Where does all this leave the poor nations of the Third World? Clearly, corporate control over biotech products and markets will preclude much research on 'poor people's problems' unless it is specifically funded by public benefactors. This point was graphically underlined by a stockbroker specializing in biotech companies:
One could produce, with today's technology, a vaccine against malaria. Here, though, the question is ... the economic question ... not for the scientist to determine but a question for the businessman and for people like the World Health Organization and the medical establishment, as to what we want to do and how we are going to pay for it.43
The stockbroker is correct. So long as most victims of a disease cannot pay for its prevention or its cure, corporations will take no interest in them, whatever their number. Indeed, New York University researchers, with the help of USAID and WHO funding, have already developed the necessary biological knowledge and skills for creating a malaria vaccine. Scaling up these techniques to the production stage would require corporate cooperation, so Genentech was approached. After two years of negotiations, the company finally backed out because WHO would not give it exclusive licensing rights to the vaccine, i.e. the right to collect a royalty on every dose administered.44
The nations and people of the Third World will also be profoundly affected by the developments of biotechnology. Trading patterns, particularly in basic raw materials, will undergo extreme shifts. Substitutions for Third World products are nothing new, of course, but they are likely to accelerate. The consequences of the biorevolution may be most serious of all for the Third World peasantry, if we are to believe the persuasive arguments of a team of rural sociologists at Cornell who are examining its probable impact. The Cornell team points out that the social effects of the Green Revolution, however harmful to Third World peasants, were still confined to relatively limited geographical areas. The research that led to the Green Revolution technology 'package' was, furthermore, 'conceived and implemented within an institutional structure comprised mainly of public and quasi public organisations' - the network of international research institutes (funded by governments, the World Bank, and private US foundations like Ford and Rockefeller). These authors believe that 'the dislocations stimulated by the inequitable deployment of Green Revolution technologies could have been considerably worse had [these international institutions] not been committed to a mission- oriented ideology of "public interest"'.
Naturally, transnational corporations made money on GR technology - but this time round, with biotechnology, international organizations are likely to be totally short-circuited since 'private capital is willing to act as the principal agent of technological transfer and development' for the 'biorevolution'. Biotechnology can provide products allowing improved cultivation in all types of soil - not just in the better-endowed areas favoured by the GR.
For instance, 'in Southeast Asia alone there are 86.5 million hectares of poor soils unsuitable for traditionally bred [Green Revolution] High Yielding Varieties because of adverse soil conditions'. In other words, as biotech penetrates further and further into the Third World countryside, we can expect increased polarization of farmers, between those who can afford the biotechnology package and those who can't. Marginalization of the majority, already living on poorer land, will occur, just as happened with the GR, unless governments adopt counter-measures.45
In a narrow sense, it is clear that biotechnology, properly used and distributed, holds the promise of a brighter future for poor countries. It could add value to their raw materials (for example, changing seaweed into glucose); reduce their dependency on imported oil; provide the means to make marginal soils productive and thus grow more food, while making room for many more cultivators; produce tree-shoots in huge quantities (through cell- cloning) and solve the firewood crisis; prevent or cure the major viral or parasitical diseases, etc. One does not, therefore, want to be overly pessimistic in an assessment of the prospects for Third World countries as participants in the biorevolution.
It is, however, realistic to point out the very real obstacles they face. First is the extremely sophisticated level of the science and technology involved and the rapid division of labour they are undergoing. Most of the poorer countries have nowhere near the number of scientists needed to provide a research base; even if they had the lab support, they do not have the industrial plant to actually manufacture rDNA products. 'Simple' things - like a steady supply of electrical power - and a high level of industrial design capacity are prerequisites for success in biotech.
Second is the thorough capitalist penetration of the field. Exchanges between university colleagues and State transfers of technology under aid programmes (however limited these may have been in the past) will vanish as corporations monopolize biotech and regulate it themselves through the international legal system of patents, licensing agreements and the like. Up to now, such legal devices have always been used to prevent Third World countries from becoming technologically independent. Unless there is a unified and extremely well-financed effort on the part of LDCs (unlikely at this juncture), the promises of biotechnology will fade, and the 'revolution' will bring an increasing gap between rich and poor.
The impact biotechnology will have on the lives of industrialized countries' citizens requires only a concluding summary here. We have already covered the main points: private interests well placed to prevail over public ones and the alarming incorporation of universities into commercial ventures.
