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Debt Trap Peonage
Monthly Review, Nov, 1985 by [[Chinweizu]]
For a country like Nigeria, which has already fallen into "debt trap peonage,"
the problem of escaping it breaks down into two tasks: escaping from it, and
taking measures to avoid falling into it again. In order to find solutions to
these two tasks, I am going to look at five questions: (1) What is Nigeria's
debt situation today, and how was it brought about? (2) What makes it a
case of debt trap peonage? (3) Why is it necessary to escape debt trap
peonage? (4) How can that be done? (5) What stops Nigeria from taking the
steps necessary for escaping it?
Today, six years after we were lured into unnecessary borrowing by lenders
eager to recycle petrodollars, Nigeria's foreign debt is officially said to be
11.08 billion pounds sterling (U.S. $16.6 billion). Debt service charges are
expected to consume 3.272 pounds sterling billion $4.9 billion), some 38.47
percent of our 1984 export revenue of 8.5 billion pounds sterling ($12.75
billion); that is without including service charges on the $5.5 billion trade
debt that we are anxious to convert into long-term debt. And as if all this
mountain of debt was not burden enough, we are seeking an IMF loan of
about $2 billion for "structural adjustments," so that we can get even more
loans from international bankers.
As our oil revenues decline, we seem to be turning into a loan addict. Our
urge is to grab loans and ever more loans, like a drug addict who must have
more and more heroin to keep going. And like the heroid addict, we are
craving these laons, not for sound purposes, but simply to finance our
spendthrift consumer habits and our ambitious maldevelopment programs.
Inclassic peonage, workers, though nominally and legally free, are held in
servitude by the terms of their indenture to their masters. Because their
wages are set too low to buy the necessities, the master grants credit but
restricts the worker to buying overpriced goods from the master's own store.
As a result, each month the peon goes deeper and deeper into debt. For as
long as the arrangement lasts, the peon cannot pay off the mounting debt
and leave, and must keep on working for the master--which suits the master
perfectly. For the master's aim is neither to starve the peons nor to see
them free from the chain of debt, but rather to keep them working until they
die. Peons cannot run away, either. The law recognizes their debt and will
enforce the master's claims. Besides, no other employer will take them on so
long as they owe the old master. So, peons who run off but do not get clean
away are either captured and brought back, or starved in hiding.
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The third world countries that are today accumulating massive debts are in
an analogous situation. They do not earn enough from the export of their
mineral and agricultural products to pay for the overpriced manufacturers
they import from the West. The West, through international banks and
government iad, lends them the difference. Each year they need more loans
to make up these deficits, and so their foreign debt mounts. Unable to pay
off their debts and powerless to survive the dire consequences of repudiating
them, these countries are obliged to continue in permanent
underdevelopment, supplying low priced raw materials to their industrial
creditors and unable to concentrate their attention and resources on
developing their economies in their own interest.
Such is precisely the situation into which Nigeria has put itself. And I must
stress that Nigeria was not captured and forced into this situation, but
volunteered itself into it. In 1978, when Nigeria agreed to contract the first
billion of these debts, it had more income from oil than it could sensibly
spend. Though it did not need the debt, it allowed itself to be persuaded to
sample the pleasures of debtorship. In that, Nigeria is more like the person
who was persuaded to take a first shot of heroin, got to like the thrill, and
took more and more, soon becoming an addict. Indeed, Nigeria did enjoy
the thrills of being a spend-thrift, and did soon become a loan addict. Nigeria
has become, not just a debt trap peon, but a squander-addicted debt trap
peon.
Nigeria shares three crucial characteristics with a heroin-addicted debt trap
peon. First, both debts are unsecured consumer debts, made up of
subsistence and spending-spree expenses, and with future income as the
only collateral. Second, both loans are pure peonage loans, that it, loans
made not because of the potential of the project the loan is to be used for,
but simply in order to secure legal control over the economic and political
behavior of the debtor. Third, the only way made available for getting out of
both debts is by getting into more debt.
But what is wrong with this situation? Why it is necessary to escape it?
