A less widely acknowledged aspect is the increasing degree of control that developed-country food systems exert over those of the Third World. The expansion of markets for Green Revolution inputs and other equipment or processes is only a part of the picture. The orientation of Third World agriculture is itself increasingly determined by outsiders who can provide cash markets for various kinds of produce. Many crops formerly produced in the temperate zones for temperate-zone customers are now grown more cheaply in tropical countries. Traditional cash crops have been joined by exports of luxury foods - many of them perishables - and animal foodstuffs.
The penetration of indigenous Third World food systems is largely, though by no means exclusively, carried out by transnational agribusiness corporations. These companies generally no longer wish to exercise direct control over Third World land, but gain a stronger hold over activities. Operations entailing risk, like farming itself, are left to the LDCs and their peasantries, while more profitable operations such as processing, marketing and the provision of inputs, credit, or management skills are carried out by foreign corporate interests. The latter have also recently shown a strong interest in providing storage facilities, an area hitherto largely under the control of families, villages or local authorities.
The Transfer of a Dominant Model
When industrialized countries intervene in the food systems of Third World nations, they are not merely providing separate items and techniques, nor even a 'package' of techniques. With the help of their foundations, their universities, their corporations and their banks, they are transferring a dominant model, which, over time, will tend to become unique as it blots out and absorbs the rich variety of peasant practices.
This model originated in the West, particularly in the United States, where prevailing conditions included plentiful land and relatively little labour for food production. It was therefore economically (although no longer ecologically) a rational response to the constraints of a well-defined geographical and social situation. The goal of this model is to obtain the maximum output per person, not per unit of land. The conditions which gave rise to this model are wholly untypical of the LDCs, where, on the contrary, the provision of productive employment to large masses of rural people remains a major unmet priority. Because the dominant model contributes to the breakdown of traditional agriculture and to the dispossession of hundreds of thousands of peasants, it can only compound unemployment while contributing very little, if anything, to increased food production. In any event, incremental production will be even more unfairly distributed by the very fact of unemployment and consequent lack of purchasing power.
Although the promotion of the dominant model can frequently be directly traced to interventions on the part of particular Western governments, international organizations have also played a crucial role. They have at best treated the human and social objectives of development in a rhetorical way and have not allowed this rhetoric to interfere with their basic support for the Western agricultural model in the LDCs. In spite of all declarations to the contrary, they have fostered the emergence and diffusion of high-technology, capital-intensive farming.
Socio-economic Effects of the Dominant Model in the LDCs
The adoption, in whole or in part, of the dominant model by LDC governments, encouraged by international organizations and frequently under pressure from transnational corporation and 'aid' partners, has led to a series of disastrous consequences. The gravest among them is the accelerating dissolution of self-provisioning agriculture both as a major element in peasant farming and as a subsistence base of the poorer rural strata - the prime victims of hunger. Some of the other consequences are as follows:
• Relations of production and exchange, formerly oriented more directly to the maintenance of family livelihoods, become commercialized.
« Competition between peasants and entrepreneurial farms for the use of good quality land increases in direct response to higher demand for both food and export crops.
The environment suffers as increasing numbers of families try to extract a livelihood from land that is diminishing in area and deteriorating in quality because of the over-use and improper husbandry they are obliged to practise for immediate survival.
Agricultural 'modernization' strikes women particularly hard. They are among the first to be eliminated when commercialized farming overtakes self-provisioning, as the consecutive Indian censuses of 1961 and 1971 clearly illustrate. During that decade, two-thirds of all female cultivators ceased activity, while the number of female agricultural labourers increased by 50 per cent.
Food 'imperialism' accompanies the introduction of the dominant model. The 'baby-foods scandal' provides a flagrant example, but other foods have received less attention. Some, like bread or soft drinks, may gain great prestige. Although the dominant model may promote commercial pseudo- variety (as in US-style supermarkets), true cultural variety inherent in the production, preparation and consumption of a broad spectrum of foods is markedly declining. This decline is accompanied by the deterioration of nutritional levels. Commercial promotion of Western processed foods downgrades not only local diets per se but also the symbolic value of traditional foods perceived, by comparison, as culturally inferior. Third World elites may take the lead in such consumption and are then imitated by their less privileged compatriots.
Food aid plays a vital role in the introduction of new dietary habits. It can also create a bias towards foreign solutions of local problems: whereas nutritionists in Mysore State had developed suitable high-protein foods from local raw materials, their formula was rejected in favour of the corn-soya-milk blend provided by the US PL 480 Food Aid Program.
