine, churning through cornfields that stretch as far as the eye can see, John Phipps has a rare view of American farm policy.
Outfitted against a gray October day in jeans, wool shirt, vest and faded baseball cap, Phipps, 58, resembled hundreds of other farmers as he struggled to change a filter on his combine. But he is hardly typical. Trained as a chemical engineer, Phipps spent five years serving on a nuclear-powered submarine before returning to east-central Illinois in the 1970s.
Today, he calls himself an "industrial farmer" who uses computers, technology and science to get the most out of the 1,800 acres of corn and soybeans he plants in an area of Illinois where the weather and soil are ideal for farming. The strategy has paid off with bigger and better yields.
Yet to Congress and federal agricultural officials, Phipps and his wife, Jan, are struggling family farmers. Last year, the government sent the Phippses a check for $120,000. Thousands of similar checks arrived throughout the Corn Belt, even as many farmers had bumper crops.
"Being labeled as a family farmer immediately qualifies me as someone who needs help," he said. "Name one other business like that -- there are none."
Over the past decade, farmers in the Midwest have produced one record crop after another. Now, surging demand for corn-based ethanol has corn prices at a 10-year high.
Phipps resents the images used to evoke sympathy for farmers. "I think they do us more harm than good," he said as he scrambled to finish his harvest. "I don't think farmers are any more special than anyone else; lots of people work hard and don't get help. Why should farmers get special treatment?"
In addition to farming, Phipps hosts a weekly farm television show, writes a blog and contributes articles to Farm Journal. That income helps significantly, he said, allowing him "a little more flexibility" than other farmers have. In the past five years, the Phippses have also received about $357,000 in federal subsidies.
"I'm not proud of it," he said. "I would like to have the moral courage and financial clout not to take them. But if I don't, I won't be able to compete when it comes time to bid for land."
Phipps knows that this fuels the rising cost of farmland; an acre of land there now sells for about $4,800. "When I belly up and write a check, I am perpetuating the problem," he said. "For the most part, all of the smaller farmers have all been flushed out in the last five years."
Still, Phipps's sympathy extends only so far. Large farms are a "rational and ethical" response to market demands, he said. His family has farmed there for six generations, Phipps himself for the past three decades. He owns 800 acres outright or with his siblings and rents 1,000 acres. His wife is his main helper and drives one of the trucks that haul up to 700 bushels of corn per load to grain bins. "Imagine that: Two middle-aged people able to farm 1,800 acres," Phipps marveled. "That's all because of the immense technology we have at our hands. We are horrendously efficient."
As his combine churns down the rows of corn, Phipps knows exactly how many bushels he is harvesting, acre by acre, row by row. The information is downloaded to his computer so he can put it in a spreadsheet.
"Farming is a science now," he said. "The image of a farmer in bib overalls bumbling along is just wrong. I'm an engineer, for God's sake."
'I Want to Earn It'
In mid-November, when the harvest is finished, Thomas Oswald, 40, retreats to his neatly restored house bordering the fields in northwest Iowa that his family has farmed since 1870. There, he dabbles on the computer, checking yields and prices, does odd jobs, and plans for the next planting season. Oswald also serves as chairman of the local Soil and Water Conservation District.
"I want to be known as someone who farms well as opposed to farming big," he says.
The 580 acres where Oswald grows corn and soybeans straddle a gravel road on the outskirts of Cleghorn, a rural farming community. Oswald rents most of the land from his father, Stanley, who at 78 still helps with the harvest. Oswald and his father share the income from the farm, which grosses $150,000 to $250,000. "We're a small to medium-size farm," Oswald said. He also does farming for neighbors, and his wife, Suzanne, works as a travel agent in Cherokee.
As with many farming areas in the Corn Belt, land values are increasing and farms are getting bigger in Cherokee County. Between 1990 and 2005, the average price for an acre of farmland more than doubled, to $3,186, according to a USDA database of land values. Between 1997 and 2002, the number of farms with 1,000 or more acres climbed by nearly one-quarter, while the number of small and medium-size farms, such as Oswald's, declined by 12 percent.
"Land prices are going nuts," Oswald said. "Some farms are going for $4,000 to $5,000 an acre." In summer, it is not unusual to see owners of larger farms "out trolling for land." The chances of smaller farmers successfully bidding for those acres are slim. "You might as well buy a lottery ticket," Oswald said.
For smaller farmers, he said, it is a Catch-22. "In order to afford land, you already have to own land or have a lot of money," he said. "The more subsidies you get, the more money you have to reinvest and expand. That free money distorts the economic pluses and minuses."
The subsidy-fueled competition for land has changed the culture and demographics of farming areas such as Cherokee County. In the past, Oswald said, there was more sharing among neighbors. "It was less about acquiring land," he said. Now, neighbors sometimes are eyed warily as competitors.
Larger, more efficient farms also require fewer workers, offering less opportunity for younger people. Cherokee County has lost one-third of its population since 1960, records show. Across Iowa, there are now twice as many farmers over the age of 65 as under the age of 35, according to Iowa State researchers. "You see the thinning of the population, and at some point you have to ask yourself, 'When does that line become too thin?' " Oswald said.
Contrary to some expectations, the billions in subsidies have failed to slow the exodus. A March 2005 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City found that hundreds of counties most dependent on subsidies had suffered the biggest population losses and posted the weakest job growth. "Farm payments appear to create dependency on even more payments, not new engines of economic growth," concluded the study's author, Mark Drabenstott.
Oswald has received nearly $98,000 in subsidies in the past five years. Each check is a "cash infusion" that helps to pay the bills. "It's hard to be proud of the little brown envelope if you don't do anything to earn it," he said. "I want to earn it."
Oswald chose to remain smaller, he said, explaining that he does not "want to muscle out neighbors" for land and is conservative about taking on too much risk. And although he may be small, Oswald stressed, he is not backward. "That's an image they use in Washington to sell these programs," he said. "It's an emotion argument -- political."
Research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.
FarmsubsidiesWPost21Dez06.doc
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/20/AR2006122001591.html?referrer=email
Acesso 22 Dez 2006
Special Report:
Harvesting Cash
Working a Farm Subsidy
As Congress prepares to debate a farm bill in 2007, The Washington Post is examining federal agriculture subsidies that grew to more than $25 billion in 2005, despite near-record farm revenue.
• Farm Program Pays $1.3 Billion to People Who Don't Farm, July 2
• Growers Reap Benefits Even in Good Year, July 3
• No Drought Required For Federal Drought Aid, July 18
• Benefit for Ranchers Was Created to Help GOP Candidate, July 18
• When Feed Was Cheap, Catfish Farmers Got Help Buying It, July 18
• Aid to Ranchers Was Diverted For Big Profits, July 19
• Aid Is a Bumper Crop for Farmers, October 15
• 'Farming Your Insurance', October 15
• Too Big for Disaster Aid, Farmer Chooses to Divide and Conquer, October 15
• Most Farmers Skipping Subsidized Loans and Going for the Cash, October 15
• Crop Insurers Piling Up Record Profits, October 16
• Dairy Industry Crushed Innovator Who Bested Price-Control System, December 10
• Federal Subsidies Turn Farms Into Big Business, December 21
• A Big Farm, but Not So Big It Could Get By Without Subsidies, December 21
• Powerful Interests Ally to Restructure Agriculture Subsidies, December 22
» FULL COVERAGE
Graphic
The Changing Family Farm
Many American family farms have been transformed from small, self-contained businesses to complex enterprises. That change has been helped along by government agricultural payments that guarantee crop prices or prop up farmers' incomes - payments that increasingly go to the largest farms.
Federal Subsidies Turn Farms Into Big Business
By Gilbert M. Gaul, Sarah Cohen and Dan Morgan
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, December 21, 2006; A01
The cornerstone of the multibillion-dollar system of federal farm subsidies is an iconic image of the struggling family farmer: small, powerless against Mother Nature, tied to the land by blood.
Without generous government help, farm-state politicians say, thousands of these hardworking families would fail, threatening the nation's abundant food supply.
"In today's fast-paced, interconnected world, there are few industries where sons and daughters can work side-by-side with moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas," Rep. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) said last year. "But we still find that today in agriculture. . . . It is a celebration of what too many in our country have forgotten, an endangered way of life that we must work each and every day to preserve."
This imagery secures billions annually in what one grower called "empathy payments" for farmers. But it is misleading.
Today, most of the nation's food is produced by modern family farms that are large operations using state-of-the-art computers, marketing consultants and technologies that cut labor, time and costs. The owners are frequently college graduates who are as comfortable with a spreadsheet as with a tractor. They cover more acres and produce more crops with fewer workers than ever before.
The very policies touted by Congress as a way to save small family farms are instead helping to accelerate their demise, economists, analysts and farmers say. That's because owners of large farms receive the largest share of government subsidies. They often use the money to acquire more land, pushing aside small and medium-size farms as well as young farmers starting out.
"Historically, when you think of family farms, you think of Mom and Dad and three generations working a small or mid-sized farm. It gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling," said Alex White, a professor of agricultural economics at Virginia Tech. "In the real world, it might be a mid-sized farm. But it also might be a huge farm. It might be a corporation."
Large family farms, defined as those with revenue of more than $250,000, account for nearly 60 percent of all agricultural production but just 7 percent of all farms. They receive more than 54 percent of government subsidies. And their share of federal payments is growing -- more than doubling over the past decade for the biggest farms.
Two farms help to tell the tale.
John Phipps of Chrisman, Ill., harvested nearly 170,000 bushels of corn and soybeans last year on two square miles of fertile soil. He grossed nearly $500,000, putting his farm in the nation's top 3 percent. Still, he received $120,000 in subsidies.
"It's embarrassing," Phipps said. "My government is basically saying I am incompetent and need help."
Several hundred miles northwest, Thomas Oswald farms the same Iowa fields that his relatives worked more than a century ago. The land he rents is about one-third the size of Phipps's, and Oswald's subsidies are much smaller. Oswald contends that federal payments are helping to fuel a spike in land prices that favors the wealthy.
"If the purpose of farm policy was to save the family farm and help stabilize rural communities, then it hasn't worked," Oswald said. "What the government is really doing is subsidizing land and assets, not people."