Those of us who look forward to the day (which we may not ourselves live to
see) when Nigeria will be an industrial world power, and those who wish to
contribute to the early arrival of that day, cannot feel happy about our
getting into a debt trap peonage that removes our economic sovereignty and
hands the piloting of our economy over to our creditors. Today, that means
turning Nigeria into a financial protectorate of the IMF. We can already see
what that means. IMF teams come to inspect our books; we take our
economic programs to them for approval; and they dictate what kinds of
social and economic restructuring we must pursue. It is just as if we were
back in the old colonial days, when the Colonial Office had to approve our
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budget and economic programs, subject, of course, to these being
serviceable to the larger imperial aims of our masters.
If we had any sense of national honor, we ought to cringe in shame. Here
we are, an allegedly sovereign nation, being treated, twenty-four years after
independence, like some delinquent schoolboy or some bankrupt company
incapable of managing its finances.
But the need to escape debt trap peonage goes beyond the sentimental
matter of national honor, and beyond the (perhaps to most people) abstract
matter of economic and political sovereignty. Debt trap peonage is injurious
to any country's development prospects; and the squander-addicted
peonage that Nigeria is getting more deeply into is doubly injurious. Besides
making us peons, it ruins our social fabric and disorients us. Let us see what
injury has alreay been done, first to our finances, then to our social
foundations and national psychology.
For today's $16.6 billion debt (i.e., two years' export revenues), we must
now pay some $5 billion a year in service charges. For us, that does not
make sense. But you can see why the banks came after us to borrow, and
still want us to borrow more, provided the IMF can guarantee policies that
will enable them to keep pumping similar billions out of us each year. And
what do you think their weapon for keeping us hooked on loans is? Our habit
of profligacy, that's what! We are addicted to loans because we are addicted
to profligacy.
At first, to justify a relatively minor loan of $1 billion to be addeed to our
huge oil revenues, we were encouraged to go on a spending spree. We were
even helped to put together a lavish pruchasing catalogue that we mistook
for a development plan. As our profligacy became a habit, the doubling of
our oil income didn't matter: we still needed a bit more to pay for our even
more rapidly enlarging desires, and so we still wanted loans. This habit of
spending beyond our means is at the root of our condition. If we learned to
feel fine with our expenses well below our income, we would psychologically
be in good shape to start plotting our escape from debt trap peonage. But
curbing profligacy, like getting off heron, is not easy, especially if it involves
a drop in what we imagine our living standards to to be.
Regarding our development prospects, debt trap peonage forces us to place
our economy under IMF supervision. Given the fundamental antagonism
between the interests of the peon and the master (in this case, between
Nigeria and the West), we can fully expect that the IMF will insist on policies
that will divert us from our national goal of developing into a powerful,
prosperous, modern, industrial nation. Anyone who thinks that the IMF will
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approve programs or sponsor policies which will develop Nigeria in such a
way as to threaten the economic hegemony of the Western powers needs to
go and think again. The IMF's job, as overseer of the global economic
arrangements of the West, is precisely the opposite.
The other reason for getting out of debt trap peonage is that under it,
policies will be imposed that will bring social chaos upon us. If we think that
things are bad now, we should look down the road a few years and see what
peonage will visit on us. For that, all we need do is look at countries that
have allowed the IMF to tell them how to manage their economies. If you
like, study the recent history of Brazil. (Those of you who read The Guardian
[Lagos] regularly may have already understood the plight of Brazil. For, in
our one year of existence, we have, in our "Economy and Business" pages,
given as much coverage as possible to developments in Brazil. Our aim has
been to sensitize Nigerians to what might soon be happening here, and why,
if we remain, like Brazil, under IMF tutelage.) In brief, this is the Brazilian
story.
In the 1970s Brazil went on a borrowing spree. Today its debt is almost
$100 billion; its debt trap agonies fill the headlines. Since its exports cannot
pay the debt service charges, Brazil is on the treadmill of seeking the
rescheduling of its debts. But before the banks agree to roll over its loans,
Brazil has to agree to the austerity measures decreed by the IMF. These
measures however, call for severe hardships to be imposed on the
population. As a result, Brazil has been plunged into semipermanent social
unrest. Strikes, riots, and factory closures have become the disorders of the
day. Hunger roams the streets and countryside. In the middle of 1983,
numerous supermarkets were looted by hungry city dwellers. Starving rural
folk who had fled to the cities were reduced to near cannibalism. Indeed,
where in the 1970s Brazil went aborrowing, in the 1980s it has gone
assorowing.
