How should one approach research basically concerned with such stop-gaps? There are delicate moral problems involved here: one cannot avoid the problems of immediate survival facing the poor today, nor discount the possibility of perhaps saving a few lives through palliative measures that may help the powerless temporarily and in limited ways. Thus we would not state categorically that one should not engage in alleviating, wherever possible, the miserable conditions of the hungry. But this sort of work is, like it or not, on the level of 'systems tinkering' and basically accepts the status quo. It should not therefore be a priority for those who hope to do relevant work against the mainstream.
Conflict with the Dominant Research Establishment
As in other areas of human affairs, the area of research is a terrain for conflict - at least when anything of importance is at stake. When there is general agreement on what constitutes the proper province of scholarly objectives and activities, one may assume that those who have an interest in maintaining the existing balance of power do not feel themselves threatened. Progressive scholars should thus welcome conflict as an admission that their work is doing powerless people some good, or might aid them in the future. This is a serious responsibility and places upon such researchers the burden of being more rigorous than their detractors and opponents while at the same time avowing and defending their 'value-loaded' approach.
The most immediate conflicts for progressive intellectuals and institutions will occur with the dominant research establishment which will quite naturally seek to maintain and increase its control over scholars and scholarship.
This establishment has a number of ways of ensuring its hegemony. One of the simplest and most effective, as some Third World Food Study Group members have brought out, is merely to occupy the terrain. Western foundations, universities, aid agencies, etc., appear in force in country X and immediately enlist the cooperation of all, or nearly all, the available scientific manpower, expertise, laboratories and institutions available. In most Third World countries, indigenous scientific capacity is underfunded to begin with, so it is materially feasible to put whatever capacity exists to work on spurious projects - or even on projects that quite candidly serve the needs of donor countries (as is the case with US 'Food for Peace' counterpart funds spent on agricultural or 'market development' research carried out in aid-recipient countries by indigenous scientists).
Any project proposed independently and designed to be of real assistance to the poorest and least influential groups, or one which might lead to a change in existing social relations, is, in effect, placed in direct competition with handsomely funded pro-grammes which generally appeal to governments as much as they do to large and powerful donors. As one of our members says, speaking of the obstacles encountered in trying to start a small project targeted to the poorest people in a country heavily populated by development experts, 'I found the patterns of allocation of resources and grants strongly biased towards these well-established and dominant research institutions whose main objective seems to be confined to their own reproduction and development. In this respect the role of international agencies was determinant.' If by some freak occurrence an innovative project does get underway, according to this same participant, 'it becomes the focus of attention of international donors and observers visiting the country, receives a lot of publicity and diverts attention from the real [overall development prospects] in that country'. Such innovations, if they cease to be invisible to planners, take on an alibi status; in both cases they can be made to serve the system's needs. It is unwise for a local scientist to protest such an orientation of the scientific capacity of his country: 'The only two scientists who contested the way in which research was undertaken in the major ... institution were fired from their assignments.'
Another member points out that a position in the international research establishment is richly rewarded - the highest priority for Third World intellectuals apparently being at present expert status with the World Bank. This is also why they strive to obtain diplomas from prestigious Western institutions - these are much more highly rewarded than degrees from Third World universities.
A third member analyses the social realities of research carried out in underdeveloped countries as follows.
Most funds for research come from outside the country (from industrialized-country sources) so it is understandable that the objectives, the methodologies and the terms of reference also be dictated from the outside. Some work by Ph.D. candidates is done for established professors with their own theories to defend. Younger scholars must conform to the professors' guidelines if they want to find a job in academia later on. Scholarship may also serve to support the foregone conclusions of decision-makers or of the international development-planners who so frequently dictate the choices of national planners.
Scholars are virtually told what their findings are expected to be. Such work obtains recognition for the intellectual in government and/or academic circles, whereas independent, progressive researchers are rarely promoted. It is no wonder that their number is infinitesimally small compared to the numbers of 'yes men' (and 'yes women'). The near-total irrelevance of most social science curricula to the value systems, perspectives or historical evolution of Third World people has also been stressed by Food Study Group members.
The Dominant Research Model: Prestige without Accountability
We have attempted to show how the dominant Western agricultural model is being propagated in the Third World with harmful consequences. (The same could be said for other areas - e.g. health care, industrial development under the aegis of transnational corporations, etc.) That there is also a dominant model in research, accepted and admired by most Third World intellectuals and seen as prestigious by their governments, cannot be over- stressed.