A New Era in Farming
The transformation of the family farm from a small, self-contained business to a complex, technology-driven enterprise is seen today in a rapidly changing rural landscape dominated by larger and wealthier farms. That landscape shows a vastly different picture of family farms than the one often evoked by legislators and industry groups: bigger, more industrial than agrarian, with owners wealthier than most Main Street Americans.
In a late-October speech in Indianapolis, Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said that, in the face of higher energy prices and natural disasters, "our farmers' resiliency is evident": Agricultural exports are at a record $68 billion; farm equity has swelled to $1.6 trillion, another record; and farmers' debt-to-assets ratio is at a 45-year low.
"Today, producers grow more crops and handle more livestock more efficiently than at any time in the history of mankind," Johanns said.
Nevertheless, just last year the government paid out about $15 billion in income support or price guarantees, which increasingly are going to the largest farms -- those with annual sales of $500,000 or more. Between 1989 and 2003, the share of federal payments for those farms jumped from 13 percent to 32 percent while the share going to small and medium-size farms -- those with $250,000 or less in sales -- dropped from 63 percent to 43 percent.
In 2003, the owners of the biggest family farms reported an average household income of $214,200, more than three times that of U.S. households on average. "Farm households are not, in general, poor," government researchers concluded.
To be sure, there are still many small and medium-size family farms. In fact, they account for nine of every 10 farms nationwide -- 1.9 million farms in all, according to the Agriculture Department's definition. But about a million of those farms are "hobby" or "residential" farms that produce little or no income from crops or livestock. The government's definition of a farm includes any operation that has or could have $1,000 annually in sales.
By including "these very, very small hobby farms" in its overall count, the USDA is "masking the tremendous consolidation" that has occurred, said Iowa State University economist Michael D. Duffy.
The shift in subsidies to wealthier farmers is helping to fuel this consolidation of farmland. The largest farms' share of agricultural production has climbed from 32 percent to 45 percent while the number for small and medium-size farms has tumbled from 42 percent to 27 percent.
As in many states, farmland in Iowa is being gathered up into ever-larger farms. In many cases, the owners are families buying up neighboring tracts. But increasingly, outside investors are also buying Iowa farmland, with "one in five acres of farmland in Iowa now owned by someone who doesn't live here," Duffy said. Many of the outside landlords rent their land to the highest bidders.
Nationally, the average size of a farm has more than doubled in the past two decades, to 441 acres. Many farms now cover thousands of acres, some tens of thousands.
"It seems as though conventional agricultural policy is to get big or get out," said Traci Bruckner, a policy analyst at the Center for Rural Affairs in Lyons, Neb., which works to preserve small farms and rural communities. "To me, that seems backwards."
'Farming Is a Science'
From the perch of his $180,000 six-row combine, churning through cornfields that stretch as far as the eye can see, John Phipps has a rare view of American farm policy.
Outfitted against a gray October day in jeans, wool shirt, vest and faded baseball cap, Phipps, 58, resembled hundreds of other farmers as he struggled to change a filter on his combine. But he is hardly typical. Trained as a chemical engineer, Phipps spent five years serving on a nuclear-powered submarine before returning to east-central Illinois in the 1970s.
Today, he calls himself an "industrial farmer" who uses computers, technology and science to get the most out of the 1,800 acres of corn and soybeans he plants in an area of Illinois where the weather and soil are ideal for farming. The strategy has paid off with bigger and better yields.
Yet to Congress and federal agricultural officials, Phipps and his wife, Jan, are struggling family farmers. Last year, the government sent the Phippses a check for $120,000. Thousands of similar checks arrived throughout the Corn Belt, even as many farmers had bumper crops.
"Being labeled as a family farmer immediately qualifies me as someone who needs help," he said. "Name one other business like that -- there are none."
Over the past decade, farmers in the Midwest have produced one record crop after another. Now, surging demand for corn-based ethanol has corn prices at a 10-year high.
Phipps resents the images used to evoke sympathy for farmers. "I think they do us more harm than good," he said as he scrambled to finish his harvest. "I don't think farmers are any more special than anyone else; lots of people work hard and don't get help. Why should farmers get special treatment?"
In addition to farming, Phipps hosts a weekly farm television show, writes a blog and contributes articles to Farm Journal. That income helps significantly, he said, allowing him "a little more flexibility" than other farmers have. In the past five years, the Phippses have also received about $357,000 in federal subsidies.
"I'm not proud of it," he said. "I would like to have the moral courage and financial clout not to take them. But if I don't, I won't be able to compete when it comes time to bid for land."
Phipps knows that this fuels the rising cost of farmland; an acre of land there now sells for about $4,800. "When I belly up and write a check, I am perpetuating the problem," he said. "For the most part, all of the smaller farmers have all been flushed out in the last five years."
Still, Phipps's sympathy extends only so far. Large farms are a "rational and ethical" response to market demands, he said. His family has farmed there for six generations, Phipps himself for the past three decades. He owns 800 acres outright or with his siblings and rents 1,000 acres. His wife is his main helper and drives one of the trucks that haul up to 700 bushels of corn per load to grain bins. "Imagine that: Two middle-aged people able to farm 1,800 acres," Phipps marveled. "That's all because of the immense technology we have at our hands. We are horrendously efficient."
As his combine churns down the rows of corn, Phipps knows exactly how many bushels he is harvesting, acre by acre, row by row. The information is downloaded to his computer so he can put it in a spreadsheet.
"Farming is a science now," he said. "The image of a farmer in bib overalls bumbling along is just wrong. I'm an engineer, for God's sake."
'I Want to Earn It'
In mid-November, when the harvest is finished, Thomas Oswald, 40, retreats to his neatly restored house bordering the fields in northwest Iowa that his family has farmed since 1870. There, he dabbles on the computer, checking yields and prices, does odd jobs, and plans for the next planting season. Oswald also serves as chairman of the local Soil and Water Conservation District.
"I want to be known as someone who farms well as opposed to farming big," he says.
The 580 acres where Oswald grows corn and soybeans straddle a gravel road on the outskirts of Cleghorn, a rural farming community. Oswald rents most of the land from his father, Stanley, who at 78 still helps with the harvest. Oswald and his father share the income from the farm, which grosses $150,000 to $250,000. "We're a small to medium-size farm," Oswald said. He also does farming for neighbors, and his wife, Suzanne, works as a travel agent in Cherokee.
As with many farming areas in the Corn Belt, land values are increasing and farms are getting bigger in Cherokee County. Between 1990 and 2005, the average price for an acre of farmland more than doubled, to $3,186, according to a USDA database of land values. Between 1997 and 2002, the number of farms with 1,000 or more acres climbed by nearly one-quarter, while the number of small and medium-size farms, such as Oswald's, declined by 12 percent.
"Land prices are going nuts," Oswald said. "Some farms are going for $4,000 to $5,000 an acre." In summer, it is not unusual to see owners of larger farms "out trolling for land." The chances of smaller farmers successfully bidding for those acres are slim. "You might as well buy a lottery ticket," Oswald said.
For smaller farmers, he said, it is a Catch-22. "In order to afford land, you already have to own land or have a lot of money," he said. "The more subsidies you get, the more money you have to reinvest and expand. That free money distorts the economic pluses and minuses."
The subsidy-fueled competition for land has changed the culture and demographics of farming areas such as Cherokee County. In the past, Oswald said, there was more sharing among neighbors. "It was less about acquiring land," he said. Now, neighbors sometimes are eyed warily as competitors.
Larger, more efficient farms also require fewer workers, offering less opportunity for younger people. Cherokee County has lost one-third of its population since 1960, records show. Across Iowa, there are now twice as many farmers over the age of 65 as under the age of 35, according to Iowa State researchers. "You see the thinning of the population, and at some point you have to ask yourself, 'When does that line become too thin?' " Oswald said.
Contrary to some expectations, the billions in subsidies have failed to slow the exodus. A March 2005 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City found that hundreds of counties most dependent on subsidies had suffered the biggest population losses and posted the weakest job growth. "Farm payments appear to create dependency on even more payments, not new engines of economic growth," concluded the study's author, Mark Drabenstott.
Oswald has received nearly $98,000 in subsidies in the past five years. Each check is a "cash infusion" that helps to pay the bills. "It's hard to be proud of the little brown envelope if you don't do anything to earn it," he said. "I want to earn it."
Oswald chose to remain smaller, he said, explaining that he does not "want to muscle out neighbors" for land and is conservative about taking on too much risk. And although he may be small, Oswald stressed, he is not backward. "That's an image they use in Washington to sell these programs," he said. "It's an emotion argument -- political."
Research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.
sexta-feira, dezembro 15, 2006
170) Um debate sobre o futuro da China...
...isto é, o nosso futuro.
Meghnad Desai é o autor indiano do saboroso "The Revenge of Karl Marx" (ja traduzido e publicado no Brasil) e Will Huton é uma especie de conselheiro informal do New Labour...
A revista mensal britanica Prospect, consoante seu nome, já está em 2007...
-------------
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Prospect Mazine, London, January 2007 |
Debate: Does the future really belong to China?
If China does not abandon one-party rule, will it stumble under the stresses of state capitalism? Or will it show that there can be a successful authoritarian road to modernity?
Will Hutton
Meghnad Desai
Will Hutton is author of “The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century,” published in January by Little, Brown
Meghnad Desai is a former director of the Centre for Global Governance and an emeritus professor of economics at the LSE. He is also a Labour peer
Dear Meghnad
29th November 2006
It is a commonplace to observe that the rise of China is transforming the world. Extrapolate from current growth rates and China will be the world's largest economy by the middle of this century, if not before. If it remains communist, the impact on the world system will be enormous and very damaging. Britain and the US are, for all their faults, democracies that accept the rule of law. This is not true of China. If an unreformed China takes its place at the top table, the global order will be kinder to despotism; the fragile emergence of an international system of governance based on the rule of law will be set back and the relations between states will depend even more nakedly on their relative power.
All that, however, is predicated on two very big "ifs"—if the current Chinese growth rate continues, and if the country remains communist. I think there are substantial doubts about each proposition. What is certain is that both cannot hold. China is reaching the limits of the sustainability of its current model, and to extrapolate from the past into the future as if nothing needs to change is a first-order mistake.
Our concern in the west should be to help China face its enormous challenges without damaging us in the process. If Chinese communism can transform itself, then China could, like Japan before it, smoothly integrate into the world power system. If not, severe convulsions lie ahead.