Caught in an endless round of debt rescheduling and endlessly screaming for
fresh loans to pay off old debts, Brazil has been subjected to the insolence of
powerful nations. When, last October, U.S. Treasury Secretary Donald
Regan, while on a visit to Rio, voiced "fear" for the future of Brazil, a
Brazilian senator cried out that the remarks were "insolent, inadmissible,
and intolerable." There were demands to have Brazil's honor defended. Yet
is there no end in sight to Brazil's debts, social unrest, and international
humiliation.
But then, some might say, the IMF insists on inculcating financial discipline,
and that can only be for the good of a financially undisciplined nation like
Nigeria. My answer to that is: not necessarily, it all depends. Though the IMF
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has come to be used by third world governments as the bogeyman that
forces them to impose the hardships of financial discipline on their countries,
we must ask: Is it really necessary to use the IMF as a bogeyman? And is
the kind of discipline it imposes the kind we need?
Citizens have been known to make great sacrifices when they blieve in the
cause for which the sacrifices are demanded. So, to use the IMF as
bogeyman simply suggests that a government has not bothered to earn the
confidence of its people in its ability to lead them on the hard and risky
journey to development. As for the kind of discipline which the IMF likes to
impose, it is the wrong kind for the wrong aims. What we need is the
discipline of the farmer who plants his or her seeds, tends his or her fields,
harvests his or her crops, and guards his or her granary from thieves and
rodents alike. What we do not need is the pseudodiscipline of the robot who,
once programmed, assists robbers in looting his or her own house.
If, for the above reasons, debt trape peonage is not good for us, how do we
get out of it and stay out of it? Let me begin by disposing of a solution that
in fact is no solution at all, but is the very problem itself. The conventional
unwisdom says that the solution to our mounting debt is to reschedule it.
But seriously, isn't that just what peons are obliged to do by their masters?
For so long as their earnings are not enough to meet their needs and pay off
the growing debt, rolling it over is not a cure but a prolongation of the
disease.
For Nigeria, switching from short-term loans to medium-term loans, or from
either to long-term loans, is like switching from heroin to methadone: it is
merely the substitution of one addiction for another, when what is needed is
an end to the addiction. Of course, addicted peons, if driven too hard, could
commit suicide; but that would be cutting their throats to spite their
enslaver's or dealer's pockets. The only remedy for the condition is to give
up the craving for heroin, and then either repudiating the debt (by running
far beyond the reach of the master's power of the law), or seeing to it that
the terms of any rescheduling allow the debt to be worked off within a
lifetime. For only then can peons walk out free, with the masters powerless
to use the law to stop them. Let us consider these options.
The peons chances of running away from their debts are pretty slim. But can
a sovereign state do that? Well, that becomes a matter of power, doesn't it?
It boils down to one question: does the debtor state have the power to defy
the armed might of the nations to which its creditors belong? If you examine
the history of the Caribbean, you will find that, earlier in this century, debts
owed to European and U.S. interests served as occasions for the takeover of
nations by the U.S. marines, and for the takeover of their finances for the
370 | P a g e
purpose of collecting payments. One remarkable example was that of the
Dominican Republic. In 1905 the United States took over its finances and
used the proceeds from its customs to pay off its foreign debt. This exercise
lasted until 1924, when the U.S. military finally left.
You may say that the world has changed considerably since then. But has it?
And in the appropriate respects? The Western countries may not be able to
enforce their will by armed might wherever they wish, as the recent
examples of Iran, Vietnam, and Lebanon show. But they have other means
available to them. Perhaps their most fearsome weapon today is economic
warfare. The United States was unable to get its hostages back from Iran
through an Entebbe-style raid, but when it embarked upon economic war,
seizing Iranian assets all over the world, Iran had to yield.
If the Western powers waged economic war on Nigeria, if they cut off all
trade, all credit, all food supplies, seized our assets around the world, and
blockaded our ports and air space, wouldn't Nigeria collapse under the
pressure? That is because Nigeria (or any third world country, for that
matter) hasn't the consumption habits and production capacity to withstand
concerted economic war from the West. Cuba has survived U.S. economic
pressure for twenty-five years, but Europe did not go along with the U.S.
blockade and the Soviet Union served as Cuba's umbilical cord and defender.
Who would do the same for Nigeria if all our Western creditors ganged up on
us?