This prestige is not fortuitous. As Pierre Spitz points out, the dominant research establishment is actually engaged in two kinds of work. The first is empirical and operational and hews very close to reality because it is concerned with a more efficient manipulation and management of that reality. The audience for which this work is prepared is a limited one; much of it is confidential and restricted to the commissioning agency. It must, in fact, be largely confidential because of its adherence to reality, because most reality is oppression.
The second kind of work is more closely related to ensuring this model's dominance through the production and dissemination of an ideology destined for the broadest possible audience, spread by a variety of media and institutions, including universities. The practitioners of the first kind of scholarship should have no difficulty identifying the interests they are serving: they share these interests to the degree that they are rewarded by them. Scholars in the second group may not always understand the role they are playing. If so, they are themselves victims of the dominant ideology - naive but not dishonest; if not, then cynical or motivated by gain. Both kinds of work may, of course, be done at different times by the same persons.
Almost all research is geared either to production or to social control and is carried out for institutions (e.g. transnational corporations, leading foundations, lending agencies like the World Bank) which exercise power without any mitigating accountability. 'Production' in this context means production of goods and services which are wanted and can be paid for by consumers with purchasing power. This aim automatically precludes research and development addressed to satisfying the needs of those who live in poverty. The bodies which impose these goals on present research are answerable to no one - except a self-selected board - and the Food Study Group considers it fruitless to ask, or to expect, them to change their aims. They are not to be persuaded, but rather confronted and exposed.
That members of the power structures are willing to devote substantial resources to research indicates that the latter is not a luxury good but an important input to control: it helps to strengthen the power of those who exercise it while simultaneously contributing to thickening the ideological smokescreen b
ehind which this power is exercised.
Some Elements of a Progressive Approach to Research
Research on Research
One immediately necessary task for progressive scholarship is to confront the dominant research establishment on its own ground. The sheer weight of resources devoted to spurious or irrelevant projects in the Third World ensures that the enormous body of work turned out will have a wide influence. (One may, for example, recall the success of the 'overpopulation-is-the-cause-of- hunger' school.) The Food Study Group's refusal to condone or participate in this kind of scholarship thus carries an important corollary: we see it as one obligation of intellectuals to carry out 'research on research' if they hope to undermine the dominant model's influence and compete for its audience in both developed and underdeveloped countries. It is important to examine what establishment research covers and why particular projects (and, of course, particular countries) are of special interest to bilateral and multilateral funders at particular times. It should be a relatively easy task to ascertain which social groups stand to benefit from the choice of certain projects rather than others.
Studying the Powerful
Related to this target (examining power by examining its uses of the instruments of scholarship) is the importance of studying the dominant social and political forces both spatially and temporally. The Food Study Group believes that the reasons for poverty and hunger are not to be found mainly within the class of the poor and hungry but in their relationships with the rest of society (from the local to the national to the international level). The most important focus for research on poverty, which itself causes hunger, can be summarized in the single word 'power': power as it is expressed in social classes and through the institutions that serve them at every level.
In The Crisis of Democracy the Trilateral Commission castigated 'value-oriented intellectuals' who 'devote themselves to the derogation of leadership, the challenging of authority and the unmasking and delegitimization of established institutions' including those responsible for 'the indoctrination of the young'.6
We would assert that intellectuals should not only be value- oriented but indeed devote themselves to just those tasks decried by the Trilateral Commission. This can be achieved in different ways at different levels.
As Pierre Spitz again notes, there is a hierarchy in research (which is not to imply that one kind has more intrinsic worth than another): (i) factual or empirical work, in which the researcher's values naturally determine the topics pursued and the facts sought; (2) research designed to verify a hypothesis clearly defined at the outset and in which facts serve this aim; (3) epistemological research concerned with the very concepts and paradigms that underlie research and the tools it uses. At each of these levels, dichotomies (and conflicts) between the dominant and the dominated classes are, or should be, apparent. One of the tasks of research is to unmask the interests involved at every level - interests which will also determine the clientele for, and the uses made of, research. We do not wish to give the impression that research can be separated from its applications, particularly from its role in the creation of a dominant ideology and its dissemination through the mass media or educational and training institutions.
Multidisciplinary Studies
There has been a general recognition, at least in the progressive scholarly community, that single-discipline research for rural development is not the road to success. Although single-discipline work still prevails in the far greater part of scholarly output, there are numerous signs that a multidisciplinary approach is becoming fashionable. This itself will not constitute a panacea. If the disciplines, whatever their nature and number, still revolve around the old paradigms and tackle the wrong problems (or the right problems in the wrong ways) they might easily do more harm than the previously more limited approach. Multidisciplinary work could, however, become an important instrument if it were to take on the issue of power as it expresses itself at the global, regional/national and local levels.
