Such officials would also have to rely far more on the expertise of local and European NGOs than on classic feasibility studies or outside experts.
Assuming the Community is prepared, as it should be, to devote greater bureaucratic and financial resources to small, locally initiated projects, here are a few criteria for ensuring their success:
•Projects should be designed so that they contribute to the country's overall food strategy, but this does not mean that people must not be consulted as to their own priorities. Women should be consulted separately; otherwise, their voices may not be heard, and men's perceived needs are not necessarily the same as theirs. Local officials should be charged with helping the Community design its project so that it is also compatible with national policy.
•Projects must be based on the local ecological and social context; that is, people must work within the constraints of their own environments. This is a basic rule because every project must eventually become self-sufficient and self- managed with no further infusions of foreign funds after an agreed time-limit.
•Europeans helping to design projects should remember that the nature of time is different in Europe and in, for example, Africa. It takes time for people to discuss matters and to decide for themselves what they can do. Their present situation has been shaped by 100 years of colonialism, twenty-six years of 'development' that left rural people out, and ten years of drought thrown in for good measure. It cannot be altered in two weeks.37
Because of the name chosen, we may tend to forget that a 'food' strategy must go far beyond the mere production of food. Personally, I would have preferred 'food system strategy'. Though less catchy, this phrase would help to make clear that production is only a part of the food problem - sometimes not the most important part.38 In order to produce, farmers must have physical inputs and credit, and they must have them at the right times of the year. To keep the food they have produced, they need adequate storage and/or processing; and if they depend on their crops for an income as well as for feeding their own families, they need a decent marketing service and a fair price for their efforts.
The hunger problem is furthermore as much about work as about growing food. 'Employment', though much favoured by Western economists, is the wrong term, because much if not most of the productive work in the Third World is not wage-remunerated. As Robert Chambers explains in a brilliant analysis:
For many of the rural poor ... their concern ... [is] less with employment than with livelihood - levels of wealth and of stocks and flows of food and cash which provide for physical and social well-being and security against impoverishment. Most families of small and marginal farmers and of the landless are concerned not with a job or a workplace, but with sustaining and improving a repertoire of activities which will provide them with an adequate and secure level of living around the year. These may include cultivation, keeping livestock; collecting or catching, and consuming or processing and selling; common property resources (firewood, charcoal, fish, grass, medicinal plants, wild animals, bamboos, reeds, tree fodders, etc.); casual labour; hawking; seasonal public relief works; seasonal migration; work as artisans (pottery, basket- and mat-making, earthenwork, blacksmithing, weaving, thatching and the like); and many other activities.39
Chambers's catalogue, as he is the first to point out, is not complete but it goes a good way towards demonstrating that food strategies, to be effective for the poorest and hungriest people, must consider a whole complex range of activities - not just farming or paid labour. A major objective of any food strategy is almost too obvious to be stated: it should keep people in the countryside by multiplying the opportunities for productive work there and by making the quality of life in rural areas competitive with advantages to be found in cities. Promotion of small industries and of environment-enhancing activities (tree- planting, erosion control, water-catchment and the like) that contribute to food production and food processing is one way. In some countries, a coercive policy towards professionals would help - for example, doctors, teachers, administrators and others who have received their education thanks to public funds should spend a specified time using their knowledge in the villages.
Two further aspects that should be part of any food strategy usually do not receive the attention they deserve: the highly seasonal nature of hunger and malnutrition and ensuring early warning of scarcity or famine.
Because we in the industrialized countries tend to deal in annual statistics and in averages - and because most of us live in cities - we have stopped noticing the obvious fact that rural people's lives follow the rhythms of the seasons. So, to a large degree, does hunger. With few exceptions, and except in cases of the most dire, entrenched famines, even poor people have enough to eat in the weeks or months that follow the harvest.
It is when their food supplies start to run out that timely intervention can make the difference between keeping their livelihood and becoming landless, between staying in the countryside and migrating to the city - even between life and death. Especially during the difficult time before the new crops can be harvested, there is competition both for food and for work - food prices go up just as wages (in cash or in kind) go down. This is also the period when people, in order to eat or to buy seed, contract debts that may dog them for years to come. Naturally, illness also strikes most readily when people are hungry. Food strategies (and food aid) should be attuned to seasonal needs. Less costly and more effective, well-timed short-term help also allows the poorest people to keep something as important to them as food - their dignity.
