It is here that the problem of the accountability of the researcher should be posed. Intellectuals working at the 'micro' or community level should be accountable to that community, and the worth of their work determined by the degree of relevance to its felt needs. (Scholars concerned with 'macro'-level issues might well be judged, on the other hand, by the degree of controversy and confrontation their work gives rise to.)
Real development is incompatible with methodologies which envisage only the collection of data by an 'objective, impartial' scholar using a pre-designed survey questionnaire. There must also exist a commitment on the researcher's part actively to foster social change in the desirable direction. The intellectual must feel a sense of identity with the situation and, perhaps most difficult, must accept being changed by the research process; as of course the researched will also change if there has been real interaction. 'Participatory' or 'dialogic' research emphasizes the holistic approach, i.e., for food problems the researcher would enter into a dialogue with the people about life in the community as a whole, because food, nutrition, health, etc., are not viewed separately but as parts of life. The people's identification of the problem, their assessment of the obstacles to solving it and their proposals for doing so in spite of the obstacles should form the total process leading to meaningful action. Interaction between 'expert' and people should upgrade traditional knowledge as well as create new knowledge to be integrated into community practice.
The important point is that any research project is itself a part of the power structure; a progressive project should thus be concerned either with (i) denouncing with factual proof present power arrangements and their harmful effects on the poor - or at least showing the gap between rhetoric and reality in the way power speaks about itself (the 'discourse') or (2) strengthening the capacity of the poor to organize and free themselves from oppression. It is likely that most projects would not be able fully to combine these two aspects, and that one person would not be able to do both kinds of work, but both are important. An unresolved problem is how to establish fruitful collaboration and continuing contact between scholars engaged in type (1) or (2) so that their work becomes mutually reinforcing. A progressive research/educational institution could play a very important role in facilitating and maintaining such contacts. It might be particularly helpful to groups in the Third World to be able to make their needs known to scholars in the developed countries, where access to documentation on the power centres is easier.
Research Outside the Dominant Food-System Model
We have attempted to make clear the concept of a food system and to suggest that there are large systems, or cycles, spanning countries, continents or the whole globe, which are gaining in importance; while small food cycles - self-provisioning on a family, community or regional level - are declining. This is perhaps an inexorable and irreversible movement; we cannot say. We believe, however, that it is the duty of the researcher and the development-planner to protect, to strengthen and to enhance the smaller cycles in all possible ways; to resist the encroachment of the large ones which are leading to increased hunger in the world.
It is particularly urgent that scientific research outside the dominant agricultural model be undertaken without delay. Without wishing to appear apocalyptic, we would still like to point out that a new world food crisis may be looming which could make the crisis of 1972-4 seem pale by comparison. The World Food Conference of 1974 predicted that the developing countries would be importing around 85 million tons of food in 1985. By 1978-9, the figure had already gone beyond 70 million tons (as compared to 50 million tons in 1976-7). After several years of abundance in the late 1970s, the stocks of the major grain exporters (particularly the United States) were being intentionally drawn down, with the result that a bushel of US wheat which sold for S3.12 in late August of 1978 is worth $4.43 at this writing (November 1979), and had gone as high as $4.60 in July before the first new harvests came in. The food dependency of most importing countries is increasing, not declining, and the failure of governments to conclude a new International Wheat Agreement in February 1979 is another ominous sign. Most observers believe that developed countries will continue to devote even greater amounts of grain to feeding animals in their own countries, thus further limiting available supplies.
The equilibrium of international food markets, with their reliance on the US and, to a lesser extent, on a handful of smaller exporters such as Canada, is so precarious that any relatively minor shock - climatic or commercial - could set off a disproportionate market reaction for which the Third World would have to pay. Outsized purchases by a major importer such as the Soviet Union or China; blight, or failure of the monsoon in Asia; a drop in US production; any or all could trigger an uncontrollable upward spiral in prices as speculation took hold. Food aid cannot be expected to palliate such conditions: the historical record shows that aid decreases as commercial purchases increase in the context of tight markets.
Only those countries deemed politically vital would continue to receive a significant supply of food aid in a period of scarcity. To these disquieting factors must be added the increasing reliance of Third World food systems, imitating the dominant system, on energy-dependent inputs like fuels, fertilizers and other petroleum- based chemicals. This comes at a time when even increased OPEC-country aid cannot compensate for their mounting costs, particularly since Western transnational corporations largely control the marketing of these products.
Many Third World governments seem to be living in a sort of fool's paradise, lulled by several years of good weather and resultant good harvests - and perhaps by a belief in the benevolence of their traditional aid partners and suppliers of major food grains. The present food system, with its reliance on high-energy, high- technology imputs, is growing more vulnerable daily, to the point where it is not unrealistic to speak of an eventual systemic breakdown.