Such considerations probably explain why all that Latin American talk of
forming a debtors' cartel remains just talk. The most they were able to
propose at the Quito debtors' summit last January (where twenty-seven
Latin American and Caribbean countries met to discuss how to get out from
under their $350 billion debt burden) was to seek three things from their
creditors: a drastic reduction in interest rates on past and future loans; an
extended repayment schedule; and the limiting of loan repayments to
manageable percentages of national export earnings.
The implication of the Quito summit is that if we lack the power to walk
away from our debt, then the best we can hope for is to work it off. Thus we
must take on no new loans, and we must pay off our existing debt. For
Nigeria, this cure would require us to end our squandermania, drastically
reduce our spending on imports, and devote most of our export earnings to
paying off our debts. But, most importantly, we would have to avoid any
new debt.
Of course, there is room for variation in the severity of the curative
program. Now, using current projections, $16.6 billion is roughly two years
371 | P a g e
of export revenues for Nigeria. We could in the most extreme version of the
regimen, cut off all imports for two years and use all our export earnings to
retire our debt. This would probably be the best cure; but would a spoiled
and pampered population stand for such a short sharp shock? You could
hear them uttering: What? Go without my daily Chivas or Remy? Drive a
dented Mercedes Benz? And for two years? The psychological wrench of this
variant of the cure might be just too much. So we might have to plan for it
to take four or five years to pay off a debt that could be inconveniently paid
off in two.
But how would such a total freeze on imports and new debt differ from the
unacceptable IMF medicine? In at least two ways. First, the IMF medicine is
futile. Inasmuch as it does not require us to stop acquiring new debt, it does
not aim to cure. It is simply an alleged cure that puts us through the
hardships of hospitalization and medication, but keeps giving us fresh
infections of the debt disease it pretends to be curing. If the aim is to regain
health and freedom, then, from the point of view of a victim economy, the
IMF hardship is pointless hardship. In contrast, the self-administered cure is
both appropriate to the disease, and drastic enough to kill it off in the
shortest possible time and get us out of hospital to enjoy our freedom.
Secondly, in development terms, the self-imposed cure has irreplaceable
advantages. To get cured of the squandermania and import mania which
make us into loan addicts, we need a therapeutic shock to our system. Like
Chu Teh, the Chinese general who got rid of his opium addiction, we need to
put ourselves in isolation on a boat without a scrap of our "heroin" (imports
and debts) on board, and sail off for the years it will take to overcome our
withdrawal pains and be cured. For that, we must collectively have the
discipline and determination derived from a conviction that a difficult course
of action is in our best interest. Such resolve, being voluntary, would
mobilize our spirit of sacrifice for national salvation and organize us for the
long hard march to development. The IMF program of hardship, on the other
hand, being imposed by an outside overseer and being clearly contrary to
our interest, cannot gain our free consent. To impose it would call for such
repression as would pit government and people against each other, and tear
Nigeria apart.
If we really want to get out of debt trap peonage, we should have nothing to
do with the IMF and its "cure." All this preoccupation with debt rescheduling,
with scampering about for new loans, all this flitting about to Washington
and London and Paris and Riyadh is a dramatic waste of time, a monumental
misdirection of effort. Dr. Soleye would make better use of his time by
staying here, working out the details of a regimen of total withdrawal, and
372 | P a g e
writing to tell the international bankers and the IMF to expect a full
repayment in two or three or four years' time.
But if we shun such a cure, why might that be? This question goes to the
psychological heart of the matter of escaping debt trap peonage. For what
keeps us from the cure is not unrelated to what caused us to be lured into
the trap in the first place, and might lure us back into it even if we get out
this time.
I am told that the ultimate basis of the banking business is confidence or
trust, which is why many banks in the United States go by the name of
"trust companies." Confidence and trust are matters not so much of
numbers as of psychology. Alas, however, they can be abused. In fact, the
confidence man (con man), with his confidence tricks (con plans), cannot
operate without first obtaining the confidence of his intended victim. And
getting people to fall into debt trap peonage is done by conning them.
But why do some people fall for con tricks while others do not? After all,
they say that it takes two to tango; and the con man can come with his con
plan, but it is up to you to fall or not to fall for it. This is a crucial point to
understand if we wish to avoid getting conned into debt trap peonage. So,
let us probe that part of the conning process that we ourselves can control.