Early warning systems can usefully complete seasonal analysis as indicators of the need for food aid or other exceptional interventions. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has on the whole promoted technological systems (satellite photography, plus Meteosat and Agrhymet weather and rainfall data). Such technology can show, rather crudely, the areas likely to be affected by shortfalls in food production, but tells us nothing about the number of people who may be affected, when they will need help or can be expected to migrate. A less costly system, which can be managed by the people themselves (perhaps with NGO help to begin with), would rely on socio-economic indicators - for example, rising grain and falling livestock prices; sales of jewellery, implements, draught animals (or, worse still, land); unusual numbers of people emigrating in search of work and the like.40
Early warning systems are vital because, properly conceived and implemented, they could prevent disasters on the Ethiopian scale. Victims of food crises could be reached in their own villages before they had to resort to feeding camps. Famines, as opposed to seasonal shortfalls, build up over long periods and display common features which can be 'read' - like the signs listed above. It would cost the EEC far less to set up a network of early warning systems, with the cooperation of partner ACP countries and NGOs, than to intervene with massive famine relief when full-blown disaster strikes.
Finally, cooperation in agricultural research for and with the poor peasantry could make enormous contributions to food security. Not nearly enough research has been devoted to the day- to-day problems of peasants, although this is one of the chief keys to improving their productivity. Since this is an enormous and complex subject, the reader (and, with luck, the policy-maker) is referred to the insightful and exceptionally readable book by Robert Chambers, Rural Development: Putting the Last First.41
We began this exercise by claiming that Europe has much to gain from cooperation with the Third World in developing food strategies that work. In the moral, but also in the political sense, what could be a greater achievement than to prove we can put an end to the age-old scourge of hunger? The difference in the late twentieth century is that hunger is no longer a scourge - it is a scandal. But it is not intractable: the causes are known, the remedies exist. The superpowers are too involved in their own rivalries to care about the plight of the billion or so people who suffer from malnutrition, chronic hunger or outright famine — including those within their own
borders.42 If Europe has the vision and the courage, it can take its place as superpower of the human spirit.
PART II
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
5
CAVEAT EMPTOR: THE 'TRANSFER' OF TECHNOLOGY
Dr Zafrullah Chowdhury is an exceptional man - the product of an upper-class Bengali family who trained as an MD in Dacca and London and returned to his country during the liberation struggle against Pakistan to care for wounded combatants. He soon after realized that the kind of medicine he had been taught had very little to do with the health problems of the poor rural Bangladeshi majority.
After the war, instead of going into a lucrative urban practice, Chowdhury set up the Gonoshasthaya Kendra - People's Health Centre - in the countryside north of Dacca at Savar; armed with near-zero funds and a boundless faith in the need for decentralized health care serving the real needs of people living in poverty. The Centre is now a full-fledged, self-sufficient community reaching out to several tens of thousands of Bangladeshis. It grows its own produce on land previously considered untillable, maintains a school for local children, and has set up an agricultural credit bank and workshops for carpentry, textiles, metal and leatherworking that provide employment primarily for rural women. A small hospital has been built on the premises, but more important are the paramedics (largely women) who have been trained to cope with most of the health problems encountered in rural Bangladesh, as well as to provide basic obstetrical and family-planning care. They range far and wide in the countryside around Savar, and several subcentres have been established in other parts of the country, staffed in the same way. Chowdhury's latest achievement is a pharmaceuticals factory (largely financed by a Dutch development aid agency and modern in every respect) that will be able to provide basic drugs at afar lower cost than those now sold in Bangladesh by American and British transnational corporations.
None of this has been easy. One can perhaps put up with the austerity of living conditions (Chowdhury's daughter is called Bishti, which means 'rain' in Bengali, because the hut he and his German-born wife Suzanne lived in when the baby was born was awash during the rainy season). The outright hostility of many better-off Bengalis who feel threatened by the GK Centre is something else. One of the paramedics was murdered in 19/6 by assassins who have been identified but never brought to justice. While I was in Savar, absentee landlords from Dacca and their hired thugs physically attacked GK workers and tried to bulldoze temporary structures on land the government has promised Chowdhury for an extension of the Centre. The landlords have simply noted that the land is worth something after all - and violence is a standard means for gratifying greed in Bangladesh. Chowdhury's next project is to build a teaching hospital where the curriculum will stress not only people-oriented health care but the sociopolitical conditions that breed poverty and disease.
The following text is the keynote speech Chowdhury asked me to give for the 'Transfer of Technology' conference he organized at the GK Centre in January 1982. Most of the participants were foreign or Bengali health care professionals; several had important responsibilities in government ministries.
When Dr Zafrullah Chowdhury invited me to give the keynote speech for the opening of this seminar, I accepted immediately, not only from gratitude for the honour, but especially because it gives me the opportunity, on behalf of all the foreign participants, to salute the remarkable work being done here at Savar by Dr Chowdhury and all his colleagues. Examples of grass-roots, integrated, autonomous and authentic development are all too rare in Third World countries, and while I've often cited Savar as just such an example, I'm enormously pleased at last to see it in operation and also to note that its work is receiving greater and greater support and is being actively encouraged by the people and the authorities of Bangladesh itself.