Biotech will create many new jobs - almost exclusively for the highly educated. The division of labour in science itself will be modified and further hierarchized. The most prestigious microbiologists will also be entrepreneurs and consultants; those not quite so brilliant will become run-of-the-mill, assembly-line scientists, even if they do have Ph.D.s, as most of them will. Such people will have little or no control over research goals, nor over the products engendered by their labour. In this they will be exactly like other industrial workers. Conversely, biotech will destroy industrial jobs in the traditional chemical or food- processing industries.
In the industrialized countries, recombinant DNA products have the potential to reduce private and public health costs, to improve agriculture, to reduce the costs of raw materials in nearly everything one buys, etc. It is, however, unlikely that consumers will benefit much, because this potential will remain unrealized. Corporations do not pass on savings when they reduce their costs. The present period - full of mergers, acquisitions and the general swapping of partners - will not last long as industrial time-scales go. Biotech will become oligopolistic - in the usual 'American way'. The benefit one derives from any biotechnological 'fix' will depend largely on one's income.
People on the receiving end of this new industry must first understand that they cannot count on any of the traditional forces to buffer the biotech shock; neither private foundations nor universities nor government - much less corporations - will help them out. The biotech 'debate' has opened and closed so fast that one is at a loss to know what to recommend: certainly the kind of clerical appeal described above can only be ineffectual, silly and miss the point entirely.
If it is possible, through public awareness, to reopen the debate, it should concern who is to control the directions and the products of biotechnology. One could not find a better point of departure than the eighteenth-century economist (who considered himself a 'moral philosopher'), Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations (1776):
The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers ... to narrow the competition must always be against [the public] and can serve only to enable the dealers ... to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens. The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened
to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.
PART III
RESEARCH, IDEOLOGY AND CULTURE
7
DECOLONIZING RESEARCH
This report for the United Nations University (UNU) is the result of a group effort, for which I acted as rapporteur and did the writing. In 1979, Dr Johan Galtung, who was then directing an ambitious and wide-ranging research project for the UNU called 'Goals, Processes and Indicators of Development', convened a 'Food Study Group' in the framework of the GPID project. The Group first met (5-7 February 1979) to produce a paper for a joint seminar of two UNU programmes - the World Hunger Programme and the Human and Social Development Programme (GPID was part of the latter). After this seminar, held at MIT in March, the Group reconvened with a number of new people to extend and deepen its initial considerations on research (8- 10 July 1979).
The following paper summarizes the FSG's work on these various occasions. Some twenty people were involved in one or both of the Group's working sessions, so it's impossible to indicate here who contributed which elements.
The Group's full membership was: Claude Alvares, Russel Anderson, George Aseniero, Sartaj Aziz, Brita Brandtzaeg, Joseph Collins, Taghi Farvar, Ernest Feder, Louis-Frangois Fieri, Johan Galtung, Susan George, Lim Teck Ghee, Cuautemoc Gonzales P., Papa Kane, Gretchen Klotz, Adolfo Mascarenhas, D. D. Narula, David Pitt, Rahmat Qureshi, Pierre Spitz, Filomina Steady and Ponna Wignaraja; plus two observers from the UN Research Institute for Social Development, Alemayehu Bessabih and Laurence Wilhelm. The final report is reproduced here (with a few paragraphs from the first paper for the MIT seminar added) and with the kind permission of the United Nations University.
Dimensions and Rationale of the Food Problem
The food problem has many dimensions, but in the context of an economy of consumption it can be visualized as a sliding scale with clinically defined overconsumption at the top and physiological starvation at the bottom, with varying degrees of qualitative and quantitative adequacy and inadequacy beween them. Such gradations correspond roughly to socio-economic categories and especially to income levels. The only serious food problem in today's world is, however, that of the hunger of millions of people who do not get enough to eat to satisfy their minimum needs.1
Hunger exists not only because of the maldistribution of food itself but also because of highly skewed income distribution which precludes the purchase of adequate amounts of food. Maldistribution of income is, in turn, a function of maldistribution of wealth and of a private ownership system which imposes no upper limit on individual or corporate control of the means of production - including those of food production - nor on the amount of wealth which can be accumulated. In contrast, the lower limit, that of zero ownership or even sub-zero ownership (e.g. in the case of chronic indebtedness), is only too clearly defined.