China's economic growth is based on the state channelling vast under-priced savings into huge investment projects driven by cheap labour. Some 200m of China's 760m workforce are migrant peasants employed in factories, construction sites and offices in its new towns and cities—the biggest migration in history. The Communist party has permitted free movement of prices, encourages profit-seeking and has sharply lowered tariffs on imports and obstacles to inward investment. Its success in creating annual growth of some 9.5 per cent for a generation, lifting 400m people out of poverty, is widely acknowledged. But the party keeps firm control of ownership, wages and company strategies—and of the state. In other words, China occupies an uneasy halfway house between socialism and capitalism; its private sector, although growing, is still puny. It is a system of Leninist corporatism—and it is this that is breaking down.
The breaches in the model are all around. How much longer can China's state-owned banks carry on directing billions of dollars of savings into investments that produce tiny or even negative returns and on which interest is irregularly paid? Poor peasants' ability to create the savings needed to fuel growth is reaching its limits. And in any case, for how long can a $2 trillion economy save at more than 40 per cent of GDP? It is reaching the limit of its capacity to increase exports (which in 2007 will surpass $1 trillion) by 25 per cent a year; at this rate of growth they will reach $5 trillion by 2020 or sooner, representing more than half of today's world trade. Is that likely? Are there sufficient ships and ports to move such volumes—and will western markets stay open without real reciprocity on trade? Every year China acquires $200bn of foreign exchange reserves, mainly dollars, as it rigs its currency to keep its exports competitive. It is absurd for a poor country like China to be lending to a rich one like the US; in fact, it is unsustainable, and the financial markets seem to agree.
China would like to lower the current feverish growth rates, but the tools available in the west—raising taxes, cutting spending and lifting interest rates—are not available to China. The party dare not trigger protests by raising taxes; officials in state enterprises and provincial governments ignore orders to lower spending because their careers depend on generating growth and jobs. And raising interest rates could create a credit crunch as loans go sour.
Nor are the limits solely economic. The 200m migrants resent seeing others grow rich as they languish in poverty. Inequality is soaring and corruption is endemic, infecting chief executives of banks, provincial governors and judges. About 400,000 people a year die of respiratory diseases caused by polluted air. China's GDP is a fifth of America's, but it releases nearly as much carbon dioxide into the air. To cap it all, the Communist party is in ideological crisis: it says the class war is over even while claiming monopoly power as the trustee of the 1949 revolution. Without continued economic growth, the party's legitimacy would be in question.
Behind all these problems lies China's only partial conversion to capitalism. Everything in China is subject to the party. Yet capitalism is much more than the profit motive and the freedom to set prices that China's reforms have permitted. The effective use of resources also depends upon a network of independent processes of scrutiny and accountability, undertaken by people in multiple centres of power and backed by rights and private property. A democratic election system is but the coping stone of this structure.
Judges who rule on evidence to deliver justice, newspapers reporting events and even corporate whistleblowers are crucial to the operation of western capitalism. It is the interaction of these hard and soft processes—what I call an "Enlightenment infrastructure"—that allows technological progress to be exploited efficiently and relatively honestly. China had markets, property and technology in the 18th century; it fell behind because it didn't have Enlightenment structures. It lacked the "trinity" of pluralism (multiple centres of political and economic power), capabilities (rights, education, private ownership) and justification (accountability, scrutiny, free expression).
The Chinese Communist party, despite local piecemeal experimentation, is repeating the mistake of the Confucian imperial system. It is the lack of independent scrutiny and accountability that lies behind the massive waste of investment and China's destruction of its environment. The reason so few people can name a great Chinese brand or company, despite the country's export success, is that there are none. China needs to build them, but doing that in an authoritarian state is impossible. In any case, more than 55 per cent of China's exports, especially high-tech ones, are made by foreign firms—another sign of China's weakness.
China needs to become a more normal economy. Chinese consumers need to save less and spend more, but people without property rights or state welfare are understandably cautious. Giving them more confidence would require secure property rights and taxation to fund a welfare system. That would mean creating an empowered middle class that would want to know how its taxes are spent. This is a political impossibility.
If this argument is right, the terms of debate about China must change. Instead of frightening ourselves about China's rise, we need to recognise our own strengths and its weaknesses. We need to be confident about so-called western values and processes—and strengthen them at home and abroad. The best way to meet the China challenge is not to close our markets and build our armies—a strong impulse in the US. It is to stay open, confident that China will only be able to truly compete with the west if it becomes more like us.
Yours
Will
Dear Will
1st December 2006
For a liberal pluralist, you sound oddly like a monist, if not a monotheist. For you, there is only one road to capitalism—the western one—and only one political system—ours.
China has achieved rapid growth with a policy of under-consumption and over-saving, and exports rather than domestic consumption. But this is not an unusual path, nor one that China is stuck on. Japan and South Korea used the same model and are now part of the OECD club of rich countries. Moving millions of peasants to urban manufacturing centres is neither totalitarian nor sinister. It was proposed as the standard development model by Arthur Lewis, a Nobel laureate, in 1954, and is indeed the classical model. (If it was less dramatic in parts of Europe, this is partly because a third of Europeans moved to North America in the second half of the 19th century.) There are no other ways of shaking off poverty. The services sector alone will not do it, and nor will a green revolution, as India is finding out.
China's very large numbers do not in themselves make its development unsustainable. If India can achieve 8 per cent growth on a 25 per cent savings rate, China (which now has 10.4 per cent growth on a 44 per cent savings rate) will surely manage the same. Moreover, China has been reforming its banking sector and the world has shown its approval by buying up the shares of Chinese banks.
China has a lot to learn about macroeconomic management, but its failings have nothing to do with totalitarianism. India is also shy about liberalising its capital account. The Asian financial crisis of 1997 taught China and India to keep a pool of liquidity handy, even at the cost of forgoing a better use for the money.
Yes, there is a Leninist party in power within a state capitalist system. But capitalism has no unique path, nor does it require a liberal democratic infrastructure to flourish. Japan's economic rise took place without a fully liberal infrastructure, and most European states, including Britain and Germany, were capitalist before they were democratic. What the most recent phase of globalisation has shown is that capitalism requires neither the Weberian Protestant ethic nor liberal democracy; any country with a decent savings rate, mass education and access to western markets can "do" capitalism. It is not a western Christian monopoly. Indeed, some Asians are proving better at it than the Europeans.
Many people simply find it hard to believe that countries like China and India, which were famine-stricken and miserable only 40 years ago, are now wiping out western industry. But this was the American complaint in the 1960s when facing European competition in the car market. How could these upstarts compete with Detroit? But compete they did, and they were soon followed by Japan and South Korea. Today the upstarts are China and India, and tomorrow they will be Ghana or Kenya.
Capitalism is not, as you say, about "much more than profit." It is first and foremost about profit and capital accumulation. It has accommodated a variety of institutional arrangements and only in the most recent phase of globalisation have we thought that an Anglo-Saxon-style liberal democracy is its sine qua non.
Let me now come to the political issue. The Chinese Communist party is at one level Leninist, but it is unlike the Russian Bolshevik party. The Chinese communists had to struggle to win the support of the peasantry for a decade and a half before they won power in 1949. They developed a philosophy of responding to popular needs within the confines of a single party. This is what they call people's democracy, and it is much more real than it was in eastern Europe. My colleague at LSE, Chun Lin, argues in The Transformation of Chinese Socialism that the Chinese concept of people's democracy is viable. In her view, the tradition has some strength left in it, although the party will have to become even more responsive. Deng Xiaoping encouraged inegalitarian capitalist growth for a period, but there may now be a reaction against it. At the recent People's Congress, Hu Jintao made some noises about the distress in the rural areas; the system can respond.
You fear that China's arrival at the top table will be harmful for the international liberal order. Yet the UN security council had the Soviet Union as well as China at the top table for decades. And I scarcely need to remind you of the many times since 1945 that the US and Britain have deviated from liberalism and multilateralism. We do need a liberal multilateral order, but not one based on western hegemony. The arrival of China and India will compel the west to learn to be truly plural and multilateral rather than a liberal bully.
Your rendering of history is the old Whig account. Everything we do is progressive and liberal and has always been so; all our cruelties as colonial powers are forgotten. Yet your trinity of pluralism, capabilities and justification is both very recent and very Anglo-Saxon. Rights have been established only recently; ask any black or Native American or a Catholic living in Ulster. (And a large minority in the US, including its president, believe in the literal truth of the Book of Revelation about Jewish rights to Palestine.)
It would be nice if individualism, liberty and pluralism were necessary for capitalism. But he fact is that it can manage without those things. Capitalism does release forces that undermine authoritarian regimes, but unevenly and never inevitably. China may yet move towards liberal individualism. But it does not have to, and it would be unwise to bet on any imminent move in that direction.
Sincerely
Meghnad
Dear Meghnad
3rd December 2006
You have failed to address most of my points about Chinese weakness. Instead you suspend your critical faculties when it comes to China—dazzled by its growth and keen to show how China's strength is proof of the frailties of western capitalism and liberal democracy. But it isn't.
China requires ever more investment to secure the same growth rate. Qu Hongbin and Ma Xiaoping of HSBC calculate that the additional output produced by every extra dollar of investment is now below what it was in the late Mao years. Outside the foreign-owned private sector, China's productivity is lamentable. In agriculture, the latest figures show that Chinese value-added is $490 per year per head compared with $1,040 in the Philippines and $4,851 in Malaysia. The labour productivity of China's state-owned enterprises, still constituting a third of GDP, is 4 per cent of US levels; one third of their workforce is only semi-employed.
You liken China's experience to the rest of Asia. But China is far more reliant on foreign direct investment (FDI) to deliver its export growth. Only 20 per cent of Taiwanese manufacturing exports and 29 per cent of Indonesia's were made by foreign companies at parallel stages in their development; in 2005, 55 per cent of China's exports were made by foreigners—and over 80 per cent of its telecommunication and electronic exports. China needs FDI to make good the deficiencies of its indigenous institutional infrastructure. China set itself a target of 50 companies in the world's top 500 by 2010. It will do well to have one.
Capitalism is far more subtle than either free market fundamentalists or Marxists accept. Of course, China has to move its peasants to its cities in order to develop. But capital still has to be allocated efficiently. And if an economy is to produce self-sustaining productivity growth, its companies must do more than exploit cheap labour. They must develop the "soft" processes that spur productivity and innovation. China's have not.
