However, from the same article, I can quote “But Congress has a moral obligation to protect American agriculture with legislation that will serve our national interests”. And I think that the reason is not only moral obligations but more concrete ones like lobbyis. This latter is just rational maximization of the self-interest of the corporations that reached a wealth level making a lobby in Washington affordable for them. It is now strategic rational choice! My point of view is that different theories accurately explain underdevelopment in different scales. It depends from where the issue is observed.

PS. This book must be read to understand what is happening behind the scenes concerning the US foreign policy.

From Wikipedia:

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (ISBN 0-452-28708-1) is a book written by John Perkins and published in 2004. It tells the story of his career with consulting firm Chas. T. Main. Before employment with the firm, he interviewed for a job with the National Security Agency (NSA). Perkins claims that this interview effectively constituted an independent screening which led to his subsequent hiring by Einar Greve, a member of the firm (and alleged NSA liaison) to become a self-described "Economic Hit Man."

Unlike Marxism, Dependency theory sees capitalism as a system of market relationship blocking the progress of poor countries. It claims also that the growth of rich countries has impoverished third world as an active process. I think that dependency theory has the most relevant explanation of poverty in the world because it has many facts hard to refute. For instance, historically, the third world countries have been changed because of their contact with the rich countries, or more than just a contact; specifically, Africa had never experienced starvation before the western colonization. And since then, the active process of impoverishment progressed with a change in the social structures. It was simply exploitation and still undergoing today in the form of unequal exchange as third world countries give up much more than they get back from the world capitalist system. Another group within the dependency school focuses on that World System, which divides the world countries in three categories: the core, the semi-periphery, and the periphery. The core, being the industrial countries that produce manufactured good, profit from the periphery in two manners; they extract the raw materials and then sell them the manufactured products because these poor countries have neither the skill nor the knowledge to produce these needed goods. Commodities used to be extracted from colonies, but with the independence of all Africa, the new leaders took the same position of the former colonial powers serving them with no alternative than to maintain a high production of these resources to satisfy the country’s needs of imports. Even the recent actions to end poverty and help poor countries grow economically such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were revealed to be no more than a new way to control these countries, through loans this time. And most of them are emergency loans that the leaders generally have no choice but accept them with the bundle of conditions that comes with. Life and Debt gave the example of Jamaica; Michael Manley, the former president, was interviewed and revealed the harsh process he has to go through to get some money from the IMF after the seventies petrol crisis. He had to accept, for instance, to stop agricultural subsidies, which worsened the situation. In the same time, the US were spending billions dollars in making dehydrated milk prices competitive even in the local market of Jamaica. And it’s not a unique case; a recent article in the Washington Post written by Jimmy carter, December 10^th, says that “A 2002 report by Oxfam International estimates that in 2001 sub-Saharan Africa lost $302 million as a direct result of U.S. cotton subsidies”.

Marxism, based on social class analysis, claims that capitalism can produce growth in the third world but only as a means to an end. In fact, the Marxist theory of historical materialism understands society as fundamentally determined by the material conditions, or modes of production, at any given time. In general, Marx identified successive stages of the development of these modes in Western Europe: the Slave Society developed when the tribes becomes a city-states and social relationships were based on the slave-master relation. Then Feudalism is born and the serfs worked under the rule of the landlord. On each conditions occupying one or another category had a fundamental impact on what an individual could or could not do. Merchants, then, developed into the current capitalists, who are the ruling class, creating and employing the true working class. The Capitalism as a social system, offered new conditions to liberty and even workers, represented by the middle class, gained full right. Yet, the constraints in the social system of capitalism are more sophisticated and give illusive individual liberties. I think a form of these ties is the fact that “everybody has to pay mortgages” as it was stated in the 2006 movie Thank you for smoking; from the lobbyists working for their corporate, to the journalists working for their newspapers, all obey to that doctrine, and obviously the consumer who is wedged between the opposite points of view; all of them are contributing to making the few riches richer. Additionally, this historical process doesn't end with capitalism but this latter, regarding Marxists, would propel the growth of communism because of the exploitation of workers and the growing wealth of the few rich. For the underdevelopment issue, Marx blames the state as it is the institution that serves the interest of the bourgeoisie and the ruling class. The government is, hence, responsible for the underdevelopment of the country with its wrong policies or the failure to implement the right ones. The strong point of Marxism is that it looks to the issue “from outside of the box”, a broader scale of history because the theory consider capitalism as a simple mode of production among others, not the sole world system.

However, the idea that rich countries will pull the poor countries out of their poverty is seen as one of the promises not kept by the rich, regarding Isbister. And that’s what the general idea of Structuralism suggests. Unlike modernizationists who see a simple partnership between the “have” and “have not”, structuralists are concerned with relationships within a broader framework or system of action. The key of understanding phenomena is thus to forget the “player” and focus on the “rules of the game”, which are the networks, linkages, interdependencies, and interactions among the parts of some system. Two important structuralist approaches are Marxism and Dependency Theory.

Modernization theory, as rationality, basically claims that poverty exists because the poor chose to be poor or exactly to stay traditional. A traditional society is defined as stagnant, with no scientific inquiry (innovation), and ascriptive (identifying with ancestors). In contrast, a modern society is based on science, has an open market, and in continuous progress. Hence, the third world countries are poor because they failed to kindle sparks of creativity, transform their societies, and commit to science and technology through free inquiry. The key solution for modernizationists is to give up the traditional values and start the process of modernization, a linear and ethnocentric process. It starts with countries’ self-transformation by encouraging scientific inquiry and abandoning their traditional values, thus they may realize technological changes leading to Capitalism as a social system. An efficient government is created then because it is vital for the development of Capitals, and therefore, this institution provides public goods and further investments in research ensuring the loop of continuous progression. This process was illustrated by W. W. Rostow in his “Economic Stages of Growth” or the ”Rostovian take-off model”. The model postulates that economic modernization occurs in five basic stages of varying length compared to a plane in a takeoff. The first is the Underdevelopment stage or the pre-Newtonian understanding and use of technology where societies still hitched to their traditional values. The second is the preconditions to take-off when small groups are seeking change and improvement. The third is the take-off, which occurs when sector led growth become common towards economic growth. Forth, the drive to maturity refers to economic diversity and greatly reduced rates of poverty and rising standard of living. And the fifth and last stage of growth is the age of high mass consumption when the country is fully modern. In addition, modernizationists claim that a partnership between rich and poor countries is essential for this process. They think that developed countries can play a critical role in that take-off by the diffusion of technology, corporations’ spread, financial loans, and consumption expansion. Yet, poor countries have a role with their government policy, because modernizationists are also reformers and believe in better policies, more aid, and freer market. Modernization theory is a dominant theory, and it is the base of the world capitalist system.