When you analyze how people (who, after all, have not been captured in
battle and dragged off to a slave farm) are lured into a debt trap and kept in
peonage, you soon discover that the operation's success depends on the
victims having a psychology that makes them susceptible to confidence
tricks and crackpot ideas. Let me illustrate this with the example of how
Nigeria was lured, back in 1978, onto the path that led to the debt trap, and
of how Nigeria is now allowing itself to be conned into getting even deeper
into debt. When we see the crackpot ideas we have been accepting from
those who want to con us, we can more easily appreciate why we fall for
them.
One of the key arguments used on us in 1978 was that if we borrowed
money we did not need, the experienced lenders would be in a position to
supervise and guide our development efforts, since they would then have a
financial stake in our development. It was a foolish argument, and some of
us said so at the time. It is still a foolish argument, and all that our falling
for it did was to enable the international loan sharks to get their teeth into
the succulent belly of our future earnings. But why did we fall for it?
As is usual with confidence tricks, the con man presented to us only a part of
the picture, and relied on our own stupid expectations to make us go along
373 | P a g e
with him. And we did. We fell in with his plans by thinking that, if he took
such a deep interest in furthering our development, we might get the
development we wanted without any strenuous effort or risk on our part. We
would let him take the wheel and do the driving and instructing while we
would half listen, and nod or giggle occasionally, while cosily taking in the
lovely view as we got driven to our destination. So we eagerly let him get
into the driver's seat, and we have been taken for a ride. But the gasoline
consumed has been ours, and the wear and tear has been on our car, while
the destination has not been the one we thought we were being driven to
(the paradise at the end of the road of development), but the peonage farm
the driver had intended all along to take us to.
The basic illusion underlying our behavior is the notion that development is
some sort of turnkey on a wall which we can buy without going through the
rigors and dangers of a hunt. But development is not like that. You cannot
buy it and fly it in and install it. True, the foreign financiers may have all the
expertise in the world on development. But the point about our development
is not the supervisory transfer to us of their expertise, but our development
of our own. And the way to develop Nigerian expertise is by giving ourselves
the opportunity to try, fail, learn, and succeed. Development, like a child's
learning to walk, involves shaky steps, falls, bruises, pain, and cries, as well
as steady stands and, finally, firm footsteps. And just as nobody else can
learn to walk (or drive, or eat, or talk) for another, even so nobody else can
do our developing for us. We must do it ourselves, taking the responsibility
and the risk, and being quite prepared for failures, since some are
inevitable.
In contrast to what we did, or rather allowed others to do to us while we
thought they were doing it for us, development requires us to take full
control of our economy, and to tackle the problems of building it up
ourselves. That is how every developed country did it. That is the secret of
how the Soviet Union and Japan and the United States did it. That is how
Britain and France did it. That is how China has been doing it. None of them
did it by handing over the directing and problem-solving involved to another
nation or group of nations. Even the Chinese had to kick out their "big
brother" Russians in 1959 and take complete charge of their own
development.
When, back in 1978, Western con men sold us the crackpot notion of the
value of creditor supervision, they did so by playing on our lazy greed for the
fruits of development without any stomach for the process itself. Now, in
1984, in order to hold us in peonage, we are being sold two notions by con
men, including, alas, some of our own high officials who seem to be
parroting their foreign mentors.
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One of these notions concerns the alleged need to create confidence in
Nigeria among the international banking community. According to a report in
the Broad Street Journal of December 1983, the permanent secretary in the
ministry of finance, Abubakar Alhaji, tried late last year to gain the support
of the Nigerian Labor Congress for the government's efforts to get an IMF
loan. He explained to them that the most crucial benefit Nigeria needed from
the IMF loan was the restoring of international confidence in Nigeria, a
confidence that would enable Nigeria to secure additional loans from the
international capital market.
Now let us appreciate what all that means. Mr. Alhaji was, in effect, telling
us that the loan from the IMF would give Nigeria access to more of the very
loans that would get us deeper into debt trap peonage. And he thought that
that was a good thing for Nigeria! Well, as far as I can see the only thing
that would restore confidence in a man who is determined to hang you is not
evidence of your stupid docility, of your resignation to his power, of your
unwillingness to holler or even make a fuss, let alone trying to escape or
hang him instead. So, instead of worrying about restoring that kind of
injurious confidence abroad, we should concentrate on creating confidence
among Nigerians in the development potential of our economy, and in our
own ability to realize that potential through our own efforts.
