The second model is based on 'dependency theory' which holds that there is a centre (the rich countries, with the United States as the centre of the centre) and a periphery (the Third World); and that the former has consistently exploited the latter since colonial times. The goal of development is thus to correct this historic and ongoing imbalance through the use of measures summed up in the New International Economic Order (NIEO) strategy: fair and stable prices for Third World raw materials, free access to northern markets for industrial goods, State control over multinational corporations' practices, alleviation of debt, etc. This model also rests on an assumption of global interdependence, but stresses that serious adjustments will have to be made in the world system so that all nations can benefit and achieve that mutuality of interest which does not yet exist. This is the stance from which nearly all Third World governments (the so-called Group of 77) argue in international negotiations.
The third model does not deny the need for an NIEO, but tries to enrich this concept with a class analysis. The world is not merely divided into rich/powerful and poor/relatively powerless nations: all countries, including the rich ones, are characterized by a dominating and a dominated class (each, of course, with its own subdivisions). The NIEO is an incomplete solution to the problems of hunger and underdevelopment because nothing guarantees that increased national revenues will benefit the poor more than marginally. In the third model, the goal of development is not merely greater equality between States, but the decent livelihood and dignity of all human beings. Unlike the first model, this approach assumes not harmony but conflict. Third World elites will not give up their privileges without a struggle and will meanwhile prevent any substantial advantages from trickling down. Rich nations will continue to exploit poor ones, but industrialized country elites will also support their Third World counterparts so that this exploitation may more conveniently continue.
Advocates of the third model see hope for the Third World not in the greater integration of the less developed countries into the world system but in their greater independence from it. They call for self-reliance - the full use of all local material and human resources - before asking for outside help and for a fundamental redistribution of power as the only way to end hunger and misery. Basic needs, yes, but as defined by the communities concerned; not so much participation as empowerment - the capacity to control those decisions which most affect one's life.
Has scholarship anything to contribute to the emergence and the enforcement of the third model (for which my own bias will be obvious)? Development students, researchers and writers must address the needs of the most deprived and must be accountable for the work they produce. Students who see such accountability as an intellectual and moral imperative can begin by approaching the material listed here with their critical faculties on full alert and by asking the kinds of questions we have sketched here: Is the study part of the 'conventional wisdom', or does it try to take an opposing or unpopular point of view? Where does it stand in relation to the above three models, i.e. to power? Does it presume harmony and proceed in a social and political vacuum? Could the work contribute to increasing the knowledge - and thus the manipulative capacity - of national or international elites?
The reader, and especially the writer, should not forget that researchers, too, stand somewhere in the power structure. Their work can be used by the rich against the poor, but also, one may hope, vice versa. Why not turn our sights towards those who hold control, with a view to giving a clearer understanding of their activities to those whose lives they affect? This is often a difficult task, for the well endowed are less vulnerable to scholarly scrutiny than those who have no choice but to let themselves be studied; we should accept this as a challenge.
The mass of scholarship listed here represents an incalculable number of hours devoted to examining various aspects of world hunger, and while all of us have been writing, the relative and absolute numbers of hungry and destitute people have vastly increased. It is time we asked ourselves why, as scholars, we are still discussing poverty and want, and applied ourselves to transforming the contents of future bibliographies into explosive devices and instruments of liberation.
10
UTOPIA, THE UNIVERSITY AND THE THIRD WORLD:
AN IMAGINARY COOPERATION PROGRAMME
The after-dinner speech is not a genre I've often practised. When your subject is almost invariably hunger and poverty, it's not a great feeling to stand up after a banquet and talk about them. If you do, you must first take infinite precautions, moving the audience away from its own guilt, a destructive emotion that does nothing for understanding and nothing for the hungry themselves.
The conference during which this dinner took place was organized in Guelph by the Universities of Guelph (Ontario, Canada) and Wageningen (Holland) in August 1983 on the theme of 'The Role of Universities in Integrated Rural Development'. Speechwriting is good discipline for making yourself think seriously about a problem. I tried to do that here, keeping in mind that I was still supposed to be the intellectual equivalent of brandy and cigars.
The network of people who met at this conference is still going strong, thanks to the efforts of Professors Tony Fuller and Wout van den Bor who edit the Rural Development Notes newsletter from their bases at Guelph and Wageningen. Many of us met again at Guelph in October 1989.