If systems breakdowns do occur (and, to many of us, this outcome appears to be only a matter of time) then we will long for the days when a different kind of complexity - biological, not industrial - made our farming systems more resilient and disaster-resistant.9
The higher the level of complex industrial technology in a given system, the more fragile and less capable of withstanding crisis it becomes. From this point of view, the systems in the industrialized countries are the most exposed to breakdown, whereas in the Third World there is still time to preserve and to improve the traditional farming practices which have provided the basis for human survival through several millennia. This, however, with rare exceptions is not being done.
On the contrary - not surprisingly, given the intellectual prestige and financial backing of the dominant model in both agriculture and research - most resources are being devoted to fine- tuning the dominant model itself to fit a greater variety of local conditions. Adolfo Mascarenhas reports, for example, that in Tanzania there is an area where peasants are capable of identifying and cultivating twenty-four different varieties of rice. Yet there is no Tanzanian (much less outside) research team monitoring their practices with the aim of understanding them in a more codiflable and 'scientific' way. On the other hand, research grants are being awarded for work on imported varieties of hybrid rice.
One encouraging example of research outside the dominant agronomic model which has come to our attention is the work being done by a team at Heidelberg University. This group takes an 'archaeological' approach to land-use practices of traditional farmers (e.g. the Kikuyu farmers in the Kilimanjaro region of Kenya) in order to understand the functional principles involved. The Kikuyu system is multi-faceted and includes various tree crops, bushes, standing crops and 'weeds' (which play a positive protective role); a system characterized by high species diversity, stability and complexity able to withstand the particular hazards of the local environment. The Kikuyu peasants exhibit great skill in arranging the species so that they interact with one another; they have also perfected anti-erosion and waste-using techniques,
demonstrating a high level of scientific sophistication. Some of the lessons learned in Kenya have subsequently been used by this Heidelberg team in designing a minimum-physical-inputs system for farm improvement in Rwanda. They have also developed a similar approach in Mexico, using Mayan cultivation practices as a starting point.
In the context of a traditional system, generally a very efficient user of energy, it is entirely possible to integrate technological elements from outside the original system at fairly low cost. This can be desirable so long as it is the farmers themselves who determine what new technologies are opportune and so long as they retain control over the system as a whole. Thus we are not advocating a museum-conservation approach to traditional systems, however good, nor a goal of simply replicating them, but rather a creative blending of local expertise with Western scientific knowledge.
Or, as the UN Research Institute for Social Development has put it,
We do not suggest ... that modern production techniques should be rejected as such or that self-provisioning agriculture must be maintained or restored as a necessary basis for food systems and rural livelihood. What is suggested, however, is that the transition to higher levels of technology, increased capitalization and further economies of scale can only be achieved by means of firm and carefully prepared policies and programmes with the active participation of the different social groups concerned, and that much of the knowledge essential to the adequate preparation and execution of such policies is not available. In addition, the political will for such programmes and policies can hardly be expected to appear spontaneously in social structures that provide poor peasant groups with little power or influence. The worst danger is the precipitate uprooting and marginalization of rural majorities and nomadic fringe groups before alternative sources of livelihood are available to them.
Research beyond the confines of the dominant agricultural model could reduce such dangers to the degree that it strengthened traditional food systems, thus making the communities practising them more resistant to outside pressures. The knowledge that lies behind traditional systems is not always readily accessible to outsiders and can be acquired only through cooperation with peasant practitioners - easier said than done, especially for Westerners.
The Food Study Group has concluded that a major responsibility incumbent on institutions consciously directing their work against mainstream research and aspiring to help solve the food/ hunger problem is to support 'creative dissidents', who should find an important place in future research.
Summary and Recommendations
1. Research should be undertaken on the impact of global power structures at national and local levels in underdeveloped countries. Politics of particular actors (for example, transnational corporations, multilateral agencies, industrialized States, etc.) should be examined to ascertain their effects on food/hunger in the Third World.
2. Research at the national level should include an action/participatory component and should incorporate findings from the global level. The object of such work should not merely be to collect data but to initiate social change. It should also aim at upgrading and conserving traditional farming systems in each country.
3. Research is also required at the epistemological level, and would include 'research on research', examination of paradigms, creation of new knowledge stocks and methodologies; the placing of research and development systems in historical perspective. The creative dissidents span all these elements and contribute to their evolution. This epistemological component is not some sort of 'philosophical window-dressing' but a vital contribution to regaining what we have called the 'conceptual initiative'. Until the terms of reference can be changed, research and development programmes will remain in the usual technocratic ruts.