The political inequities in the way China handles migration—every worker has to have a licence to migrate and most migrants do not, thus rendering them illegal—and the frequent confiscation of peasant land have the same roots as the weaknesses in the enterprise system. China lacks the Enlightenment trinity.
The growing peasant and worker protests (4m protesters and 800,000 strikers in 2005) suggest that many Chinese want enforceable property rights and the legal right to strike—these are not western idiosyncrasies. You are right to say that Hu is raising the issue of social justice—but efforts in this direction are tiny. The tax burden on peasants was reduced by 0.1 per cent of GDP in 2005. Hu dare not increase the tax burden in cities. Why? Because there would be a demand for accountability.
Amartya Sen argues that many third world intellectuals are unable to get past the experience of colonialism to see the value of western institutions and values—and the parallels they have with the best of their own traditions. You conform to Sen's model. Why don't you include China's 18th-century imperial land grab of central Eurasia—nearly doubling China's land area—and the subsequent ethnic cleansing as part of your list of past robbery and state crime? Because it wasn't western?
The paradox is that the best way to challenge the west is to beat it at its own game. Japan's response to its economic crisis, the growth of democratic institutions in Taiwan and South Korea and the increasing success of an open India (sadly held back by caste and sexism, especially in the countryside) support my thesis. But I am not complacent about the west: the last third of my new book is about how the US, Britain and others fail to practise what we preach.
Best
Will
Dear Will
4th December 2006
Whatever else I may be, I am not a third world intellectual, having spent two thirds of my life in Britain! Nor am I a postcolonial postmodernist. I have a simple position: no nation, no region, no empire has any monopoly on virtue. East and west have both indulged in ethnic cleansing. China's imperial past is like any other country's, except the Chinese do not suffer from western amnesia.
Back to economics. Chinese agriculture is not as bad as your figures imply. It has been concentrating on grains (it had a terrible famine 40 years ago) while Malaysia and the Philippines have been commercial crop growers for a long time. The latter are higher value-added items.
China doubled its manufacturing labour force between 1983 and 2003, to number slightly over 100m. But China's rural economy, like India's, still suffers from scarce land and surplus labour, and this is why many more millions need to be taken off the land—something only achievable by rapid manufacturing growth. Public enterprise in China, as in India, is capital-intensive and inefficient. But the private sector is not as puny as you imply. If productivity is low in public sector manufacturing and agriculture, town and village enterprises and the genuine private sector, plus the foreign-owned sector, must conversely be productive. China exports low-tech products where there are few brand names, but that is where its expanding market is.
China has chosen to invest in infrastructure, unlike India (or the USSR when it was growing fast). This is a slow process. When you go to China you see new airports and empty highways and the Shanghai maglev. In India, the airports are slums.
China is also less centralised than it seems. It has large regional centres which run their own economic policies, with regional party bosses often disobeying the centre. Beneath the Leninist façade, China is making a transition to an economy where the centre is nominally in charge of certain things—foreign exchange policy or defence—while the people do whatever they think will make them better off. And, yes, protests arise out of inequities, as they do in India. But the fact that they occur and that China has an active "new left" (see Chaohua Wang's One China, Many Paths) tells me that China is not monolithic. It is just not a liberal democracy along Anglo-Saxon lines.
I do not defend the inequities or brutalities thrown up by China's growth. But I don't think they are a sign of weakness. Despite similar problems in most other economies in the past, none collapsed because of excessive growth. The USSR died because of stagnation.
You do not think China can repeat Asian success. But I recall when Americans didn't believe Japan could compete with them. They said that the Japanese could only copy and not innovate, because Japanese culture was too conformist. Yet China filed 130,000 patents in 2004, the fourth highest in the world (after Japan, the US, and South Korea), three times more than Britain. This represents a growth of 517 per cent since 1995, and equal proportions of residents and non-residents were responsible.
You see the inequities and brutalities of China's growth as unique to China's communist system, and it offends your liberal sensibilities. You want these inequities and brutalities to be swept away. I see them as part of the historic path of rapid accumulation that many economies pass through. This is how income growth occurs in capitalism. What's new?
Good wishes
Meghnad
Dear Meghnad
4th December 2006
China's model may have served it well in mobilising the saving for industrialisation, but it is now reaching the limits of its possibilities. Your own figures show that half China's patent applications come from foreign-owned companies. China's own resident patents place it 17th in the world league table, and only 30 per cent are for new inventions. Most of China's new jobs since 1980 have come from services, not manufacturing as you imply, and productivity in services is nearly as poor as in agriculture and state enterprises.
I am not predicting China's collapse. What I am saying is that it faces a profoundly difficult transition to a more normal economy with normal levels of savings, investment and consumption and less dependence on exports. My argument is that the direction of change has to be the same as that emerging in the rest of Asia. This means China needs to incorporate my three-cornered cluster of Enlightenment processes—pluralism, capabilities, justification—into its internal workings. They will look very Chinese and not western, but their function will be the same.
It is in our interests for this change to happen—both to allow China to carry on growing and for it to have a greater vested interest in maintaining a rules-based international system. China's indifference to Africa's authoritarian despots, as it courts the continent for energy and raw materials, is a foretaste of what an unchanged China will be like.
You contrast the west's amnesia about its past with China. But nobody in China knows about the doubling of China's land area under the Qing, any more than they know about China's war against Vietnam in 1979, or even Tiananmen. They are written out of the history books; the websites are blocked. It is shocking that a leading British intellectual like yourself can excuse such manipulation of the truth while being so ready to criticise the open society of which you have been part for most of your life. This debate would have been impossible in China. Until it changes, it will be condemned to a colossally inefficient and socially cruel form of development, because it is disdainful of human dignities and the imperative of accountability.
Yours
Will
Dear Will
4th December 2006
So anything China does which is good is foreign and everything else is sinister. So China is exploiting Africa's resources, and this is an indicator of China's authoritarianism. How unlike the Belgians and the French and the British, with their Enlightenment trinity and liberal freedoms, who nurtured Africa lovingly, never coveted its resources and cured its poverty!
You say services are generating more jobs in China than manufacturing. Perhaps, but the same is true of India and Britain. So what?
Non-residents filed 50 per cent of China's patents, 47 per cent of EU patents and 81 per cent of US patents. So what? China has just surpassed Japan in spending on R&D but you will no doubt say that is all foreign. If China is weak in every sector—agriculture, manufacturing, services, innovation—why do you fear it will rise inexorably and pollute the global top table where only virtuous western powers should rule?
You say China must join a rules-based international system. Yet when it joins the WTO and exports bras and shoes to the EU, they are locked up in warehouses while Peter Mandelson soothes the Italian and French producers, telling them why they don't have to obey the rules.
China is going through a fascinating experiment of growth at rates never achieved by any other country for such a sustained period. It needs to go on doing so. It has the second or third largest GDP, yet it is desperately poor in per capita terms. It solved the problems of mass illiteracy and extreme poverty with a dictatorship. I am curious to see if it can achieve this impossible combination of capitalism with a Leninist party. No one else has tried. It may fail, but why not let it go through the experiment and leave it to the Chinese people to revolt if they want a different regime?
In the 18th century, Voltaire thought China was enlightened compared to France. Now you say China is benighted because it is not like us. It is easy to forget how we got from there to here. It is a bit like the environmental damage caused by development. We rich countries tell the latecomers that they cannot do what we did when we were poor: you must behave like us now, even if it condemns you to remain poor. We shall see.
Merry Xmas
Meghnad
End of the article
Meghnad Desai é o autor indiano do saboroso "The Revenge of Karl Marx" (ja traduzido e publicado no Brasil) e Will Huton é uma especie de conselheiro informal do New Labour...
A revista mensal britanica Prospect, consoante seu nome, já está em 2007...
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Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Prospect Mazine, London, January 2007 |
Debate: Does the future really belong to China?
If China does not abandon one-party rule, will it stumble under the stresses of state capitalism? Or will it show that there can be a successful authoritarian road to modernity?
Will Hutton
Meghnad Desai
Will Hutton is author of “The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century,” published in January by Little, Brown
Meghnad Desai is a former director of the Centre for Global Governance and an emeritus professor of economics at the LSE. He is also a Labour peer
Dear Meghnad
29th November 2006
It is a commonplace to observe that the rise of China is transforming the world. Extrapolate from current growth rates and China will be the world's largest economy by the middle of this century, if not before. If it remains communist, the impact on the world system will be enormous and very damaging. Britain and the US are, for all their faults, democracies that accept the rule of law. This is not true of China. If an unreformed China takes its place at the top table, the global order will be kinder to despotism; the fragile emergence of an international system of governance based on the rule of law will be set back and the relations between states will depend even more nakedly on their relative power.
All that, however, is predicated on two very big "ifs"—if the current Chinese growth rate continues, and if the country remains communist. I think there are substantial doubts about each proposition. What is certain is that both cannot hold. China is reaching the limits of the sustainability of its current model, and to extrapolate from the past into the future as if nothing needs to change is a first-order mistake.
Our concern in the west should be to help China face its enormous challenges without damaging us in the process. If Chinese communism can transform itself, then China could, like Japan before it, smoothly integrate into the world power system. If not, severe convulsions lie ahead.
China's economic growth is based on the state channelling vast under-priced savings into huge investment projects driven by cheap labour. Some 200m of China's 760m workforce are migrant peasants employed in factories, construction sites and offices in its new towns and cities—the biggest migration in history. The Communist party has permitted free movement of prices, encourages profit-seeking and has sharply lowered tariffs on imports and obstacles to inward investment. Its success in creating annual growth of some 9.5 per cent for a generation, lifting 400m people out of poverty, is widely acknowledged. But the party keeps firm control of ownership, wages and company strategies—and of the state. In other words, China occupies an uneasy halfway house between socialism and capitalism; its private sector, although growing, is still puny. It is a system of Leninist corporatism—and it is this that is breaking down.
The breaches in the model are all around. How much longer can China's state-owned banks carry on directing billions of dollars of savings into investments that produce tiny or even negative returns and on which interest is irregularly paid? Poor peasants' ability to create the savings needed to fuel growth is reaching its limits. And in any case, for how long can a $2 trillion economy save at more than 40 per cent of GDP? It is reaching the limit of its capacity to increase exports (which in 2007 will surpass $1 trillion) by 25 per cent a year; at this rate of growth they will reach $5 trillion by 2020 or sooner, representing more than half of today's world trade. Is that likely? Are there sufficient ships and ports to move such volumes—and will western markets stay open without real reciprocity on trade? Every year China acquires $200bn of foreign exchange reserves, mainly dollars, as it rigs its currency to keep its exports competitive. It is absurd for a poor country like China to be lending to a rich one like the US; in fact, it is unsustainable, and the financial markets seem to agree.