• Countries whose 'export-led' agricultural strategies cause them to emphasize the supply of foreign markets, and to forsake their peasantries' attempts to produce food for local consumption, grow increasingly dependent on massive cereal imports, tying them both economically and politically to privileged suppliers, more often than not the United States.
• Outside interventions and transfers of technology tend to reproduce the high-capital, low-labour-intensive characteristics of industrialized countries' food systems. This necessarily increases the cost of food, which must remunerate invested capital (e.g., centralized storage adds an estimated 20 per cent to the cost of grains sold in LDCs, according to an FAO expert). This, of course, places food beyond the reach of poor consumers and contributes to eliminating peasants who cannot compete in wholly mercantilized food systems.
The Rapid Decline of Self-Provisioning
However deleterious these consequences of the introduction of the dominant model (the above list is far from complete) it must be stressed that the most serious among them is the marked decline of self-provisioning agriculture.
The drama of this process of decay lies in the fact that the 'umbilical' attachment of people to the land at the level of the family or kin-group is, with all its insecurities and natural hazards, the food system that has maintained humankind during most of its history. In the market-oriented developing countries, trends are encouraged that inevitably confirm or accelerate the decline of self- provisioning before other forms of economic activity are able to offer alternative means of livelihood to the displaced peasantry. As a consequence, marginalization and proletarianization are proceeding inexorably in Asia, Africa and Latin America, though at differing speeds and in different ways.
The full significance of this transformation is not entirely comprehended, but it seems to imply deterioration in the nourishment of the already poor as they are obliged to purchase food in unfavourable conditions from the market; massive migration to urban centres and a much higher level of conflict, disorder and repression. The removal of productive assets from women through new forms of division of labour in agricultural production may often result in a serious reduction of food provided to rural families.'
The actual producers of food - the overwhelmingly rural majorities of the Third World - are being p
rogressively divested of their control over what they shall produce, by what methods, and of the resulting harvest. Imitation of the Western high-technology model and continued subservience to the needs of outside food systems cannot be expected to eliminate hunger - only to make it worse. The relevant questions in the 'hunger problematique' have become: 'Who controls the surplus?'; 'Who has the power to define what constitutes the "surplus" at the expense of the starving and malnourished?'
Science, Scientists and the Hunger Problem 3
The relationship between 'science' and 'development' is not a transparent one. A close and critical examination of this relationship may be itself a contribution to development and, ultimately, to science as well. Most Western scientists would see the following statements as unproblematic:
• Science is/should be 'value-free', 'objective'.
• The task of science is to discover laws.
• These laws should be as general as possible.
• The scientist (at least in his professional capacity) is a competent expert, tolerant, open-minded and politically neutral.
The label 'value-free' may hide a host of hidden values and assumptions of which the researcher may be unaware (although they may be obvious to others and surface in dialogue or confrontation). Scientific laws are conceived as reflecting a basically unchanging empirical reality. And in the notion of working towards 'general' laws, there is a clear norm of universalism. Behind laws lie paradigms, or generally accepted fundamental beliefs about phenomena, describing their nature but also defining the kinds of new investigations that can be undertaken without challenging the basic hypotheses.
The preceding set of propositions might be contrasted with a concept of science which would not hide values and assumptions but would try to make them explicit and subject to challenge and exploration. Such a science would be concerned not only with seeking invariances but also with breaking them; it would seek fewer universals and more insights relevant to the particularities of specific points in space and time. (Catastrophe theory is concerned with just such questions and is beginning to provide the mathematical structures for a science far more attuned to the qualitative and the discontinuous than to the quantifiable and the regular. It also stresses the irreversibility of certain phenomena and the impossibility of predicting them.)
The fundamental debate about Western science in general, and the positivist orientation in particular, has clear relevance for the discussion of any specific science, especially when the historical and socio-economic origins of these branches of knowledge are examined.
Much science is goal-oriented, and geared either to production or to social control. Science began to serve the now- dominant economic system around the seventeenth century, but since the nineteenth century this relationship has become more explicit. The maritime character of the British Empire was not without influence on the development of meteorology and naval astronomy; nor was the rational exploitation of colonial possessions unrelated to the establishment of agronomy, mineralogy, and tropical medicine as separate branches of knowledge. It is not surprising that the earliest agricultural research focused on cash crops to the exclusion of African or Asian food crops. Nutrition studies, as first undertaken in Europe, were designed to determine the minimum standards necessary for assuring the reproduction of the industrial labour force (particularly miners).
Present-day scientists may agree with Mao Zedong that science is the crystallization of knowledge developed through humankind's struggle for production, but it is also their duty to ask, 'Production for whom?' If science is to become relevant to the real needs of the Third World and to have any favourable impact on human and social development, it must undertake a fundamental re-examination of its goals and its methods.