Creating and Using New Stocks of Knowledge and Innovative Methodologies
Beneath the 'growth model' that dominated development thinking for so many fruitless years lay the assumption that there was a unique stock of knowledge (science and technology), that this was the exclusive preserve of the industrialized countries, and that it needed to be transferred along with capital if Third World nations were ever to 'bridge the gap'. But a concept of human development cannot mean 'Western' or 'elitist'. Does anyone really believe that insight is so asymmetrically distributed that billions of men and women deeply engaged in food production, preparation, distribution and consumption know nothing at all, whereas a few selected researchers (nutritionists, social scientists, agronomists, et al.) know everything? Thus stated, most would agree that there must exist huge stocks of knowledge beyond the confines of 'official' science and technology, but that they have gone largely uncollected, untapped and unutilized. There may be, in fact, four separate stocks of knowledge, of which two are as yet largely uncreated:
1. Western, positivist, mechanistic science and technology;
2. Traditional, empirical, operational stocks of knowledge, stored by peasants and closely adapted to survival skills within the constraints of a wide variety of environments;
3. Knowledge which might come from interaction between (1) and (2), if only self-satisfied 'experts' can be persuaded to listen and learn, and peasants, so long disdained, can be persuaded they have something to teach;
4. Knowledge which might come from the significant demand in many developed countries for a simpler, more humane lifestyle.
New nature/human/technology 'mixes' are needed, including many that have not been imagined yet, but which might be part of that 'Third Science' stemming from a real dialogue between North and South, peasants and experts. This would necessarily imply sharing decision-making power as well as knowledge; as mass consciousness increased, elites would find their power diminishing.7
Methodologies of the social sciences in particular (but also of nutrition) developed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in an urban, industrial, masculine, Western context. They are thus more apt to be good at defining - and answering - questions posed by urban, industrial, masculine, Western societies. Research has not only treated people like objects, but has suffered from environment-blindness, sex-blindness and age-blindness. Nutritional science, for example, knows relatively little about traditional mixes and sequences of foods making maximum use of the environment. When it does take an interest in such matters, it is often to discover that Western inroads are destroying dietary practices with a sound scientific basis (e.g. food combinations ensuring optimum balance of amino acids). The invisibility of women in most development-planning can be corrected only when women themselves take an active part in the planning process. Something is known about infants and children under five (unfortunately, mortality statistics form a large part of this knowledge) but very little work has been done on old people. Third World people may have lower life-expectancies, but they also age more quickly. In fragile food systems, children and old people suffer disproportionately; just as they, along with women, are the first to be eliminated from productive work when control shifts from local communities to outside forces.
People have their own ways of stocking information, but these are rarely the ways that figure on social scientists' questionnaires. If peasants are asked, for example, how large a yield they produced, or how much they spent on cloth last year, or even how large their plot of ground is, they may have difficulty answering, but this does not mean that they are ignorant. Their measurement and information system merely uses other criteria: e.g. the 'quantity price', or amount that can be bought with one unit of currency at different times of the year; or the 'commodity basket' of purchases that are approximately the same every week or month; or the number of months they and their families were able to live off their own harvest without having recourse to purchased food. Questions asked inside th
e people's terms of reference will receive useful answers.
Surveyors who have rarely ever been hungry themselves can perhaps not be expected to realize immediately that annual data about food intake would seem strange indeed to peasants and their families whose problem is survival tomorrow, next week and next month, especially during the lean season. Surveys could, however, very usefully look at fluctuations rather than averages for various socio-economic groups. A survey of a village one month before and one month after harvest would give entirely different results.8 This means that projects would have to last longer and that the 'people's methodology' would have to be adopted in order to learn something worth knowing.
The 'Objects' of Research Must Become Its Subjects Those for whom progressive research is purportedly being done -the poor and hungry - must be consulted about their needs and helped by the researcher to define those needs. We believe that the worst-off know very well why they are poor, at least on the immediate local level, and that this knowledge represents one starting point for improving their status. This can come about only through various forms of organization in which the researcher should take as active a role as is warranted by the expressed desire of the community in question. We are not sure whether there are any serious thinkers who still believe in scholarly neutrality, but, if so, we would like to paraphrase Orwell and point out that 'all researchers are neutral, but they are more neutral towards some social groups than towards others'.