THE DEVELOPING WORLD

Autumn 2008

by Gie Goris

Industries based on creativity have done well, as both Silicon Valley and Britain’s vibrant creative sector can testify. Gie Goris makes a plea for the EU to invest in cultural projects in Africa and elsewhere as part of its aid effort

Culture makes money. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development says that in 2005 the cultural industries accounted for 7%, or $1.3 trillion of the world economy. These industries include music, film and television, textile design and fashion. In Britain, at least 2m people have jobs related to culture and top auditing firm KPMG reported to the British government that employment in the creative sector would in the 20 years up to 2015 grow by 46%. Tessa Jowell, a former UK culture secretary, reckons that 20% of Britain’s GNP can now be attributed to the creative industries, with music alone worth £5bn. The British film industry employs 47,000 people, the computer games industry 22,000 and the design industry 70,000.

With similarly impressive figures in other developed countries, one might expect to see increasingly heavy investment in culture, creativity and the arts. But that’s far from the case. Of the European Development Fund's €23bn budget for 2008-2013, only €21.33m – less than 0.1% – is devoted to support for cultural industries, cinema and audiovisual businesses and capacity-building programmes for professionals in the sector. With that small a proportion of the budget, it would be fair to assume that culture is seen as a pretty low development priority. There is a bit more in the European development budget for culture: €50m is devoted to culture within the “Investing in People 2007-2013” programme; the Mercosur Regional Programme for 2007-2013 has €1.5m for culture; the India Country Strategy Paper 2007-2013 has €4.7m and different Euro-Mediterranean programmes provide several million euros every year. But compared to the €46bn spent last year in EU and the member states’ official development aid, support for culture is small change.

Some EU countries have already got the idea that culture can earn them serious money. Britain is now a world leader in profitable culture because the British realised long ago that as manufacturers they can no longer compete with the cheap-labour countries of Asia. They have harnessed their creative talent with great success and now other countries are taking notice. Gilberto Gil, Brazil’s minister of culture, said recently that creative industries presented "a singular opportunity for developing countries to establish new economic and trading relations." He welcomed the inauguration of the International Forum on Creative Industries, which is a UN initiative.

The great advantage that creative industries have over, say, shoe manufacturers is that their raw material – talent – is potentially abundant in all countries, however poor. Creativity also has no national boundaries. A third of all start-ups in Silicon Valley during the 1990s were by entrepreneurs of Indian or Chinese descent, says Richard Florida in his book “The Rise of the Creative Class”. The flow of global talent has long provided the US with its edge in high technology, including people such as Sergey Brin, the Moscow-born co-founder of Google, and Sabeer Bhatia, Hotmail's co-founder who grew up in Bangalore. Yahoo's Jerry Yang of Taiwan, Pierre Omidyar, the French-born founder of eBay, and Linus Torvalds, the software luminary from Finland. They are just a few of the migrants who have helped to revolutionise the global economy.

The African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) states were among those who saw the value of creativity early on. In 2003, the ACP said in its Dakar Declaration that “culture is one of the most effective tools of sustainable development and contributes to the maintenance of peace and security.” In 2004, the African Union’s plan for speeding up the integration of the continent included an “action area” devoted to culture. The Union called for more investment in cultural industries, while insisting that African cultural values were indispensable for sustainable development. Tony Blair’s Commission on Africa concluded in 2005: “We want culture to become an inherent component of all development strategies.” The UN development agencies have rightly observed that “only recently has creativity been widely recognised as a source of wealth, a means of generating employment and a significant factor in poverty reduction.” And the link between culture and development would hardly have been unfamiliar to US President Franklin Roosevelt, whose administration during the Great Depression of the 1930s spread murals, sculptures, concerts and theatre projects throughout the country.

So the link between creativity and development is widely accepted. What is now needed is more of it, especially in developing countries. A direct example of the link is to be found in Bollywood, the centre of India’s film industry that produces more than 900 movies a year. It is the core of a business whose annual turnover is this year expected to reach $9.4bn, more than double the 2005 figure.

Does the marketing of culture – a prerequisite if it is to have economic potential – exhaust or degrade this resource? How can culture-as-product escape an association with neo-colonialism when the raw material still comes out of Africa and the purchasing power of the West still defines the shape of the finished product? Congolese art critic Manda Tchebwa takes a realistic view. In his book “African Music: New Challenges, new Vocations” he says that “African states should be aware that music no longer is a shared spirituality or a mystic medium in service of the gods. Music is a cultural product which is a part of the economic development of a country and which has a place at the stock market, just like minerals. Music can earn billions of dollars for Africa – once the continent decides to build a rational music market of its own, on the basis of effective legislation.”

Another sticky question is how to define culture. Is it the sum total of values and norms produced and cherished by a community, expressing its moral convictions and its desire to survive? Is it a national asset, even though Africa’s 50 plus nations have at least 2,000 languages, including 374 in Nigeria alone? Or do debates about culture refer to arts and crafts which give tangible form to our deeper convictions and enrich them with new insights and challenges? The International Network on Cultural Policy, whose members come from 71 countries, observed in 2005 that culture is an essential life force of communities and it “rejected approaches that treat culture only as an instrument for market-driven economic growth.”

Brazil’s Gilberto Gil argues that we should avoid picking one definition over another when considering the inter-relationship between culture and development. Rather, he says, we need to take on board the sum value of all forms of cultural expression, not just contemporary creative arts. “Digital culture multiplies all this, pointing toward a degree of development unheard of for humankind,” adds Gil. He notes that the concept of development is a product of human culture, and the process of development can only happen within a given cultural environment. Culture, therefore, shapes development and the changes brought about by development are, necessarily, cultural. “Culture and development are concepts and processes that are naturally inter-twined and shared,” Gil says.

If Europe is sincere in its commitment to development and the empowerment of people in Africa, Asia and Latin-America, it should invest in culture far more than it does today. And it should take the risk of investing in hard-headed, strong-willed and unpredictable artists. Such artists might be able to break into the closed circuit of elite power. EU Development Commissioner Louis Michel, please note.