What then are some of the issues and obstacles that must be faced by individuals and institutions seeking to help transform the hunger problematique through the use of the instruments of scholarship? We shall refer specifically here to 'research', but our remarks almost invariably apply to other activities carried out by intellectuals, like education and training.
New Slogans versus Old Realities
There seems now to be near-universal recognition, at least at the rhetorical level, that 'growth models' and once-popular 'technological fixes' have not worked. Policies favouring capital-intensive, import-substitution industrial development have led to neglect of agriculture as a whole, and, within the agricultural sector, the wealthiest and most 'progressive' producers have received attention at the expense of small peasants and landless labourers. As we have stressed, these groups have become increasingly unable to produce enough or to buy enough food to meet their minimum needs. Such statements may now be regarded as truisms, but this does not mean that development agents and agencies are acting on their implications.
The proven ineffectiveness of liberal solutions for the pressing problems of the Third World has not even been accompanied by a genuine conceptual change of heart. Old slogans ('GNP growth', 'trickle down', 'take-off, etc.) wear out and are discarded, yet their replacements look suspiciously similar behind new facades. Concepts which may have been innovative when formulated by Third World leaders are deradicalized by the development establishment, or this establishment simply forges its own new 'appropriate terminology'. Two potentially radical concepts currently undergoing this watering-down process are the New International Economic Order and Basic Needs.4
So long as this establishment maintains the conceptual initiative and is able to impose its own terms of reference, it will hold an important tool for entrenching the status quo. Progressive scholars must attempt to regain the initiative in this area.
Technical Solutions versus Politics
Although one now sees numerous references to the 'political will necessary' for carrying out the bland recommendations of international conferences, in practice development expertise generally confines itself to technical questions supposedly amenable to tech-nical solutions. The all-important political dimensions in any real development (which always implies gains for some and losses for others) is left out.
The 'development intelligentsia' also treads carefully even where technical issues are concerned, avoiding examination of the social and political context in which they are placed. In designing projects, implementing scientific discoveries (e.g. Green Revolution seed varieties) or planning changes in technology, it usually ignores the following postulates which ought to be obvious to any neutral observer:
1. A project (scientific discovery, technological innovation, etc.) benefiting the least favoured classes will not be acceptable to the dominant classes unless their interests are also substantially served.
2. A project ... which benefits only the poor will be ignored, sabotaged or otherwise suppressed by the powerful in so far as possible.
3. A project ... which serves the interests of the dominant classes while doing positive harm to the poor may still be put into practice and if necessary maintained by violence so long as no basic change in the balance of political and social forces takes place.5
Development experts design programmes they claim will 'reach' the poor while offering no guarantees to that effect. The implementation of projects in which the poor stand to benefit may succeed so long as the area is saturated with capital and so long as these projects are administered over small areas by dedicated personnel having no particular interests to defend. It is, however, unrealistic to suppose that, beyond the pilot stage, market forces will not intervene and that the wealthier and more powerful elements of society will not appropriate whatever technical and financial benefits the project was designed to create.
Systemic Adjustments versus Structural Change
Most research currently carried out by development agencies is concerned with face-lifting operations, not structural change, and starts from the premise that the present world system, given a few compromises, can be made to work for everyone, as it is claimed to have worked for everyone in the now-developed count
ries.
The Food Study Group does not believe systemic adjustments (e.g. the inclusion of more people in Green Revolution-type strategies), even if they occur, will change the status of the masses of hungry people more than marginally. Thus we cannot advocate research basically committed to tinkering with present structures. This is a waste of time if one's goals are really to benefit those who at present lack all control over the circumstances of their lives. Aside from what we consider the false premises and the self-serving nature of such scholarship, we might also point out that those seeking systemic adjustments rarely if ever consult the poor and powerless people their research is nominally designed to serve. Top-down research design and project implementation is still the rule.
We also take note that successful systemic adjustments in the past (successful, that is, in staving off acute social conflict) have to a large degree created conditions that make improvement in the status of the poorest members of society virtually impossible. One example submitted to the Group (by D. D. Narula) is that of the very limited land reform in India, which nevertheless extended rural control from 1-2 per cent of the landholders to 18-19 per cent today. It will be far more difficult to dislodge this recently created class than the previous feudal one without profound and painful social change.
Much research sponsored by major donors is also directed towards helping people to make do with less rather than aiding them to obtain more. Efforts are directed to 'getting the most from' an environment already depleted by the greed of national or international interests which have reduced the quantity and quality of resources available to the poor. Little work is devoted to strategies for regaining even those rights that theoretically belong to the most deprived, much less for demanding new ones.