capitalism’s dark underbelly
what do you do when you walk into a cashew processing factory in rural mozambique and have 50 eyes turn and silently stare at you, the white person, who has come to inspect the work and then ride off in the big fancy car?
the NGO i am here with is quite involved in the cashew industry here in mozambique. mozambique used to have a huge percent of the global market share for processing cashews until international competition heated up with india and lots of places in southeast asia coming onboard. the industry in mozambique couldn’t compete and more or less collapsed here until my little NGO came to the rescue (faster than a speeding bullet! leaping taller than a, um, really tall building? how does it go again?) my NGO is in large part responsible for the mozambiquan cashew industry turning around and getting back on its feet. to be honest, i have mixed feelings about being involved in this.
as i am sitting here munching on some cashews (delicious!), i have to say that a heck of a lot of work went into these babies that i am popping into my mouth at a ferocious rate (and i wonder why i never seem to loose weight. hmm. what could it be?) shelling cashews is a very manual labor intensive process. the cashews are put into a steamer to loosen the shell, then cracked open, then the inner lining is peeled off, then they are separated out by grade size, then steamed and then bagged. and this is all done here by hand in mozambique where the country’s cheap labor force is
Friday, December 15, 2006
my host for the cashew factory tour was an indian manager who had been living in africa for about 10 years running various factories in various countries. he went home to india every three months or so and he had all indian managers working for him. he could bring in an indian manager in for $600 a month, which is starting to be close to what the manager could make back in india what with the rising living standards in india, but this $600 would be tax free (the US is just about the only country in the world to tax the income of its citizens living and working abroad). the indian managers, usually young guys, would then live out in the middle of the jungle at the factory for two years. no mozambiquans were managers.
he kept pointing out that the mozambiquan workers were lazy. indian workers could shell 1.5 to 2 times as many as the mozambiquans did in a day (i’ve asked a couple of people about this “lazy”
issue and the answer seems to either be that a). mozambiquans lived for a couple hundred years under a brutal colonial regime and then went straight into a brutal war which just ended 15 years ago. up until now it has been pure hand to mouth subsistence and they are still learning about the whole “job” concept or b). yes, they just enjoy hanging out more than working). and my indian guide also pointed out that mozambiquans would steal the cashews so you had to watch them. when the bell rang for lunch, everyone had to leave the factory and the doors were locked.
on the drive out to the factory as we were bouncing along the dirt roads, he told me he believed that the people were much better off working at his plant for a buck a day than they were without him. when he started here a year ago, they were skinnier and sicker. now, they are much healthier as a) they work all day and go home tired so now they don’t have time/energy to go out with the prostitutes (he was quite concerned about prostitutes and brought up the evils of prostitutes many many times on our car ride out to the plantation) b) they have self-esteem now that they are productive members of society c) he feeds them lunch and d) they earn a buck a day and don’t have to go steal coconuts off of trees to survive. is that a good enough rationalization for paying someone a buck a day?
actually it is a bit less than a buck a day. the plantation is in the middle of nowhere so i asked him how the workers get out there. he proudly said that they give them a bike. a couple of more questions revealed that the worker then got docked some of the buck a day he or she earned to pay for the bike for the next year to year and a half.
what is the alternative? i do understand that if he pays his workers more he will most likely go out of business and then no one will have a job. cashew processing plants currently run on about 3% profit margins and they assume a fair amount of risk in their operations so its not like there is a lot of fat on the table that is just not being passed on to the workers. so why don’t we pay more for cashews? because someone will sell them for less and still make money and wall street and main street both like that. and let’s be honest, i like cheap stuff as much as the next person. this mozambiquan factory seems to be the dark underbelly of our capitalist drive for low cost, the refuse pile where we crap out the results of bargain basement sales. that is the world today of global capitalism, i think as i pop another delicious cashew in my mouth. this is the part that we don’t see, don’t want to know about. as i walked around the cashew factory, conscious of my $400 camera (16 months salary), $100 shoes (4 months salary), $300 pair of glasses (about a year’s salary), and we won’t even get into the ridiculous amounts of money spent on my hair, it all seems a little surreal. 300 pairs of eyes staring at you in the factory makes me wonder a bit about justice and fairness.
the street sign for the intersection of avenida mao tse tung and avenida kim il sung, corrupted by a capatalist ad
north korea. bummer of a draw. but, on the upside, there is an avendia kim il sung here in maputo, but it is not as big as avenida karl marx, avenida vladimar i. lenin or even avenida mao tse tung. i can see the mothership getting bigger streets for lenin and marx, but it must have irked kim il sung to know that mao tse tung got a bigger road. once i go to south africa and buy a new battery for my digital camera (can't find one here), i will have to take a picture of me next to some street signs
the country was communist for a while and russia paired up all the developing countries with a big brother country who was more developed. mozambique really lost out on that lottery as they got
giving it a foothold to compete in that ferociously competitive global market. folks are paid by the task and stand there all day at their station and e.g. crack shells with the help of a little device that looks like it would take off half your finger if you were not careful. nut. crack. nut. crack. nut. crack. all day long.
they make about 800 metacais a month, which nets out to roughly a buck a day.
they did not look happy.
a clarification on the not looking happy part - if i can make a mass generalization, mozambiquans seem to me to be extremely happy people, almost bafflingly happy for a people who have been pretty much consistently handed the short end of the stick at every turn. they have huge lovely smiles, are super friendly, and are quick to laugh. if you take their picture and hand them the camera to see it, the smiles and laughter are really quite outrageous. i was talking to a malawian friend of mine about how the folks in the cashew factory didn’t look as happy as other folks i had seen. his answer was that of course they weren’t happy. africans hate to be inside.
