Is creativity a cure for the economic blues?

Halifax-based professor Larry Haiven drives up to Cape Breton every chance he can get to take a close look at the island's flourishing music scene. A keen observer of the decline of traditional occupations such as fishing and mining, he believes cultural activity is taking on a new importance in what he calls the "peripheral" economy of East Coast Canada. He is currently working on a major study of cultural production and this so-called new economy.

"To take Atlantic Canada as an example, where once there were working coal mines, there are now miner's museums, miners' choirs, and plays and novels about miners. Where once there were thriving fishery and shipbuilding industries, there are now fishery and martime museums, tall ships for tourists and world-famous heritage towns kept in loving historical fidelity. Indeed, the re-creation of the Fortress of Louisbourg occurred as a direct response to the impending demise of the Cape Breton coalfields and steel industry," says Haiven.

Culture is more than the output of a single artistic genius who is discovered and marketed by an industry, continues Haiven, who teaches industrial relations in the department of management at Saint Mary's University. "There are other models of artist development and many of them involve, indeed require, community and government involvement.

As a traditional producer of commodities like coal and fish for the richer core of central Canada, Cape Breton Island shares some of the attributes of developing countries that are seeking, with considerable difficulty, new economic opportunities in the face of poverty, volatile markets and formidable First World trade barriers. The idea that culture can play a role in development has even been discussed at the institutional level of the World Bank, which last year issued a collection of articles in a book entitled Culture and Public Action, edited by Vijayendra Rao and Michael Walton.

And while culture has primarily been viewed by aid groups and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) as an education tool to promote issues like health, women's rights and AIDS awareness, its value as an economic tool is starting to be appreciated. Take, for example, Oxfam's assistance in the creation of a small but growing film industry in Ethiopia.

Emily King, a research officer in the strategic research and analysis unit at the federal department of Canadian Heritage in Ottawa, laments how culture "gets lost in the shuffle" in most calculations about economic well-being because it is perceived as an intangible item. At the same time, she is uncomfortable with any notion that cultural activity requires an economic justification for its existence.

A better way to demonstrate culture's importance, she says, is to note the symbiotic relationship between thriving businesses and employment activity, and the presence of artists focused on "new ways of thinking about things."

"I think of culture as a basic building block for development purposes. It is the source of new creativity. Without this refreshment of that basic set of knowledge you can lose the new ideas as well," explains King, whose definition of culture is broad enough to include sports activity. A recent study of rural areas, presented at Industry Canada, has found that "those communities that kept or built the hockey rink were the ones that [best] survived," she reports.

Similarly, music plays an important role in the lives of people in Cape Breton, says Larry Haiven. "Insofar as culture builds social cohesion and makes a place more attractive, it can improve the general economic health of a region by making people want to live there and stay living there."

From the World Bank's perspective, one area of the world that appears ripe for cultural development is sub-Saharan Africa, a rich source of World Beat music. The transition of Nashville, Tennessee from a dirt-poor community before 1940 to an extremely wealthy hub of country music producing billions of dollars for a local industry made up of recording studios, publishing companies and performance rights agencies, was repeatedly cited at a 2001 Washington workshop on the development of the music industry in Africa.

Paul Collier, the World Bank's director of its development research department, called for an alternative to the continent's dependence on earnings from raw agricultural products or minerals. "At the practical level, the music industry has the potential to have a big impact on economic structure precisely because these economies are so small. You only need one or two real successes - you only need a Nashville - and you have transformed the export structure of an economy away from primary commodity dependence, and that will have major effects."

But for this transformation to occur in Africa one needs, first of all, a tougher copyright protection regime that eliminates the plague of 'pirate' retailers duplicating and selling music without the proceeds going back to the performers and the recording industry itself, said a spokesperson for one of the music labels present at the Washington workshop.

"The challenge is to work with local producers, local labels and local artists in Africa to try to establish a structure in which everyone from record companies to artists, composers and authors receive due payment without stifling this enormously dynamic and very creative scene," says Gerard Seligman, senior director of Hemisphere and Special Projects for London-based EMI records.

But the attempt to impose a property rights regime in Africa has had mixed success, says John Collins, a musician and a professor of musicology at the University of Ghana in Accra. "Many traditional and non/pre-industrial societies do not have such extreme notions of music being a form of private property that can be used for individual commercial gain," he recently wrote in a major essay on the subject.