Another crackpot notion that Western con men have been trying to sell us is
that of our being "underborrowed." Even the minister of finance in the last
administration, Adamu Ciroma, tries to parrot that crackpot idea and get us
to accept it. Well, it seems to me utterly foolish to accept that we are
"underborrowed" even as we have to use nearly 40 percent of our export
earnings to pay charges on a mountain of spendthrift debt. As far as I am
concerned, Nigeria became overborrowed on that day in 1978 when we
allowed ourselves to borrow one kobo that we did not absolutely need. By
that I mean one kobo we did not have the absorptive capacity to invest
prudently. And what did we use our $16.6 billion loan for? Most, if not all, of
it was squandered. If you consider that, according to Oladele Olashore of the
International Bank for West Africa, Nigeria did not get more than 25 percent
value for all our imports, you can see that no less than $12 billion of that
mountain of debt was wasted. In other words, our injudicious imports
merely helped the Western countries to recycle into their pockets most of
the money they were loaning us or paying us for our oil.
What disposes Nigerians to accept such crackpot notions? What keeps them
from taking the cure for their condition? What are they trying to evade by
replying on foreign debt to finance their development? Without foreign
financing (through oil and loans), Nigeria would have to undergo internal
capital accumulation, and enduring the rigors of internal capital
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accumulation and mobilization is not an easy process. They are accompanied
by great hardships and risks. And basically Nigerians do not want the rigors
and risks of development. All they want are its fruits. So they think they can
beg (aid), borrow (loans), and sell (oil) their way to development.
Obviously, Nigeria falls for these con tricks and crackpot notions because,
deep down, Nigerians (or at least the elite from which all our leaders come)
have the psychology of the sucker. Suckers are greedy but lazy and want
the easiest way to their overblown ambitions. Suckers believe that there is
such a thing as a free lunch, and that they are smart enough to snatch it
from a hungry lion's table. Suckers want to go to paradise but do not want
to die. Suckers believe in perpetual motion machines. Their lazy greed blinds
them to the elementary fact that, in the real world--as opposed to that of
lazy fantasy--what you get is what you pay for, no more, and quite often
less!
You are, of course, free to want an easy way to the paradise of
development. But is there one? Economic history shows that development
happens to be one of those journeys (much like climbing Mt. Everest) for
which there are no easy paths, only more or less difficult ones. So, if you
think you have found a broad and easy road, you can be sure (if Christ is to
be believed) that it doesn't lead to paradise.
If Nigerians are at all serious about development, and therefore serious
about escaping their debt trap peonage, they need to abandon their sucker
psychology and fantasies. They need to alter their expectations to conform
to the truth that the price of development must be paid, not in money alone
but in effort, and not by others but by ourselves.
In that regard, let me tell you what a lawyer friend of mine, a Nigerian, once
told me. He said that any man who goes to the police and complains that he
has been swindled by a money doubler should himself be locked up. I think
that is a position we, as a nation, should adopt. So, instead of self-
righteously complaining about the wickedness of those who conned us into
the debt trap (usually meaning the West), or against those who refuse to
give us all the aid we crave (usually meaning the Eastern bloc countries), we
should speedily end our foolish spending spree, retire our debts, and free
ourselves from the strangling strings of foreign aid and loans. Then we can
use our resources to develop ourselves. Should we ever need to get into
some international lending and borrowing after that, our watchword ought to
be: never lend more than you can afford to write off, and never borrow more
than you can invest and repay without strain.
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In conclusion, let me say this: ultimately, there is no magic formula for
averting debt trap peonage. Like corporate or military strategy, the task
calls for intelligent analysis of concrete situations, clear formulation of goals
and objectives, meticulous application of principles derived from experience,
some practical inventiveness, and a dogged watchfulness against con men
and crackpot ideas. In the light of our current experience, we should above
all rein in our sucker's psychology, beware of Greeks bearing gifts, and
practice that eternal vigilance which is the price, not only of political, but
also of economic liberty. In short, we should get into the habit of using our
heads in our national interest. But unfortunately, as a Lagos taxi driver once
told me, "Nigerians think the head is a spare part." May I suggest that we
attach it at once, and put it to work immediately?
COPYRIGHT 1985 Monthly Review Foundation, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
Chinweizu "Debt trap peonage". Monthly Review. FindArticles.com. 13 Mar,
2010. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1132/is_v37/ai_4000399/

Debt Trap Peonage - Revision history

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