Surely we who labour in the vineyards of Third World rural development are often tempted to dream, to fantasize and to play the 'absolute power' game; the game that allows us to rim the world the way it ought to be run. Most of us have been frustrated by a project somewhere, sometime, that should have gone right and went wrong. Or, according to our different temperaments, we may become enraged or shrug our shoulders in disgust when reading the annual reports of certain official aid organizations, or just the daily newspapers. How, we may ask, is it possible to spend so much money for such paltry, or even negative, results? Occasionally, we may even be rewarded by participating in a project which goes according to plan and really benefits the needy people for whom it was intended. When this occurs, and after the initial flush of pride, we may find ourselves even more frustrated, and wonder why everyone doesn't see the wisdom of acting in just such a way everywhere. People whose daily lives revolve around the problems of development know - or at least believe they know - what needs to be done; they do not need an after-dinner speaker to tell them. All of us feel, consciously or unconsciously, that the problems are soluble: what we need is that some superior Being give us absolute power to get them solved.
Tonight, the organizers of the Guelph-Wageningen Conference on Universities and Integrated Rural Development have given me a splendid opportunity. They have handed me what amounts to carte blanche to play the 'absolute power' game in public. I intend to play it in somewhat the same way that Andre Malraux composed his 'Imaginary Museum': no problems of money, personal or national susceptibilities, or obstacles engendered by any powers-that-be are going to get in the way of my particular Utopia. I will not be upset if you decide to say about me what William Lamb is reported to have said about Lord Macaulay: 'I wish I were as sure of anything as he is of everything.' The aim of Utopias, from Plato to Thomas More and onwards, has always been to make political points which at some periods in history could not be made in any other way without fear of reprisal. Here, among colleagues, I do not fear reprisals: hence my aim will also be to provoke each of you to envisage his or her own Utopia.
Perhaps, through a collective effort of imagination in our coming days together and after we separate, by juxtaposing and confronting and arguing about our Utopias we may come closer to a genuine politics, in the noblest sense, of successful integrated rural development, and have a clearer idea of how we as scholars and practitioners might work in order to make that politics a reality, inside and outside the University, in both North and South.
Before I use the opportunity given me, let me make a disclaimer, then situate my Utopia in relation to current trends in dev
elopment theory and practice as I perceive them. First, the disclaimer. I am not especially well qualified to speak about integrated rural development, and I say this without false modesty. I have never spent six months living in a Third World village, nor have I ever had to deal with the nuts and bolts of a project: I therefore speak from the particular point of view of someone who does not work in the field, as many of you have done, unless it is the field that has come to be called 'development education'.
Second, my Utopia will not be set in a vacuum. Part of the crisis in development thinking - and I believe we shall all agree that a crisis exists - stems from deep yet often unspoken divergences in our definitions of 'development'. What does the word mean? To oversimplify, one could say that there are basically three definitions, or models, or paradigms, or even factions where development is concerned, and most of us, myself included, are committed to one or another of these models, largely on ideological and political grounds. The first duty of people involved in development is to lay their cards on the table and make those political grounds explicit. This I shall attempt briefly to do (These three models appear in the preceding piece as well, but I have left them here because they don't take up much space and they help to situate Utopia University).
The first paradigm could be called the 'GNP growth plus trickle-down model', although the question 'Growth for whom?' is rarely asked. Where rural development is concerned, this model stresses 'technological fixes' like the Green Revolution or Post- harvest Technology; it tends to concentrate on the entrepreneur class of farmers in the better-endowed areas and it claims that greater national production will automatically benefit poor and hungry people living in the same national space. This model also tends to give priority to cash crops, to encourage transfers of Western technology, and to welcome the presence of transnational agribusiness corporations. Basically, this model assumes that the rural development process in the Third World should be in large measure imitative of the one that took place in the now- industrialized countries. It presupposes - although this is rarely stated outright - a world ruled by harmony. 'Trickle-down' will work because the attitudes of elites towards their poorer and hungrier compatriots are essentially benevolent. At the global level, nations are interdependent and should exchange raw materials, goods and services according to the principles of comparative advantage in a world system which is supposed to be ultimately beneficial to all.
In this first model, though growth may indeed take place, power does not change hands. Control over resources not only remains where it was (with the privileged few in the First and Third Worlds) but is actually reinforced by the development process itself. Most observers are at last willing to recognize that development practice based on model one is a patent failure. Third World societies are, if anything, more polarized between small elites and destitute masses than ever before.