The greater part of the work of our seminar will be devoted to problems posed by transfers of technology in the fields of health, medicine and pharmaceuticals. This is as it should be, given the long-term orientation of the Savar Centre and its most recent achievement - the resplendent new pharmaceuticals factory. Many other participants will address these topics with great professional competence in the coming days. My task, as defined by Zafrullah Chowdhury, is to try to place the problems of technology transfer in a more general perspective.
Speakers should adhere to one simple, cardinal rule: talk about what they know. My direct experience of the Third World is limited and this is my first, although I hope not my last, visit to Bangladesh, so I have no pretensions to speaking about the effects of technology transfer in this country. What I hope I know a little more about, as a citizen of one rich, industrialized country and a resident of another, are the nature of Western technology and the plans the ruling elites of the rich countries have for the poor countries as we move towards the end of the twentieth century.
No one here needs to be told that the present world system is in crisis. Poor countries are hit particularly hard - more expensive imported food and energy, crushing debts, dwindling prospects for their own exports and so forth. What I'm concerned with here, however, is how the rich nations, and especially their transnational corporations (or TNCs), are reacting to the crisis. Their reactions, as I hope to show, are crucial for the future of the Third World.
In a world of rising costs and diminishing profits, it becomes more important than ever for the industrialized countries and the TNCs to maintain and to reinforce their hegemony over the global economy. They must, from their point of view, increase their control over world production, and world markets. People who believe that the interventions of TNCs in Third World countries are primarily for the good of those countries; those who believe that these companies have any object besides the enhancement of their own profits are making a serious mistake. The uses - and the abuses - of technology are among the instruments they employ in orchestrating global control.
Let's begin by taking a critical look at our vocabulary itself. Technology is not 'transferred' - that is a nice, sanitary, aseptic word. Technology is bought and sold, full stop. The word 'transfer' also implies that 'recipient' nations gain real control over a technology deposited in their laps and which then becomes wholly theirs. This, too, is a mistake. Another popular misconception is that 'technology' is merely some sort of machinery or apparatus. In reality, technology is never just a product. It is also a process, and those who buy technology from the West are usually getting a lot more than they bargained for. Let me explore this notion of technology as a process a little more fully.
Present Western technology should not be looked at as a 'given' which just happens to be there. A more accurate way to see it is as the result of several centuries of the history of Western capitalism. The technology we now use in the West - the same technology that is sold in a stage of greater or lesser obsolescence to the Third World - is by no means determined by pure considerations of efficiency and it is even less determined by the needs of society as a whole. The technology the West uses is the outcome of a social and political process and of social and political struggles. It embodies relationships between social classes in a particular kind of social organization and has been developed to serve the needs of those who have come to dominate society.
Unfortunately for the masses of people in the West, the outcome of this centuries-long social and political process has been much less satisfactory - that is, for the vast majority of workers or farmers or service industry employees. During the nineteenth century, the large, centralized factory entirely replaced the small, decentralized (even individual) production units which had previously been the rule. This change took place not so much because the factory system was necessarily more efficient: its outstanding advantage was that it allowed a far greater measure of social control over the workforce.
Who can believe that Western workers would choose of their own free will the 'Taylor' system of the assembly line with its speed-ups, its repetitious, meaningless gestures and ruthless supervision, dehumanizing and alien
ating the workforce from the final product of its own labour? Has a later generation of workers 'chosen' the technology of industrial robots which is now rapidly eliminating their jobs in the automotive and textile industries, with electronics and others to come? Have farmworkers 'chosen' the mechanical lettuce- and tomato-harvesters developed in direct response to the strikes led by Cesar Chavez? These harvesters are replacing thousands of them in the United States - and will soon do so elsewhere. Have US farmers 'chosen' an agricultural technology so expensive that they can no longer meet its costs, so that an average of 800 of them go out of business every week? Have office employees and clerks 'chosen' the technology of office automation which will replace up to 40 per cent of their numbers before the year 2000, according to recent studies?
Anyone who buys Western technology should understand that he is not just buying a product, but rather a distinct set of social relationships which have now become so embedded in the technology that they are nearly invisible. Along with the technology comes a hierarchical, authoritarian way of organizing production itself - and one which will dispense with human labour whenever feasible. Furthermore, purchasers of technology are buying the end result of our inability in the West to create the desirable society, in spite of all our wealth. I will go even further and say that they are, in effect, buying a kind of crystallized failure - the failure of struggles of working people in the West to create full employment, a humane production process, consumption based on socially useful goods and an unpolluted, sustainable environment in which all could live harmoniously. They are also buying, conversely, the crystallized success of our ruling elites in imposing productivity and profit as the only goals of human existence. Put another way, the technology we use and are selling to others in the 1980s is certainly not the only technology we could devise - just these products, just these processes and no others - inevitable and somehow foreordained by disembodied, pure reason. The technology we have devised represents a series of choices among a whole range of possibilities, and these choices were dictated by a minority whose goal was, is and always will be its own greater power and profits.