China would like to lower the current feverish growth rates, but the tools available in the west—raising taxes, cutting spending and lifting interest rates—are not available to China. The party dare not trigger protests by raising taxes; officials in state enterprises and provincial governments ignore orders to lower spending because their careers depend on generating growth and jobs. And raising interest rates could create a credit crunch as loans go sour.
Nor are the limits solely economic. The 200m migrants resent seeing others grow rich as they languish in poverty. Inequality is soaring and corruption is endemic, infecting chief executives of banks, provincial governors and judges. About 400,000 people a year die of respiratory diseases caused by polluted air. China's GDP is a fifth of America's, but it releases nearly as much carbon dioxide into the air. To cap it all, the Communist party is in ideological crisis: it says the class war is over even while claiming monopoly power as the trustee of the 1949 revolution. Without continued economic growth, the party's legitimacy would be in question.
Behind all these problems lies China's only partial conversion to capitalism. Everything in China is subject to the party. Yet capitalism is much more than the profit motive and the freedom to set prices that China's reforms have permitted. The effective use of resources also depends upon a network of independent processes of scrutiny and accountability, undertaken by people in multiple centres of power and backed by rights and private property. A democratic election system is but the coping stone of this structure.
Judges who rule on evidence to deliver justice, newspapers reporting events and even corporate whistleblowers are crucial to the operation of western capitalism. It is the interaction of these hard and soft processes—what I call an "Enlightenment infrastructure"—that allows technological progress to be exploited efficiently and relatively honestly. China had markets, property and technology in the 18th century; it fell behind because it didn't have Enlightenment structures. It lacked the "trinity" of pluralism (multiple centres of political and economic power), capabilities (rights, education, private ownership) and justification (accountability, scrutiny, free expression).
The Chinese Communist party, despite local piecemeal experimentation, is repeating the mistake of the Confucian imperial system. It is the lack of independent scrutiny and accountability that lies behind the massive waste of investment and China's destruction of its environment. The reason so few people can name a great Chinese brand or company, despite the country's export success, is that there are none. China needs to build them, but doing that in an authoritarian state is impossible. In any case, more than 55 per cent of China's exports, especially high-tech ones, are made by foreign firms—another sign of China's weakness.
China needs to become a more normal economy. Chinese consumers need to save less and spend more, but people without property rights or state welfare are understandably cautious. Giving them more confidence would require secure property rights and taxation to fund a welfare system. That would mean creating an empowered middle class that would want to know how its taxes are spent. This is a political impossibility.
If this argument is right, the terms of debate about China must change. Instead of frightening ourselves about China's rise, we need to recognise our own strengths and its weaknesses. We need to be confident about so-called western values and processes—and strengthen them at home and abroad. The best way to meet the China challenge is not to close our markets and build our armies—a strong impulse in the US. It is to stay open, confident that China will only be able to truly compete with the west if it becomes more like us.
Yours
Will
Dear Will
1st December 2006
For a liberal pluralist, you sound oddly like a monist, if not a monotheist. For you, there is only one road to capitalism—the western one—and only one political system—ours.
China has achieved rapid growth with a policy of under-consumption and over-saving, and exports rather than domestic consumption. But this is not an unusual path, nor one that China is stuck on. Japan and South Korea used the same model and are now part of the OECD club of rich countries. Moving millions of peasants to urban manufacturing centres is neither totalitarian nor sinister. It was proposed as the standard development model by Arthur Lewis, a Nobel laureate, in 1954, and is indeed the classical model. (If it was less dramatic in parts of Europe, this is partly because a third of Europeans moved to North America in the second half of the 19th century.) There are no other ways of shaking off poverty. The services sector alone will not do it, and nor will a green revolution, as India is finding out.
China's very large numbers do not in themselves make its development unsustainable. If India can achieve 8 per cent growth on a 25 per cent savings rate, China (which now has 10.4 per cent growth on a 44 per cent savings rate) will surely manage the same. Moreover, China has been reforming its banking sector and the world has shown its approval by buying up the shares of Chinese banks.
China has a lot to learn about macroeconomic management, but its failings have nothing to do with totalitarianism. India is also shy about liberalising its capital account. The Asian financial crisis of 1997 taught China and India to keep a pool of liquidity handy, even at the cost of forgoing a better use for the money.
Yes, there is a Leninist party in power within a state capitalist system. But capitalism has no unique path, nor does it require a liberal democratic infrastructure to flourish. Japan's economic rise took place without a fully liberal infrastructure, and most European states, including Britain and Germany, were capitalist before they were democratic. What the most recent phase of globalisation has shown is that capitalism requires neither the Weberian Protestant ethic nor liberal democracy; any country with a decent savings rate, mass education and access to western markets can "do" capitalism. It is not a western Christian monopoly. Indeed, some Asians are proving better at it than the Europeans.
Many people simply find it hard to believe that countries like China and India, which were famine-stricken and miserable only 40 years ago, are now wiping out western industry. But this was the American complaint in the 1960s when facing European competition in the car market. How could these upstarts compete with Detroit? But compete they did, and they were soon followed by Japan and South Korea. Today the upstarts are China and India, and tomorrow they will be Ghana or Kenya.
Capitalism is not, as you say, about "much more than profit." It is first and foremost about profit and capital accumulation. It has accommodated a variety of institutional arrangements and only in the most recent phase of globalisation have we thought that an Anglo-Saxon-style liberal democracy is its sine qua non.
Let me now come to the political issue. The Chinese Communist party is at one level Leninist, but it is unlike the Russian Bolshevik party. The Chinese communists had to struggle to win the support of the peasantry for a decade and a half before they won power in 1949. They developed a philosophy of responding to popular needs within the confines of a single party. This is what they call people's democracy, and it is much more real than it was in eastern Europe. My colleague at LSE, Chun Lin, argues in The Transformation of Chinese Socialism that the Chinese concept of people's democracy is viable. In her view, the tradition has some strength left in it, although the party will have to become even more responsive. Deng Xiaoping encouraged inegalitarian capitalist growth for a period, but there may now be a reaction against it. At the recent People's Congress, Hu Jintao made some noises about the distress in the rural areas; the system can respond.
You fear that China's arrival at the top table will be harmful for the international liberal order. Yet the UN security council had the Soviet Union as well as China at the top table for decades. And I scarcely need to remind you of the many times since 1945 that the US and Britain have deviated from liberalism and multilateralism. We do need a liberal multilateral order, but not one based on western hegemony. The arrival of China and India will compel the west to learn to be truly plural and multilateral rather than a liberal bully.
Your rendering of history is the old Whig account. Everything we do is progressive and liberal and has always been so; all our cruelties as colonial powers are forgotten. Yet your trinity of pluralism, capabilities and justification is both very recent and very Anglo-Saxon. Rights have been established only recently; ask any black or Native American or a Catholic living in Ulster. (And a large minority in the US, including its president, believe in the literal truth of the Book of Revelation about Jewish rights to Palestine.)
It would be nice if individualism, liberty and pluralism were necessary for capitalism. But he fact is that it can manage without those things. Capitalism does release forces that undermine authoritarian regimes, but unevenly and never inevitably. China may yet move towards liberal individualism. But it does not have to, and it would be unwise to bet on any imminent move in that direction.
Sincerely
Meghnad
Dear Meghnad
3rd December 2006
You have failed to address most of my points about Chinese weakness. Instead you suspend your critical faculties when it comes to China—dazzled by its growth and keen to show how China's strength is proof of the frailties of western capitalism and liberal democracy. But it isn't.
China requires ever more investment to secure the same growth rate. Qu Hongbin and Ma Xiaoping of HSBC calculate that the additional output produced by every extra dollar of investment is now below what it was in the late Mao years. Outside the foreign-owned private sector, China's productivity is lamentable. In agriculture, the latest figures show that Chinese value-added is $490 per year per head compared with $1,040 in the Philippines and $4,851 in Malaysia. The labour productivity of China's state-owned enterprises, still constituting a third of GDP, is 4 per cent of US levels; one third of their workforce is only semi-employed.
You liken China's experience to the rest of Asia. But China is far more reliant on foreign direct investment (FDI) to deliver its export growth. Only 20 per cent of Taiwanese manufacturing exports and 29 per cent of Indonesia's were made by foreign companies at parallel stages in their development; in 2005, 55 per cent of China's exports were made by foreigners—and over 80 per cent of its telecommunication and electronic exports. China needs FDI to make good the deficiencies of its indigenous institutional infrastructure. China set itself a target of 50 companies in the world's top 500 by 2010. It will do well to have one.
Capitalism is far more subtle than either free market fundamentalists or Marxists accept. Of course, China has to move its peasants to its cities in order to develop. But capital still has to be allocated efficiently. And if an economy is to produce self-sustaining productivity growth, its companies must do more than exploit cheap labour. They must develop the "soft" processes that spur productivity and innovation. China's have not.
The political inequities in the way China handles migration—every worker has to have a licence to migrate and most migrants do not, thus rendering them illegal—and the frequent confiscation of peasant land have the same roots as the weaknesses in the enterprise system. China lacks the Enlightenment trinity.
The growing peasant and worker protests (4m protesters and 800,000 strikers in 2005) suggest that many Chinese want enforceable property rights and the legal right to strike—these are not western idiosyncrasies. You are right to say that Hu is raising the issue of social justice—but efforts in this direction are tiny. The tax burden on peasants was reduced by 0.1 per cent of GDP in 2005. Hu dare not increase the tax burden in cities. Why? Because there would be a demand for accountability.
Amartya Sen argues that many third world intellectuals are unable to get past the experience of colonialism to see the value of western institutions and values—and the parallels they have with the best of their own traditions. You conform to Sen's model. Why don't you include China's 18th-century imperial land grab of central Eurasia—nearly doubling China's land area—and the subsequent ethnic cleansing as part of your list of past robbery and state crime? Because it wasn't western?
