Conclusions: Global Interventions and Poverty Eradication

Abstract

The facts, arguments and analyses offered above belie the notion that politics and economics are distinct, necessarily separable realms of academic inquiry. I have also presented a way of knowing about the cotton problem that is very much aligned with the idea that the ‘facts’ of the political economic world are not independent of the methodologies, methods or languages used to investigate and describe them. In my global political economy of cotton and poverty the particular policies or practices that oppress people in specific locales and the ways and means to address these factors are to a certain extent indeterminate. As George Soros (2008: 43) has recently argued, ‘perfect knowledge is not within our reach’. Like Soros, I believe that social ‘reality’ is a moving target and that individuals and institutions in the political economy often hold understandings and exude expectations that are necessarily subjective. From this standpoint social ‘science’ is an inevitably fallible exercise. Yet as this book demonstrates, I have not chosen to throw the baby entirely out with the bathwater. Striving for the truth as regards globalization and the maintenance of cotton poverty within the interstate system and the world capitalist economy seemed a useful scholarly pursuit. I have sought to add an encompassing story to the available literature at a time of growing interest in the problem.