ARE WE CORRECTLY DEFINING & MEASURING DEVELOPMENT?
In the Caribbean we have generally moved beyond using GDP to measure development, to focus more on the Human Development Index (HDI). But the HDI looks at GDP per capita which we know is possibly the world’s most imperfect measure of anything. The HDI also looks at life expectancy at birth, emphasizing longevity but accidentally contributing to an overpopulated planet, while not accounting for our quality of life, especially the deterioration in health in those years we have succeeded in adding! The HDI also looks at the number of years of schooling, with no reference to the quality of our education outcomes, nor how relevant our education is. The fact that we are not measuring these outcomes in the first place, means we may be focusing on ‘solving’ the wrong things. The fact that the majority of our tertiary educated graduates leave the Caribbean and are able to succeed elsewhere, tells us that while we are hitting some of the right targets, we are clearly missing many others.
By not consistently measuring poverty or inequality in the Caribbean, we don’t know whether our current socio-economic systems and policies are in fact making us poorer. For example, the largely regressive taxation systems in the Caribbean which tax individuals / wages (and food!) more than profits, is pro-poverty and pro-inequality (which also causes poverty). And by looking northwards, over-emphasizing consumption and celebrating material accumulation, creating a perpetual collective rat race of earning / borrowing / finding enough foreign currency to import goods and services, are we growing our economies, improving our lives, planting the right seeds to feed future West Indians, or are we (still) creating (more) wealth for our (former) colonizers? This Babylon system (as Bob Marley called it), where we are ‘educated’ to join a workforce, get a job, take a 30 year mortgage and car loan, live on debt, have children and teach them to do the same, give them everything we didn’t have materially, so they / we have to work and borrow to sustain these habits and lifestyles...is a vicious cycle we are trapped in. This system limits our freedoms as Caribbean people, and is the antithesis of development as per Amartya Sen’s definition of Development as Freedom.
In my Trinidad & Tobago, we have seen our freedoms relentlessly eroded during this century, but we are not the only country in the Caribbean to have regressed or even failed by this measure of development. But I was blessed to live in freedom with the people of Vanuatu last month, learning quite by accident just how evidently misguided the Caribbean’s development journey has been.
“THE WORLD HAS MUCH TO LEARN FROM INDIGENOUS PEOPLES’ WISDOM”
Vanuatu has a GDP/capita resembling Haiti’s, and is the world’s most at-risk country for natural disasters and extreme weather. And despite disaster upon disaster, Vanuatu was again ranked as the Happiest Country in 2024 by the Happy Planet Index, which reports that while no country has achieved sustainable wellbeing, Vanuatu comes closest with life expectancy of 70.4 years and a self-reported wellbeing score of 7.1/10, all with a low carbon footprint. In Vanuatu, people largely eat what they grow and grow what they eat, they own the ancestral land on which they have lived and farmed for thousands of years, with a strong sense of community providing unrivalled support and social protections. What we think of as ‘development’ in the ‘western’ sense is deeply flawed and ultimately dystopian based on the pressures on the individual and our planet, and we have moved so far west that we are ending up East. Which is exactly where Vanuatu is, and should choose to stay, confidently and securely.
The global boom in digital nomads relocating to more sustainable and rural community-based lifestyles, the popularity of silent retreats and digital detoxes, and the explosion in the wellness industry and so-called organic food, all of which is inherent in the indigenous cultures of Vanuatu and elsewhere, demonstrate our yearning to return to where we began as a species.
Recently the UN Secretary General opened the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues stating: “The world has much to learn from Indigenous Peoples' wisdom, insights and approaches.” How do we get back to a place where we can re-learn and re-embrace some of the more sustainable and community-based lifestyles and socio-economic development practices of our ancestors, and thereby create more socio-economic freedoms for ourselves and the future generations of Caribbean people?