Because of lobbying by artists, legislators in Ghana have recently dropped a clause in new copyright legislation that would have required local musicians to seek permission and pay the government whenever they incorporate elements of indigenous folkloric music - where the original composer is unknown - into their performance. The bill originally proposed a harsh sentence of two years in jail.

A campaigner for the preservation of more recent forms of Ghana's 'high life' music that have to compete with the popularity of rap and techno-pop, Collins had concerns that this clause might have served "as a disincentive to those Ghanaians who want to creatively develop and re-cycle their own culture."

While happy that musicians will not face that particular governmental music, Collins laments a tentative deal reached in the 1980s between kiosk owners (the pirate retailers), copyright administrators and one of the record producers' unions, which would have facilitated the flow of some of the earnings from copied music cassettes to composers, artists and producers. It was scuttled in the face of political pressure from major recording labels. He says it is a shame that these kiosk owners could not have been turned into "legitimate" business people. "The local Ghanaian music industry lost these innovative business entrepreneurs to the second-hand car parts racket and other less contentious trades."

Meanwhile, a Halifax rocker who has experienced first-hand how only superstars in the music industry can make money on CD sales because of contractual arrangements with major music labels, calls the introduction of western copyright norms in Africa "a non-starter." Timothy MacNeil, who is doing his masters thesis at Dalhousie University on the business realities facing musicians both in Canada and in Africa, says that the major music labels have failed to stop the illegal copying and downloading of their legally protected songs in North America and Europe by fans with their computers. "How do they expect to enforce copyright in Africa?" he asks.

MacNeil, who has released a CD and still plays music while going to school, says that since most musicians make their earnings on concerts and the sale of personal paraphernalia like t-shirts, he is not sure how this cultural strategy will help the average struggling musician in places like Mali or Senegal eke out a living.

MacNeil is also skeptical of the Nashville model, observing that it became as big as it did because no country music industry existed before in the U.S. "Any African 'Nashville' would have to compete with a global music infrastructure that flows through established nodes like Paris, New York, London and Nashville itself. An African regional node would be possible, but once a scene or an artist wishes to plug into the global music economy, they do so through one of the established nodes [where the major music labels are based]. Many cities in England, for example, have tried to build their own scenes, but when it comes to going international, they've had to submit to the rule of London."

A more successful culture development strategy may involve less ambitious efforts like the organizing of a film festival three years ago in Ethiopia, which has encouraged the start of an industry in a country with an already established copyright law for films shown in movie theatres and on television.

At that festival, a contest was held to award the two best proposals for short half-hour documentaries that are socially relevant, not too negative in tone, and spoken in the Amharic language. Both Oxfam Canada and a local NGO, the Gemini Trust, helped to facilitate the festival which traveled across the East African country and showed seven Ethiopian films. The line-up, mostly documentaries, featured personal, local stories to illuminate information on HIV/AIDs.

Mahlet Hailemariam, an Ethiopian citizen who was then a program officer for Oxfam Canada, says that the use of inexpensive digital video (the cost of one short documentary is in the $6,000 range) has made the making of films feasible financially. She reports that Ethiopians want to see films in their own local languages. "Culture is very important, it is where people get their meaning about life."

Since then, with the financial support of local businesses, scores of films are being produced in her country, and many of them are raising important social and economic issues "that people can relate to." And two schools teaching photography and filmmaking have opened their doors in the country. "Although they are not paid [a lot], there are actors. It looks like more and more people are being drawn to the field."

Hailemariam, who is currently finishing graduate work in international development at Clark University in Boston, says the films, whether they are made for commercial or educational purposes, can be seen in all sorts of venues including movie theatres, on television and in the market on mobile screens. "In some places, there will be a discussion after the film." Also, commercial films are available in stores on videocassettes or CDs, she adds. "I am sure they are available in Toronto. I have seen some of them in Boston and in Washington."

Nevertheless, films are not a substitute for other development policies that lead to poverty reduction. Larry Haiven wants to keep the current culture mania in perspective. "Culture is being overburdened with significance and is being seen as a cure-all for every region that has economic problems. Not every city can be a 'cultural city.' Many regional boosters are crawling up the shrine of culture on their knees as if it were a modern-day Lourdes, able to bestow economic prosperity by the mere wish or recitation of the right words."

"Were it that easy."

Written April 2005.