Manfred Max-Neef on Fundamental Human Needs

Latin America: crisis and perplexity In creating the future, there is either the risk of making errors of perception, or of making errors of action. Concerning perception, two serious mistakes are often made. The first is to believe diat the Latin American crisis can be ascribed principally to an external crisis. The second, stemming from the first, is to assume that our depression is just a passing historical circumstance. Although it is true that external conditions do considerably influence dependent and vulnerable economies like ours, it is, none the less, also probable that a recovery of the capitalistic economy in the North will not affect significandy our own recovery. It would be a delusion to base a strategy for future development on the expansion of exports of primary products. Very simply, indicators suggest that the bulk of primary products will be affected, for different reasons, by unfavourable terms of trade. Moreover, others are already being replaced by more efficient substitutes. Another strategy based on the diversification of exports, diat is, of manufactured goods, would inevitably come up against the protectionist policies of the powers in die North. Also, to assume a type of development which is nurtured by external contributions of capital is ruled out altogether on account of die serious and insoluble condition of indebtedness in which we are forced to live. In our opinion, the future lies in mustering all our energy to design imaginative but viable alternatives. The conditions for these alternatives seem to be quite clear. The two schools of economic thought which have prevailed in the Latin American setting, neo-liberal monetarism and the more inter-ventionist state-centered developmentalism promoted by the Economic Commission for Latin America, these have not been able to satisfy the legitimate needs of the Latin American masses. A new perspective is called for which aims at an adequate satisfaction of human needs. Furthermore, if future development cannot be sustained through die expansion of exports or through substantial injection of foreign capital, an alternative development must generate a capacity for greater self-reliance. We are proposing an orientation which would enable us to create conditions for a new praxis based on Human Scale Development. Such development is focused and based on the satisfaction of fundamental human needs, on the generation of growing levels of self-reliance, and on the construction of organic articulations of people widi nature and technology, of global processes with local activity, …