A system that creates denial and disease, while accumulating trillions of dollars of super-profits for agribusiness, is a system for creating poverty for people.

A few generations ago, almost everybody was poor. The Industrial Revolution led to new riches, but much of the world was left far behind.

This is a totally false history of poverty, and cannot be the basis of making poverty history. Jeffrey Sachs has got it wrong. The poor are not those who were left behind; they are the ones who were pushed out and excluded from access to their own wealth and resources.

The “poor are not poor because they are lazy or their governments are corrupt.” They are poor because their wealth has been appropriated and wealth-creating capacity destroyed. The riches accumulated by Europe were based on riches appropriated from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Without the destruction of India’s rich textile industry, without the takeover of the spice trade, without the genocide of the native American tribes, without Africa's slavery, the industrial revolution would not have led to new riches for Europe or the U.S. It was the violent takeover of Third World resources and Third World markets that created wealth in the North—but it simultaneously created poverty in the South.

Two economic myths facilitate a separation between two intimately linked processes: the growth of affluence and the growth of poverty. Firstly, growth is viewed only as growth of capital. What goes unperceived is the destruction in nature and in people’s sustenance economy that this growth creates. The two simultaneously created ‘externalities’ of growth—environmental destruction and poverty creation—are then casually linked, not to the processes of growth, but to each other. Poverty, it is stated, causes environmental destruction. The disease is then offered

as a cure: growth will solve the problems of poverty and environmental crisis it has given rise to in the first place. This is the message of Jeffrey Sachs’s analysis.

The second myth that separates affluence from poverty, is the assumption that if you produce what you consume, you do not produce. This is the basis on which the production boundary is drawn for national accounting that measures economic growth. Both myths contribute to the mystification of growth and consumerism, but they also hide the real processes that create poverty. First, the market economy dominated by capital is not the only economy. Development has, however, been based on the growth of the market economy. The invisible costs of development have been the destruction of two other economies: nature’s processes and people’s survival. The ignorance or neglect of these two vital economies is the reason why development has posed a threat of ecological destruction and a threat to human survival, both of which, however, have remained ‘hidden negative externalities’ of the development process. Instead of being seen as results of exclusion, they are presented as ‘those left behind.’ Instead of being viewed as those who suffer the worst burden of unjust growth in the form of poverty, they are falsely presented as those not touched by growth. This false separation of processes that create affluence from those that create poverty is at the core of Jeffrey Sachs analysis. His recipes will therefore aggravate and deepen poverty instead of ending it.

Trade and exchange of goods and services have always existed in human societies, but these were subjected to nature’s and people’s economies. The elevation of the domain of the market and man-made capital to the position of the highest organizing principle for societies