NOTES TOWARD A CONCLUSION
These last few pages are called "notes toward a conclusion" and not "conclusion" because it is manifestly impossible to deal with every aspect of an enormous subject in a document of this size. Many questions have been left unanswered or have not even been asked. These final pages are therefore largely a plea for other research to flesh out the many conclusions that might be drawn: I should be especially gratified if the suggested model provided a useful framework for others undertaking more specific work on MNCs, country studies and the like.
There are, nevertheless, certain remarks I would like to make and some are of a personal nature. The experience of publishing a first book which draws a large and sometimes passionate response is perhaps equalled only by that of having one's first baby. Like most comments on babies, most reviews tend to be fairly banal and predictable; few of them contribute to the author's intellectual progress, at least in my experience. One review of How the Other Half Dies, was, however, exceptionally helpful to me, in an unpredictable sort of way. It ended thus:
Yet I find it troubling that it is the people of rich and complex countries who propose this simple vision (of a different, more just society). Diversity in diet and culture seem to me to be unconditional goods. And they are goods which prosperity buys. The question suggested to me by both books is still how to use well the prosperity of the West. (Emma Rothschild, "The Politics of Hunger" (a review of Food First and How the Other Half Dies) New York Times Book Review. 17 July 1977)
I read this over several times, trying to understand exactly what was meant. To me, too, diversity in diet and culture seem to be unconditional goods. What does Western prosperity have to do with them? The more I reflected on this, the more I felt that the reviewer was dead wrong. Those two terms—"Western prosperity" and "diversity" kept clashing in my head. Eventually, dialectics prevailed and they merged into the idea of a world food system, of increasing food uniformity brought about under the leadership of the West, especially that of agribusiness. Western prosperity (i.e. transnational capital) swallows up diversity. It has no use for culture, but needs only consumers. It does not even need peasants, which is why so many of them have become redundant.
An American friend, commenting on this study, finally explained to me what the review had actually meant:
Certainly Western prosperity does not swallow up diversity, as one can observe at local overstocked supermarkets. This struck me the first time I entered one upon returning from Africa. I was overwhelmed by the abundance of'overchoice,' to borrow Alvin Toffler's term from Future Shock. The store shelved eighty-five kinds of bottled salad dressing. Eighty-five kinds.
If this is "diversity of diet," who needs it? Even more to the point, who can afford it? It is certainly not "diversity of culture," but the merest commercialism, attempting to drive out anything resembling personal, community or even national initiative.
There is a New International Economic Order being set up in the area of food, but it is agribusiness' and not the one the Third World has been negotiating for. If these basic ideas are not clear by now, it is my fault, not the reader's, but cannot in any case be remedied at this stage. That is why I want to devote the remainder of these notes not to repetition or summary but to clarification and to one or two remarks concerning positive policy.
First of all, some things I am not saying. I am not proposing Instant Nostalgia as a solution, a return to some totally imaginary Eden and ancestral methods. I do not share the desire of many fed-up Westerners to go raise sheep in the provinces and I am not suggesting that the Third World use ... simpler agricultural systems. In fact, it seems to me that the Western system is linear, crude and not very scientific in the richest sense of the word. I would indeed like to see much more complex agricultural/food systems in UDCs; the kind that only the availability of many hands can make possible. This is such an important point that it will figure substantially in my future research and writing.
In spite of some evidence to the contrary, I further do not believe in conspiracy as a theory of history, nor that events are the result of a permanent plot of the rich against the poor. One can simultaneously believe in good will of many individual people working in the development Establishment and in the harmful effects they have as a class on other people's lives. I cannot say whether this is because of willful decision at the topmost levels or simply because the decision makers are so immersed in their own ideology that they are incapable of imagining viable alternatives. What one can say with certainty is that "everything takes place as if" the desire to foster Western interests at the expense of the Third World were the driving force behind almost all "development efforts" including "charitable" or "disinterested" interventions. The odds seem to me that this will remain the case and that we must therefore take this tendency to harm—deliberate or not—into account. Future modifications brought to Third World food systems are not exempt from it.
The Transnational Institute is a community of scholar-activists; it is therefore perhaps not out of place that a few suggestions for positive action appear at the end of a TNI study whose first purpose is to inform and to convince.
First of all, groups and individuals in the industrialized countries who hope to "do something" should be concentrating, I think, on two basic lines of action, depending on their location, circumstances, particular bent, etc. One is to weaken the agribusiness chain described above at home. What weakens it in the West will also make it more vulnerable, less able to advance in the Third World. The other is to help strengthen those groups in UDCs that are working for change in their own societies. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) can here usually be more effective than State-run development projects. Because they are smaller, they can be more imaginative, more innovative and above all more radical. The worst they need fear is outstanding success—i.e. that the local government fears their activity, wants to prevent its spread, and throws them out. A victory of sorts; some seeds may have been planted. NGO projects can also provide an embarrassing yardstick against which official development efforts may be measured. (Why doesn't USAID encourage local participation like X?) States, even repressive ones, must eventually respond to political pressures. Whether at home or abroad, we can try to diminish the power and prestige of oppressors and to help people struggling to build up their own weight in the balance of power — while always remembering that we can get on the next plane home in time of crisis, whereas the local workers and peasants cannot.