The paradox is that the best way to challenge the west is to beat it at its own game. Japan's response to its economic crisis, the growth of democratic institutions in Taiwan and South Korea and the increasing success of an open India (sadly held back by caste and sexism, especially in the countryside) support my thesis. But I am not complacent about the west: the last third of my new book is about how the US, Britain and others fail to practise what we preach.
Best
Will
Dear Will
4th December 2006
Whatever else I may be, I am not a third world intellectual, having spent two thirds of my life in Britain! Nor am I a postcolonial postmodernist. I have a simple position: no nation, no region, no empire has any monopoly on virtue. East and west have both indulged in ethnic cleansing. China's imperial past is like any other country's, except the Chinese do not suffer from western amnesia.
Back to economics. Chinese agriculture is not as bad as your figures imply. It has been concentrating on grains (it had a terrible famine 40 years ago) while Malaysia and the Philippines have been commercial crop growers for a long time. The latter are higher value-added items.
China doubled its manufacturing labour force between 1983 and 2003, to number slightly over 100m. But China's rural economy, like India's, still suffers from scarce land and surplus labour, and this is why many more millions need to be taken off the land—something only achievable by rapid manufacturing growth. Public enterprise in China, as in India, is capital-intensive and inefficient. But the private sector is not as puny as you imply. If productivity is low in public sector manufacturing and agriculture, town and village enterprises and the genuine private sector, plus the foreign-owned sector, must conversely be productive. China exports low-tech products where there are few brand names, but that is where its expanding market is.
China has chosen to invest in infrastructure, unlike India (or the USSR when it was growing fast). This is a slow process. When you go to China you see new airports and empty highways and the Shanghai maglev. In India, the airports are slums.
China is also less centralised than it seems. It has large regional centres which run their own economic policies, with regional party bosses often disobeying the centre. Beneath the Leninist façade, China is making a transition to an economy where the centre is nominally in charge of certain things—foreign exchange policy or defence—while the people do whatever they think will make them better off. And, yes, protests arise out of inequities, as they do in India. But the fact that they occur and that China has an active "new left" (see Chaohua Wang's One China, Many Paths) tells me that China is not monolithic. It is just not a liberal democracy along Anglo-Saxon lines.
I do not defend the inequities or brutalities thrown up by China's growth. But I don't think they are a sign of weakness. Despite similar problems in most other economies in the past, none collapsed because of excessive growth. The USSR died because of stagnation.
You do not think China can repeat Asian success. But I recall when Americans didn't believe Japan could compete with them. They said that the Japanese could only copy and not innovate, because Japanese culture was too conformist. Yet China filed 130,000 patents in 2004, the fourth highest in the world (after Japan, the US, and South Korea), three times more than Britain. This represents a growth of 517 per cent since 1995, and equal proportions of residents and non-residents were responsible.
You see the inequities and brutalities of China's growth as unique to China's communist system, and it offends your liberal sensibilities. You want these inequities and brutalities to be swept away. I see them as part of the historic path of rapid accumulation that many economies pass through. This is how income growth occurs in capitalism. What's new?
Good wishes
Meghnad
Dear Meghnad
4th December 2006
China's model may have served it well in mobilising the saving for industrialisation, but it is now reaching the limits of its possibilities. Your own figures show that half China's patent applications come from foreign-owned companies. China's own resident patents place it 17th in the world league table, and only 30 per cent are for new inventions. Most of China's new jobs since 1980 have come from services, not manufacturing as you imply, and productivity in services is nearly as poor as in agriculture and state enterprises.
I am not predicting China's collapse. What I am saying is that it faces a profoundly difficult transition to a more normal economy with normal levels of savings, investment and consumption and less dependence on exports. My argument is that the direction of change has to be the same as that emerging in the rest of Asia. This means China needs to incorporate my three-cornered cluster of Enlightenment processes—pluralism, capabilities, justification—into its internal workings. They will look very Chinese and not western, but their function will be the same.
It is in our interests for this change to happen—both to allow China to carry on growing and for it to have a greater vested interest in maintaining a rules-based international system. China's indifference to Africa's authoritarian despots, as it courts the continent for energy and raw materials, is a foretaste of what an unchanged China will be like.
You contrast the west's amnesia about its past with China. But nobody in China knows about the doubling of China's land area under the Qing, any more than they know about China's war against Vietnam in 1979, or even Tiananmen. They are written out of the history books; the websites are blocked. It is shocking that a leading British intellectual like yourself can excuse such manipulation of the truth while being so ready to criticise the open society of which you have been part for most of your life. This debate would have been impossible in China. Until it changes, it will be condemned to a colossally inefficient and socially cruel form of development, because it is disdainful of human dignities and the imperative of accountability.
Yours
Will
Dear Will
4th December 2006
So anything China does which is good is foreign and everything else is sinister. So China is exploiting Africa's resources, and this is an indicator of China's authoritarianism. How unlike the Belgians and the French and the British, with their Enlightenment trinity and liberal freedoms, who nurtured Africa lovingly, never coveted its resources and cured its poverty!
You say services are generating more jobs in China than manufacturing. Perhaps, but the same is true of India and Britain. So what?
Non-residents filed 50 per cent of China's patents, 47 per cent of EU patents and 81 per cent of US patents. So what? China has just surpassed Japan in spending on R&D but you will no doubt say that is all foreign. If China is weak in every sector—agriculture, manufacturing, services, innovation—why do you fear it will rise inexorably and pollute the global top table where only virtuous western powers should rule?
You say China must join a rules-based international system. Yet when it joins the WTO and exports bras and shoes to the EU, they are locked up in warehouses while Peter Mandelson soothes the Italian and French producers, telling them why they don't have to obey the rules.
China is going through a fascinating experiment of growth at rates never achieved by any other country for such a sustained period. It needs to go on doing so. It has the second or third largest GDP, yet it is desperately poor in per capita terms. It solved the problems of mass illiteracy and extreme poverty with a dictatorship. I am curious to see if it can achieve this impossible combination of capitalism with a Leninist party. No one else has tried. It may fail, but why not let it go through the experiment and leave it to the Chinese people to revolt if they want a different regime?
In the 18th century, Voltaire thought China was enlightened compared to France. Now you say China is benighted because it is not like us. It is easy to forget how we got from there to here. It is a bit like the environmental damage caused by development. We rich countries tell the latecomers that they cannot do what we did when we were poor: you must behave like us now, even if it condemns you to remain poor. We shall see.
Merry Xmas
Meghnad
End of the article
quarta-feira, dezembro 13, 2006
169) Pausa para alguma mineiridade...
Não por ser filho de uma mineira, ou adorar passear por aquelas terras escarpadas e comer aquela comida gostosa, tenho lá minhas mineirices, e de vez em quando me descubro mineirando algum jeito diferente de ser...
Pois eu recebi, de dois amigos mineiros, os textos que agora seguem, para puro deleite vocabular e do espírito...
SOTAQUE MINEIRO: É ILEGAL, IMORAL OU ENGORDA?
Felipe Peixoto Braga Netto
''Minas não é palavra montanhosa.
É palavra abissal. Minas é dentro
E fundo"
Carlos Drummond de Andrade
Gente, simplificar é um pecado. Se a vida não fosse tão corrida, se não tivesse tanta conta para pagar, tantos processos — oh sina — para analisar, eu fundaria um partido cuja luta seria descobrir as falas de cada região do Brasil.
Cadê os lingüistas deste país? Sinto falta de um tratado geral das sotaques brasileiros. Não há nada que me fascine mais. Como é que as montanhas, matas ou mares influem tanto, e determinam a cadência e a sonoridade das palavras?
É um absurdo. Existem livros sobre tudo; não tem (ou não conheço) um sobre o falar ingênuo deste povo doce. Escritores, ô de casa, cadê vocês? Escrevam sobre isto, se já escreveram me mandem, que espero ansioso.
Um simples" mas" é uma coisa no Rio Grande do Sul. É tudo menos um "mas" nordestino, por exemplo. O sotaque das mineiras deveria ser ilegal, imoral ou engordar. Porque, se tudo que é bom tem um desses horríveis efeitos colaterais, como é que o falar, sensual e lindo (das mineiras) ficou de fora?
Porque, Deus, que sotaque! Mineira devia nascer com tarja preta avisando: ouvi-la faz mal à saúde. Se uma mineira, falando mansinho, me pedir para assinar um contrato doando tudo que tenho, sou capaz de perguntar: só isso? Assino achando que ela me faz um favor.
Eu sou suspeitíssimo. Confesso: esse sotaque me desarma. Certa vez quase propus casamento a uma menina que me ligou por engano, só pelo sotaque.
Mas, se o sotaque desarma, as expressões são um capítulo à parte. Não vou exagerar, dizendo que a gente não se entende... Mas que é algo delicioso descobrir, aos poucos, as expressões daqui, ah isso é...
Os mineiros têm um ódio mortal das palavras completas. Preferem, sabe- se lá por que, abandoná-las no meio do caminho (não dizem: pode parar, dizem: "pó parar". Não dizem: onde eu estou?, dizem: "ôndôtô?". Parece que as palavras, para os mineiros, são como aqueles chatos que pedem carona. Quando você percebe a roubada, prefere deixá- los no caminho.
Os não-mineiros, ignorantes nas coisas de Minas, supõem, precipitada e levianamente, que os mineiros vivem — lingüisticamente falando — apenas de uais, trens e sôs. Digo-lhes que não.
Mineiro não fala que o sujeito é competente em tal ou qual atividade. Fala que ele é bom de serviço. Pouco importa que seja um juiz, um jogador de futebol ou um ator de filme pornô. Se der no couro — metaforicamente falando, claro — ele é bom de serviço. Faz sentido...
Mineiras não usam o famosíssimo tudo bem. Sempre que duas mineiras se encontram, uma delas há de perguntar pra outra: "cê tá boa?" Para mim, isso é pleonasmo. Perguntar para uma mineira se ela tá boa, é como perguntar a um peixe se ele sabe nadar. Desnecessário.
Há outras. Vamos supor que você esteja tendo um caso com uma mulher casada. Um amigo seu, se for mineiro, vai chegar e dizer: — Mexe com isso não, sô (leia-se: sai dessa, é fria, etc).
O verbo "mexer", para os mineiros, tem os mais amplos significados. Quer dizer, por exemplo, trabalhar. Se lhe perguntarem com o que você mexe, não fique ofendido. Querem saber o seu ofício.