The second paradigm - again very briefly - rests on the theory of dependency, or of the centre countries versus the periphery. According to this dependency model, the centre has exploited the periphery since colonial times and the goal of development is thus to correct an historic and ongoing imbalance of unequal exchange which continues to impoverish Third World societies. This unjust situation can be altered by applying the measures variously referred to as the New International Economic Order, the UNCTAD basket of recommendations or, most recently, the Brandt Report Programme: fair and stable prices for Third World products, debt relief, easier access to northern markets for finished goods, massive transfers of aid in the style of the Marshall Plan, etc. This paradigm also rests on the assumption of global interdependence, but stresses that serious adjustments will have to be made in the world system before all nations can benefit and achieve real reciprocity and harmony which does not yet exist. This, of course, is the stance from which Third World governments in the Group of 77 argue in international negotiations - and small wonder, since the model concerns States, and States alone. Ten years of spurious North-South 'dialogue', carried out at enormous cost in resources the Third World could have invested better elsewhere, have not brought us one inch closer to world harmony as defined by model two.
Even if it had been achieved, power relations might ideally change between countries, but not necessarily within them. In the House of the G-77 are many mansions: Pinochet's Chile and Marcos's Philippines, so to speak, call for the same measures as Zimbabwe or Nicaragua.
As you may have guessed already, my particular Utopia is not to be found within the frontiers of either of these models, but rather in the largely unexplored territory of the third paradigm, where human rights, human dignity and human needs are the touchstones of theory and the goals of action. This territory may very well be inaccessible and beyond the realm of reasonable politics. That is precisely why it seems worth asking how we may come a little closer to it and how university cooperation programmes may help us to do so.
Indeed, when we seek to describe the third model, we have already reached the outskirts of Utopia. Of the three possible paradigms I am suggesting, this one has been the least well articulated theoretically and is certainly the least practised. Just by trying to give it a name, I reveal my own bias in its favour, but I would call it the model of 'authentic' or 'liberated' development.
What might it look like? The third model would not deny the need for some sort of New International Economic Order, but it would be wary of locking Third World countries into the international market as a primary means of development. In fact, it would try to help them to disengage from this market as one way of refocusing attention on their internal needs before catering to the needs of foreigners. It would certainly try to enrich the State- to-State relationships of model two with a class analysis, demonstrating that the world is not merely divided into groups of rich and powerful nations versus poor and relatively powerless ones. All countries, including the industrialized ones, have their own centres and their own peripheries, or their dominant and dominated classes, if you prefer a different vocabulary. For proponents of the third model, the Brandt programme is a partial, even illusory, solution to underdevelopment, because nothing guarantees that increased national revenues will benefit the poorest people more than marginally, especially those who live in the countryside.
Authentic development means more than greater equality between States: it demands a decent livelihood and basic rights for all human beings. This paradigm, like the other two, also rests on an unspoken assumption. Unfortunately, this assumption is not very palatable to governments, international organizations or, for that matter, to many individuals. That notion is, of course, conflict. Elites will not often give up their privileges without a struggle and will usually prevent whatever they can from trickling down. The dominant classes of rich, strong nations will continue to exploit poor and weak ones, but they may sometimes give extra support to their Third World counterparts so that this exploitation may more conveniently continue. Such support may range from outright military presence to various kinds of economic aid and cultural ties between the elites, each of which gets something from the bargain. Allow me to add that this is the case whether we are speaking about the Western or the Eastern bloc.
Thus model three cannot really work in most societies unless there is some redistribution of power, both between and within countries - including the industrialized countries. Any development project should thus contribute to this end.
So should university cooperation programmes. Thus I'll start building my Utopian programme in the land of model three. By virtue of the absolute power conferred on me tonight, I'll begin by changing the terms of reference. In Utopia, we won't ask how northerners might contribute to 'integrated rural development' in the poorer countries of the South, but rather decode the officialese. This rather barbarous term, 'integrated rural development', was invented by powerful financial institutions for their own purposes. In plain English it means an adequate livelihood and human dignity for the vast majority of the landed or landless peasantry who are presently dep
rived of both. The first question to ask is not, therefore, 'What can we contribute to integrated rural development?', but rather 'Why are so many millions of people prevented from enjoying both a decent livelihood and a modicum of dignity, and what, if anything, may we do about it?'
The reasons these millions of people live in deprivation lie partly in the developed countries, partly in the Third World itself and partly in relationships between the two. Although universities do not have the power to make State policy, nevertheless the concepts and intellectual attitudes elaborated in academia do have a way of trickling down - or up. Let's give the universities a Utopian opportunity to influence official attitudes and look in turn at what northern universities, southern ones and a partner-ship between them might do to improve the lot of the poor majority.