Hunger is also a function of the misappropriation of human and physical resources. Capitalist entrepreneurs are not in the business of providing employment nor of satisfying the needs of society as a whole, but are guided by the profit motive. In capitalist economies, income distribution determines not only consumption but consumption patterns. In other words, the system's priorities will encourage the production of foodstuffs and other goods which yield the highest profits and which are therefore geared to satisfying the needs (or the whims) of those who can pay. Such priorities will also, obviously, determine the use-patterns of human and physical resources. A perverse resource/use-pattern will correspond to a perverse income/consumption pattern in which market, i.e., monetary, demand will direct the flows of raw materials, including foods, and finished goods.
It is therefore altogether logical that countries in which a high percentage of the population suffers from hunger and malnutrition should often be the same ones that supply traditional or perishable cash crops to affluent purchasers, generally in the northern hemisphere but also to Third World elites. People without purchasing power are placed, ipso facto, outside the market and exert no influence whatever over what it will provide.
Arguments stressing the existence of enough food in the world to furnish each of the planet's inhabitants with a daily diet of over 3,000 calories are striking but may tend to obscure the fact that no country on earth, including the richest, has yet reached the outer limits of what its population (given sufficient income) can consume in terms of value, not numerical calories. Wealthy consumers often enjoy regimens of 8,000 to 10,000 calories per day if the large proportion of animal-based products in their diets is calculated in grain-equivalent terms.
It remains to be seen whether a system entirely based on profits and purchasing power will continue to provide some food for the indigent in order to forestall major upheavals which could endanger its overall hegemony. Food aid plays a vital role here, as do free, or subsidized, food-distribution schemes. The palliative aspects of food distribution under capitalist conditions will depend on the balance of forces within each particular national community and upon the rank and importance of particular nations in the international system (e.g. the major beneficiaries of food aid). Whatever the level of aid to the destitute, it constitutes neither a permanent nor a structural solution to the persistence of hunger.
Classic Development Strategies and Control over Food Systems
In the past quarter-century, huge transfers of capital and technology have led to the extension of perverse resource-use and resource-enjoyment patterns in the Third World, where the present and probable future food situation must be examined in the context of expanding capitalist control. The tendency of Western development planners and of Third World nationals trained in their methods has been to take a piecemeal approach towards hunger alleviation. Thus, instead of seeing the food problem as a function of a chain or system which begins with inputs (physical as well as intangible, e.g. research and credit), proceeds through food production per se, and continues through the storage, processing and distribution phases before reaching the final consumer, planners have tended to focus on one or another isolated aspect of the system. The 'Green Revolution' was a strategy concentrating on inputs, the current vogue is for 'Post-harvest Technology'; both exhibit a narrow and technocratic approach.
Strategies for particular countries are, furthermore, generally viewed as operating behind closed frontiers, without reference to international market forces or to interventions by agents representing food systems external to the one of the country concerned. To hope that such strategies will succeed - whether they focus on inputs, on increased production, reduction of post-harvest losses, provision of specific nutrients, or on any other segment of the food system chain - is Utopian in so far as the central issue of the whole food system has not been confronted: the issue of control.
The question 'Who is in control?' may be answered with examples chosen at random from any point along the food system chain; one might begin at the beginning with seeds. Seeds can be selected for maximum yield (given suitable and costly inputs) or for maximum reliability under stringent climatic conditions. They may lend themselves to easy self-reproduction or may deteriorate from year to year (e.g. hybrid corn); they may be geared to plants containing maximum nutritional value or, as in some developed countries, to the needs of mechanical harvesters. If peasants controlled current research and reproduction of seeds, it is likely that they would ask for, and get, such characteristics as reliability rather than maximum yield, reproducibility rather than deterioration, and high energy/nutritional value. Because seed research and reproduction have been largely under the control of industrialized countries, such characteristics have not generally been sought.
Control over one aspect of the
food system implies its extension to others: again, the choice of seeds determines not only the inputs required but also 'appropriate' storage and processing techniques.
One highly significant aspect of this issue of control is that exercised by rural oligarchies over poorer peasants: in village after village, a tiny local power elite holds sway over credit, marketing, access to water and other essential services, and employment (including that of family members), not to mention the use of the land itself under a variety of more or less extortionate tenancy and sharecropping arrangements. Such power has now been widely recognized; even governments which have done little or nothing to redress the balance pay lip-service to the concept of greater equality and realize that top-heavy power structures act as a 'political constraint' on food production.
The Role of Industrialized Countries' Food Systems in the Hunger Problematique