Os mineiros também não gostam do verbo conseguir. Aqui ninguém consegue nada. Você não dá conta. Sôcê (se você) acha que não vai chegar a tempo, você liga e diz:
— Aqui, não vou dar conta de chegar na hora, não, sô.
Esse "aqui" é outro que só tem aqui. É antecedente obrigatório, sob pena de punição pública, de qualquer frase. É mais usada, no entanto, quando você quer falar e não estão lhe dando muita atenção: é uma forma de dizer, olá, me escutem, por favor. É a última instância antes de jogar um pão de queijo na cabeça do interlocutor.
Mineiras não dizem "apaixonado por". Dizem, sabe-se lá por que, "apaixonado com". Soa engraçado aos ouvidos forasteiros. Ouve-se a toda hora: "Ah, eu apaixonei com ele...". Ou: "sou doida com ele" (ele, no caso, pode ser você, um carro, um cachorro). Elas vivem apaixonadas com alguma coisa.
Que os mineiros não acabam as palavras, todo mundo sabe. É um tal de bonitim, fechadim, e por aí vai. Já me acostumei a ouvir: "E aí, vão?". Traduzo: "E aí, vamos?". Não caia na besteira de esperar um "vamos" completo de uma mineira. Não ouvirá nunca.
Na verdade, o mineiro é o baiano lingüístico. A preguiça chegou aqui e armou rede. O mineiro não pronuncia uma palavra completa nem com uma arma apontada para a cabeça.
Eu preciso avisar à língua portuguesa que gosto muito dela, mas prefiro, com todo respeito, a mineira. Nada pessoal. Aqui certas regras não entram. São barradas pelas montanhas. Por exemplo: em Minas, se você quiser falar que precisa ir a um lugar, vai dizer: - Eu preciso de ir.
Onde os mineiros arrumaram esse "de", aí no meio, é uma boa pergunta. Só não me perguntem. Mas que ele existe, existe. Asseguro que sim, com escritura lavrada em cartório. Deixa eu repetir, porque é importante. Aqui em Minas ninguém precisa ir a lugar nenhum. Entendam... Você não precisa ir, você "precisa de ir". Você não precisa viajar, você "precisa de viajar". Se você chamar sua filha para acompanhá-la ao supermercado, ela reclamará:
— Ah, mãe, eu preciso de ir?
No supermercado, o mineiro não faz muitas compras, ele compra um tanto de coisa. O supermercado não estará lotado, ele terá um tanto de gente. Se a fila do caixa não anda, é porque está agarrando lá na frente. Entendeu? Deus, tenho que explicar tudo. Não vou ficar procurando sinônimo, que diabo. E não digo mais nada, leitor, você está agarrando meu texto. Agarrar é agarrar, ora!
Se, saindo do supermercado, a mineirinha vir um mendigo e ficar com pena, suspirará: - Ai, gente, que dó.
É provável que a essa altura o leitor já esteja apaixonado pelas mineiras. Eu aviso que vá se apaixonar na China, que lá está sobrando gente. E não vem caçar confusão pro meu lado.
Porque, devo dizer, mineiro não arruma briga, mineiro "caça confusão". Se você quiser dizer que tal sujeito é arruaceiro, é melhor falar, para se fazer entendido, que ele"vive caçando confusão".
Para uma mineira falar do meu desempenho sexual, ou dizer que algo é muitíssimo bom (acho que dá na mesma), ela, se for jovem, vai gritar: "Ô, é sem noção".Entendeu, leitora? É sem noção! Você não tem, leitora, idéia do tanto de bom que é. Só não esqueça, por favor, o "Ô" no começo, porque sem ele não dá para dar noção do tanto que algo é sem noção, entendeu?
Ouço a leitora chiar:
— Capaz...
Vocês já ouviram esse "capaz"? É lindo. Quer dizer o quê? Sei lá, quer dizer "tá fácil que eu faça isso", com algumas toneladas de ironia. Gente, ando um péssimo tradutor. Se você propõe a sua namorada um sexo a três (com as amigas dela), provavelmente ouvirá um "capaz..." como resposta. Se, em vingança contra a recusa, você ameaçar casar com a Gisele Bundchen, ela dirá: "ô dó dôcê". Entendeu agora?
Não? Deixa para lá. É parecido com o "nem...". Já ouviu o "nem..."? Completo ele fica: - Ah, nem...
O que significa? Significa, amigo leitor, que a mineira que o pronunciou não fará o que você propôs de jeito nenhum. Mas de jeito nenhum. Você diz: "Meu amor, cê anima de comer um tropeiro no Mineirão?". Resposta: "nem..." Ainda não entendeu? Uai, nem é nem. Leitor, você é meio burrinho ou é impressão?
A propósito, um mineiro não pergunta: "você não vai?". A pergunta, mineiramente falando, seria: "cê não anima de ir"? Tão simples. O resto do Brasil complica tudo. É, ué, cês dão umas volta pra falar os trem...
Certa vez pedi um exemplo e a interlocutora pensou alto: - Você quer que eu "dou" um exemplo...
Eu sei, eu sei, a gramática não tolera esses abusos mineiros de conjugação. Mas que são uma gracinha, ah isso lá são.
Ei, leitor, pára de babar. Que coisa feia. Olha o papel todo molhado. Chega, não conto mais nada. Está bem, está bem, mas se comporte.
Falando em "ei...". As mineiras falam assim, usando, curiosamente, o "ei" no lugar do "oi". Você liga, e elas atendem lindamente: "eiiii!!!", com muitos pontos de exclamação, a depender da saudade...
Tem tantos outros... O plural, então, é um problema. Um lindo problema, mas um problema. Sou, não nego, suspeito. Minha inclinação é para perdoar, com louvor, os deslizes vocabulares das mineiras.
Aliás, deslizes nada. Só porque aqui a língua é outra, não quer dizer que a oficial esteja com a razão. Se você, em conversa, falar: - Ah, fui lá comprar umas coisas...
— Que' s coisa? — ela retrucará.
Acreditam? O plural dá um pulo. Sai das coisas e vai para o que.
Ouvi de uma menina culta um "pelas metade", no lugar de "pela metade". E se você acusar injustamente uma mineira, ela, chorosa, confidenciará: - Ele pôs a culpa "ni mim".
A conjugação dos verbos tem lá seus mistérios, em Minas... Ontem, uma senhora docemente me consolou: "preocupa não, bobo!". E meus ouvidos, já acostumados às ingênuas conjugações mineiras, nem se espantam. Talvez se espantassem se ouvissem um: "não se preocupe", ou algo assim. A fórmula mineira é sintética, e diz tudo.
Até o tchau, em Minas, é personalizado. Ninguém diz tchau pura e simplesmente. Aqui se diz: "tchau pro cê", "tchau pro cês". É útil deixar claro o destinatário do tchau. O tchau, minha filha, é prôcê, não é pra outra entendeu?
Deve haver, por certo, outras expressões... A minha memória (que não ajuda muito) trouxe essas por enquanto. Estou, claro, aberto a sugestões. Como é uma pesquisa empírica, umas voluntárias ajudariam... Exigência: ser mineira. Conversando com lingüistas, fui informado: é prudente que tenham cabelos pretos, espessos e lisos, aquela pele bem branquinha... Tudo, naturalmente, em nome da ciência. Bem, eu me explico: é que, características à parte, as conformações físicas influem no timbre e som da voz, e eu não posso, em honrados assuntos mineiros, correr o risco de ser inexato, entendem?
==============
Ser mineiro...
"Ser mineiro é não dizer o que faz nem o que vai fazer. É fingir que não sabe aquilo que sabe, é falar pouco e escutar muito, é passar por bobo e ser inteligente, é vender queijo branco. Um bom mineiro não laça boi com embira, não dá rasteira no vento, não pisa no escuro, não anda no molhado, não estica conversa com estranhos, só acredita na fumaça quando vê fogo, só arrisca quando tem certeza, não troca um pássaro na mão por dois voando. Ser mineiro é dizer 'uai', é ser diferente e ter marca registrada, é ter história. Ser mineiro é ter simplicidade e pureza, humildade e modéstia, coragem e bravura, fidalguia e elegância. Ser mineiro é ver o nascer do sol e o brilhar da lua, é ouvir o cantar dos pássaros e o mugir do gado, é sentir o despertar do tempo e o amanhecer da vida. Ser mineiro é ser religioso, conservador, é cultivar as letras e as artes, é ser poeta e literato, é gostar de política e amar a liberdade, é viver nas montanhas, é ter vida interior."
Autor anônimo
(mas só pode ser mineiro, ou então enganou bem...)
Pois eu recebi, de dois amigos mineiros, os textos que agora seguem, para puro deleite vocabular e do espírito...
SOTAQUE MINEIRO: É ILEGAL, IMORAL OU ENGORDA?
Felipe Peixoto Braga Netto
''Minas não é palavra montanhosa.
É palavra abissal. Minas é dentro
E fundo"
Carlos Drummond de Andrade
Gente, simplificar é um pecado. Se a vida não fosse tão corrida, se não tivesse tanta conta para pagar, tantos processos — oh sina — para analisar, eu fundaria um partido cuja luta seria descobrir as falas de cada região do Brasil.
Cadê os lingüistas deste país? Sinto falta de um tratado geral das sotaques brasileiros. Não há nada que me fascine mais. Como é que as montanhas, matas ou mares influem tanto, e determinam a cadência e a sonoridade das palavras?
É um absurdo. Existem livros sobre tudo; não tem (ou não conheço) um sobre o falar ingênuo deste povo doce. Escritores, ô de casa, cadê vocês? Escrevam sobre isto, se já escreveram me mandem, que espero ansioso.
Um simples" mas" é uma coisa no Rio Grande do Sul. É tudo menos um "mas" nordestino, por exemplo. O sotaque das mineiras deveria ser ilegal, imoral ou engordar. Porque, se tudo que é bom tem um desses horríveis efeitos colaterais, como é que o falar, sensual e lindo (das mineiras) ficou de fora?
Porque, Deus, que sotaque! Mineira devia nascer com tarja preta avisando: ouvi-la faz mal à saúde. Se uma mineira, falando mansinho, me pedir para assinar um contrato doando tudo que tenho, sou capaz de perguntar: só isso? Assino achando que ela me faz um favor.
Eu sou suspeitíssimo. Confesso: esse sotaque me desarma. Certa vez quase propus casamento a uma menina que me ligou por engano, só pelo sotaque.