4. The ultimate goal of all this work should be to educate, train, sensitize and remould national elites and to raise mass consciousness for social change. Assuming that governments and other elites want to contribute to solving the food/hunger problem, they will need not only data on the interests which currently prevent this, but also a decolonized conceptual approach that relativizes and delegitimizes the dominant model(s) in any number of disciplines. Such a decolonized approach should be transmitted through educational and training institutions which should help people to recapture and liberate their own creativity - as individuals and as nations. Although this report has concentrated more on the theoretical elements of a hunger problematique, research critique, and proposals for change, we believe that most of our observations apply to education and training as well. In other words, there are dominant models in curricula, pedagogical methods, etc.; these models are instituted and maintained by particular classes whose interests they serve; there are also creative dissidents working outside these models who need support. One form of support is the provision of alternative curricular tools. Participatory research is a form of education which raises mass consciousness, just as the exposure of present repressive power structures is one necessary step towards freeing creativity.
Conclusion
Ideally, people should be in a position to make a choice as to the kind of food/agricultural system they prefer and to carry it out, based on their own design, but we are very far away from that goal. The Food Study Group is aware that all its recommendations run counter to currently observable trends: more centralized State bureaucracies, growing power of transnational corporate capitalism, etc. Greater popular control over food-producing resources and food itself seems, however, the only viable long-term strategy against hunger. Useful research will foster this strategy and will not only try to help the now-powerless to formulate what they want and need, but also attempt to provide them with useful information about the power structures that work against them so that they may frame more realistic strategies.
It is obvious that these strategies, like those of any real human and social development, will involve political conflict; this cannot be avoided. We are not, however, engaged in waiting for the revolution, which has little more to recommend it than waiting for the afterlife. We do believe that with the cooperation of men and women of goodwill everywhere - North or South, intellectuals or peasants - it is possible to build up countervailing powers, to work for slow revolution, to discover available political spaces and to create new ones within which it is possible to struggle against the economic and class interests which have no scruples about eliminating millions of people. As John Berger has written,
The peasantry as a class is the oldest in existence. It has shown remarkable powers of survival - powers which have puzzled and confused most administrators and theorists. In fact... the essential character of the peasantry ... despite all the important differences of climate, religion, economic and social history ... actually derives from its being a class of survivors. It is often said that the majority of people in the world today are still peasants. Yet this fact masks a more significant one. For the first time ever, it is possible that the class of survivors may not survive.10
We see it as the task of intellectuals to recognize our debt to this class of survivors, our common interest not only that they endure but that they prosper. We must be prepared to move forward with them; to do so, we must be prepared to abandon our comfortable hypotheses, our scientific certainties, our favourite wisdoms - including, perhaps, those set forth in this paper.
8
THE SNOB THEORY OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT
Comic relief time. Or at least a satirical tone for a serious subject. This piece appeared in Development Forum, June 1982, 'the single regular publication of the United Nations system in the field of economic and social development', under the title 'An Invitation to be Offended'. Development Forum does not require permission to reprint, but I thank them anyway and change the title back to 'The SNOB Theory of Underdevelopment'.
'Of course, poor Mr James never did meet the right people.'
English dowager, commenting on Henry James, upper-class American anglophile novelist who took British nationality br />
'Breastfeeding is for savages.'
African doctor
I hope to be among the first to alienate nearly all my friends by bringing up in the most public and tasteless manner a subject not discussed in well-bred 'development' intellectual circles, except in whispers and with intimates, after midnight.
If you too are a believer, but are afraid to come out of the closet, perhaps this may give you the courage to talk openly about SNOB. The acronym stands for Social Naivete of Behaviour or Simple Necessities of Business, depending on which side you're looking at. Those who espouse the SNOB theory hold dear the motto, 'Nothing So Blind as a Colonized Mind'.
SNOB is an idea whose time has come, because exploitation in the postcolonial world is a tricky business. No more rounding up the natives and telling them to produce, or else. No more dumping cheap goods on vassalized countries' markets to ruin local cottage industries. Tough times for business, these. But hardly desperate. There's more than one way to skin a cat - or a Third World country and its citizens. The SNOB method, properly employed, not only yields higher profits but provides more perverse satisfaction to its practitioners than common or garden domination.
The theoretical underpinnings of SNOB have been known for centuries and its practical applications are universal. SNOB's guiding principle is that human beings tend to imitate those they perceive as their social superiors. Adepts regard Moli- ere, immortal author of Le bourgeois gentilhomme, as their greatest ancestor. Literati would add Proust, creator of Madame Verdurin and other unforgettable characters, to the Pantheon; while academics may recall Gabriel Tarde, early sociologist and neglected author of The Laws of Imitation (1895). Americans, more succinctly, may recite, if pressed, 'Oh carry me back to Boston / The home of the bean and the cod / Where the Lodges speak only to Cabots / And the Cabots speak only to God.'