In addition, we need many more researchers in the field and some substantial money to make sure people doing good work in the developed and underdeveloped countries alike are in touch with each other and can effectively communicate their findings. Food is now becoming a somewhat fashionable field, a welcome development because one might accurately say that the number of people engaged in critical research is significantly smaller than the executive staff of any major multinational food corporation. We also need people on the inside, some means of countering the effective information networks of the companies.
This is not to imply that "development" or "food" research is the major battleground—because that, of course, is in the Third World itself. Yet one can occasionally furnish better arms to those groups that are trying to change the status quo in their own societies. To this extent, good development research can be dangerous to the Establishment, and, because it represents a danger, it will be fought. One of the opposition's most frequently used tactics is the accusation that such research is not "value-free" and is thus "unscientific." "Value- free" social science is a myth, but a convenient one since it considers defense and illustration of the status quo as "objective" and "scientific": whereas to question or to condemn the dominant system is to be "ideologically motivated." People working in the field will inevitably be faced with such accusations and should try to accept once and for all that all good development research done in the future will be value-loaded and political, because politics conditions the very questions we ask and determines our u
nstated assumptions. If we make no enemies, we should question the worth of our work.
This idea that research can somehow be value-free stems, it seems to me, from another prevalent myth about the development process itself. The theories of "GNP growth" and "trickle-down" rest upon this myth, which assumes, for mysterious reasons, that the UDC classes that have gained wealth and power will want to share both with their less fortunate countrymen. Have we in the West such short memories that we cannot even recall the fact that our own enjoyment of relatively more egalitarian societies is not due to the benevolence or the largesse of our own dominant classes but has been achieved through decades and centuries of struggle—struggles of farmers and workers and women and minorities? Why should it be any different in the Third World? Why should one assume that "development" will be a harmonious process, somehow exempt from conflict? Development is conflict, and there are real forces opposing it; real enemies with real interests who are not playing games. Neither must we.
Now that "trickle-down" as a solution has been largely discredited by the facts themselves, there is a need for new strategies, or at least for new slogans. Two of these are "Basic Needs" and "Self- Reliance." No one can be against satisfying basic needs, but there are dangers inherent in the slogan if it is used in the wrong way. If it is merely excuse for the army of development cadres to go out and measure and weigh and photograph and calibrate the perennial "target- groups" of the Third World; in order to determine how many calories and pairs of shoes and hours of education they need, we may as well forget it. It is the "target-groups" that ought to be targeting the experts, telling them what their needs are and the obstacles they see to satisfying them. It is rare that they are asked to do so. Basic needs are not merely physical but involve also that nebulous "quality of life" that no group has a right to define for any other. One must also question how those needs are to be satisfied—by people themselves, working in community or larger groups? Or in some mysterious way by the "market" which has not shown to date marked ability to provide bare essentials? "Basic Needs" is going to be served up with a variety of sauces, and we must be on the lookout for those that are adulterated.
"Self-reliance," again, is attractive, also becoming fashionable, to the point that one can hear some Third World leaders say, in effect, "To become self-reliant, we need to import X, Y or Z." Real self- reliance does not mean autarchy, but it does imply a certain class structure, a particular relationship between the leaders and the people. It cannot be achieved in any significant measure when their interests diverge. Some leaders may try to hide greater hardship and exploitation of the peasantry under the cloak of self-reliance. The example of Cambodia comes to mind, although one should not make definitive judgments on the amount of information presently available.
There are some brave souls inside the development Establishment genuinely trying to encourage political change of the kind that comes about only through real popular participation (even inside the World Bank). The furthest-reaching critique of current development research and practices coming from an official body is doubtless that of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) which goes beyond "Basic Needs" by posing the double requirement of livelihood and participation as the criteria for real development (See UNRISD, Strategy and Programme Proposals, UNRISD 77/C. 37, Board S.S. 1977/W.P. 2/Rev. I, Geneva, 4 November 1977). Livelihood is not merely so many calories or yards of cloth or tons of bricks, whatever their importance, but involves cultural values; just as participation is not causing people to acquiesce to decisions made for them elsewhere but a political stance holding that people should be the subjects, not the objects of decisions that shape their lives.
The adoption of a "New Economic Order" based on the uniform food system model which guarantees Western-style standards of living for some just as surely as it does hunger for others is probably the line of least resistance most Third World countries will follow. The only way to oppose it is through genuine political commitment, backed by the entire national community, which recognizes dependency as the enemy. I have tried to show how some of the mechanisms of this food system work, but this should not be construed as demonstrating their inevitability. Knowledge can act as a depressant and lead to despair, but action for and with others is liberating. We should remember Gramsci's "Optimism of the will, pessimism of the mind" and know that both for us and for the Third World, there is a choice.