Mas, se o sotaque desarma, as expressões são um capítulo à parte. Não vou exagerar, dizendo que a gente não se entende... Mas que é algo delicioso descobrir, aos poucos, as expressões daqui, ah isso é...
Os mineiros têm um ódio mortal das palavras completas. Preferem, sabe- se lá por que, abandoná-las no meio do caminho (não dizem: pode parar, dizem: "pó parar". Não dizem: onde eu estou?, dizem: "ôndôtô?". Parece que as palavras, para os mineiros, são como aqueles chatos que pedem carona. Quando você percebe a roubada, prefere deixá- los no caminho.
Os não-mineiros, ignorantes nas coisas de Minas, supõem, precipitada e levianamente, que os mineiros vivem — lingüisticamente falando — apenas de uais, trens e sôs. Digo-lhes que não.
Mineiro não fala que o sujeito é competente em tal ou qual atividade. Fala que ele é bom de serviço. Pouco importa que seja um juiz, um jogador de futebol ou um ator de filme pornô. Se der no couro — metaforicamente falando, claro — ele é bom de serviço. Faz sentido...
Mineiras não usam o famosíssimo tudo bem. Sempre que duas mineiras se encontram, uma delas há de perguntar pra outra: "cê tá boa?" Para mim, isso é pleonasmo. Perguntar para uma mineira se ela tá boa, é como perguntar a um peixe se ele sabe nadar. Desnecessário.
Há outras. Vamos supor que você esteja tendo um caso com uma mulher casada. Um amigo seu, se for mineiro, vai chegar e dizer: — Mexe com isso não, sô (leia-se: sai dessa, é fria, etc).
O verbo "mexer", para os mineiros, tem os mais amplos significados. Quer dizer, por exemplo, trabalhar. Se lhe perguntarem com o que você mexe, não fique ofendido. Querem saber o seu ofício.
Os mineiros também não gostam do verbo conseguir. Aqui ninguém consegue nada. Você não dá conta. Sôcê (se você) acha que não vai chegar a tempo, você liga e diz:
— Aqui, não vou dar conta de chegar na hora, não, sô.
Esse "aqui" é outro que só tem aqui. É antecedente obrigatório, sob pena de punição pública, de qualquer frase. É mais usada, no entanto, quando você quer falar e não estão lhe dando muita atenção: é uma forma de dizer, olá, me escutem, por favor. É a última instância antes de jogar um pão de queijo na cabeça do interlocutor.
Mineiras não dizem "apaixonado por". Dizem, sabe-se lá por que, "apaixonado com". Soa engraçado aos ouvidos forasteiros. Ouve-se a toda hora: "Ah, eu apaixonei com ele...". Ou: "sou doida com ele" (ele, no caso, pode ser você, um carro, um cachorro). Elas vivem apaixonadas com alguma coisa.
Que os mineiros não acabam as palavras, todo mundo sabe. É um tal de bonitim, fechadim, e por aí vai. Já me acostumei a ouvir: "E aí, vão?". Traduzo: "E aí, vamos?". Não caia na besteira de esperar um "vamos" completo de uma mineira. Não ouvirá nunca.
Na verdade, o mineiro é o baiano lingüístico. A preguiça chegou aqui e armou rede. O mineiro não pronuncia uma palavra completa nem com uma arma apontada para a cabeça.
Eu preciso avisar à língua portuguesa que gosto muito dela, mas prefiro, com todo respeito, a mineira. Nada pessoal. Aqui certas regras não entram. São barradas pelas montanhas. Por exemplo: em Minas, se você quiser falar que precisa ir a um lugar, vai dizer: - Eu preciso de ir.
Onde os mineiros arrumaram esse "de", aí no meio, é uma boa pergunta. Só não me perguntem. Mas que ele existe, existe. Asseguro que sim, com escritura lavrada em cartório. Deixa eu repetir, porque é importante. Aqui em Minas ninguém precisa ir a lugar nenhum. Entendam... Você não precisa ir, você "precisa de ir". Você não precisa viajar, você "precisa de viajar". Se você chamar sua filha para acompanhá-la ao supermercado, ela reclamará:
— Ah, mãe, eu preciso de ir?
No supermercado, o mineiro não faz muitas compras, ele compra um tanto de coisa. O supermercado não estará lotado, ele terá um tanto de gente. Se a fila do caixa não anda, é porque está agarrando lá na frente. Entendeu? Deus, tenho que explicar tudo. Não vou ficar procurando sinônimo, que diabo. E não digo mais nada, leitor, você está agarrando meu texto. Agarrar é agarrar, ora!
Se, saindo do supermercado, a mineirinha vir um mendigo e ficar com pena, suspirará: - Ai, gente, que dó.
É provável que a essa altura o leitor já esteja apaixonado pelas mineiras. Eu aviso que vá se apaixonar na China, que lá está sobrando gente. E não vem caçar confusão pro meu lado.
Porque, devo dizer, mineiro não arruma briga, mineiro "caça confusão". Se você quiser dizer que tal sujeito é arruaceiro, é melhor falar, para se fazer entendido, que ele"vive caçando confusão".
Para uma mineira falar do meu desempenho sexual, ou dizer que algo é muitíssimo bom (acho que dá na mesma), ela, se for jovem, vai gritar: "Ô, é sem noção".Entendeu, leitora? É sem noção! Você não tem, leitora, idéia do tanto de bom que é. Só não esqueça, por favor, o "Ô" no começo, porque sem ele não dá para dar noção do tanto que algo é sem noção, entendeu?
Ouço a leitora chiar:
— Capaz...
Vocês já ouviram esse "capaz"? É lindo. Quer dizer o quê? Sei lá, quer dizer "tá fácil que eu faça isso", com algumas toneladas de ironia. Gente, ando um péssimo tradutor. Se você propõe a sua namorada um sexo a três (com as amigas dela), provavelmente ouvirá um "capaz..." como resposta. Se, em vingança contra a recusa, você ameaçar casar com a Gisele Bundchen, ela dirá: "ô dó dôcê". Entendeu agora?
Não? Deixa para lá. É parecido com o "nem...". Já ouviu o "nem..."? Completo ele fica: - Ah, nem...
O que significa? Significa, amigo leitor, que a mineira que o pronunciou não fará o que você propôs de jeito nenhum. Mas de jeito nenhum. Você diz: "Meu amor, cê anima de comer um tropeiro no Mineirão?". Resposta: "nem..." Ainda não entendeu? Uai, nem é nem. Leitor, você é meio burrinho ou é impressão?
A propósito, um mineiro não pergunta: "você não vai?". A pergunta, mineiramente falando, seria: "cê não anima de ir"? Tão simples. O resto do Brasil complica tudo. É, ué, cês dão umas volta pra falar os trem...
Certa vez pedi um exemplo e a interlocutora pensou alto: - Você quer que eu "dou" um exemplo...
Eu sei, eu sei, a gramática não tolera esses abusos mineiros de conjugação. Mas que são uma gracinha, ah isso lá são.
Ei, leitor, pára de babar. Que coisa feia. Olha o papel todo molhado. Chega, não conto mais nada. Está bem, está bem, mas se comporte.
Falando em "ei...". As mineiras falam assim, usando, curiosamente, o "ei" no lugar do "oi". Você liga, e elas atendem lindamente: "eiiii!!!", com muitos pontos de exclamação, a depender da saudade...
Tem tantos outros... O plural, então, é um problema. Um lindo problema, mas um problema. Sou, não nego, suspeito. Minha inclinação é para perdoar, com louvor, os deslizes vocabulares das mineiras.
Aliás, deslizes nada. Só porque aqui a língua é outra, não quer dizer que a oficial esteja com a razão. Se você, em conversa, falar: - Ah, fui lá comprar umas coisas...
— Que' s coisa? — ela retrucará.
Acreditam? O plural dá um pulo. Sai das coisas e vai para o que.
Ouvi de uma menina culta um "pelas metade", no lugar de "pela metade". E se você acusar injustamente uma mineira, ela, chorosa, confidenciará: - Ele pôs a culpa "ni mim".
A conjugação dos verbos tem lá seus mistérios, em Minas... Ontem, uma senhora docemente me consolou: "preocupa não, bobo!". E meus ouvidos, já acostumados às ingênuas conjugações mineiras, nem se espantam. Talvez se espantassem se ouvissem um: "não se preocupe", ou algo assim. A fórmula mineira é sintética, e diz tudo.
Até o tchau, em Minas, é personalizado. Ninguém diz tchau pura e simplesmente. Aqui se diz: "tchau pro cê", "tchau pro cês". É útil deixar claro o destinatário do tchau. O tchau, minha filha, é prôcê, não é pra outra entendeu?
Deve haver, por certo, outras expressões... A minha memória (que não ajuda muito) trouxe essas por enquanto. Estou, claro, aberto a sugestões. Como é uma pesquisa empírica, umas voluntárias ajudariam... Exigência: ser mineira. Conversando com lingüistas, fui informado: é prudente que tenham cabelos pretos, espessos e lisos, aquela pele bem branquinha... Tudo, naturalmente, em nome da ciência. Bem, eu me explico: é que, características à parte, as conformações físicas influem no timbre e som da voz, e eu não posso, em honrados assuntos mineiros, correr o risco de ser inexato, entendem?
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Ser mineiro...
"Ser mineiro é não dizer o que faz nem o que vai fazer. É fingir que não sabe aquilo que sabe, é falar pouco e escutar muito, é passar por bobo e ser inteligente, é vender queijo branco. Um bom mineiro não laça boi com embira, não dá rasteira no vento, não pisa no escuro, não anda no molhado, não estica conversa com estranhos, só acredita na fumaça quando vê fogo, só arrisca quando tem certeza, não troca um pássaro na mão por dois voando. Ser mineiro é dizer 'uai', é ser diferente e ter marca registrada, é ter história. Ser mineiro é ter simplicidade e pureza, humildade e modéstia, coragem e bravura, fidalguia e elegância. Ser mineiro é ver o nascer do sol e o brilhar da lua, é ouvir o cantar dos pássaros e o mugir do gado, é sentir o despertar do tempo e o amanhecer da vida. Ser mineiro é ser religioso, conservador, é cultivar as letras e as artes, é ser poeta e literato, é gostar de política e amar a liberdade, é viver nas montanhas, é ter vida interior."
Autor anônimo
(mas só pode ser mineiro, ou então enganou bem...)
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