Meanwhile, agribusiness TNCs are developing strategies for reducing their own dependence on tropical products from the Third World. Substitutes for jute and cotton are already widely used, while industrial use of sugar is gradually giving way to high-fructose corn syrup. It is now even possible to produce coffee and cocoa substitutes from plentiful temperate country crops like soya or barley. A shrub which gives natural latex as good as the hevea's is being grown experimentally. Higher prices for tropical crops (negotiated in fora like UNCTAD) will encourage recourse to substitutes, so that exporting countries have no guarantee they will be able to sell the same quantities as before, even if they gain concessions on prices.34
The Third World is more than ever a supplier of food products at prices it does not control and a purchaser of staple foods (70 million tons last year) at prices it does not control either. A bushel of US wheat which cost $3.12 in late August 1978 sold for $4.30 in September 1979. As a whole, the Third World now buys about 30 per cent of all American agricultural exports - and up to 60 per cent of that part of the US wheat crop that is sold abroad.35 'Comparative advantage' as a doctrine for development seems to have become bankrupt - except for the rich countries.
Increasing Production: A Solution?
Let us take the second possible objection - that one can guard against harmful effects of the dominant food system model; production must, in any case, be increased. The relevant question here is 'Production for whom?' In our present system, production is indeed being increased, but much of it is going to the already well-fed, because purchasing power is the magnet that draws food, both nationally and internationally. Through the dominant model, income and capital are concentrated in industrialized countries and in the hands of a Third World minority. It might be possible to guard against negative trends (although I do not believe it possible in market economies); what is evident is that such precautions have not been taken to date. Agrarian reform has made little progress, land ceiling legislation is not applied; while 'the market', i.e. competition, allocates access not only to food but to food-producing resources, including land.
Powerful commercial interests have a stake in promulgating the dominant model, either to sell agricultural products and expertise or to produce exportable agricultural goods more cheaply than they can do in rich countries. These interests are frequently aided by governments and by the UN system itself. Tied aid is one mechanism encouraging dependency on an imported model. The largest bilateral donor (the United States) ties 73 percent of its aid, while the OECD Development Assistance Committee countries as a group tie over half of theirs.36 American food aid is legally conditioned by the recipients' acceptance of Green Revolution-type techniques, while the European Development Fund gives over half its agricultural assistance to cash, not food crop projects.37 The US government's Overseas Private Investment Corporation supplies loans and political risk insurance to agribusiness companies' projects in the Third World, generally producing for export or for the moneyed elites of poor countries. Until recently, over one hundred TNC agribusinesses were integrated in FAO as the 'Industry Cooperative Programme'.38 Although the Director-General of FAO disbanded the ICP in 1978, it has regrouped and obtained consultative status with the UN Development Programme. In spite of such State or
international agency support, no evidence has yet been supplied that TNCs contribute to authentic food systems.
Has the Third World Had a Real Choice of Food Systems?
The third possible objection - 'this is what the developing countries want' - brings us back to the problems of economic and intellectual colonization and to the responsibilities of developed countries. Decades of interference and technology transfer have resulted not only in economic dependency but in a transfer of values and attitudes as well. The dominant model is what the Third World 'wants' - or may have been obliged to accept - because no one, with the exception of a few imaginative non-governmental organizations with no stake in dependent development, is offering anything else.
Northern governments and multilateral donors tend to finance the kinds of projects they understand (based, necessarily, on their own food systems) and those which will bring an immediate tangible return (in the form of traditional or luxury cash crops or purchases of inputs and expertise). This is, however, an extremely short-sighted policy on the part of donors whose own economic and political futures will be partly determined by the nature of the development process in poorer countries. The Iranian revolution was, for example, partly a violent reaction against the foreign takeover and large-scale destruction of a national food system which had resulted in the forcible displacement of several hundred thousand rural people and annual food imports costing half a billion dollars (from the United States alone) - this in a country which had once been self-sufficient.
Is There a Realistic Development Policy Alternative for Industrialized Country Governments?
Third World governments which accommodate easily to dependency and inauthentic food systems may not be in power for ever and those who replace them will tend to have long memories concerning those outside influences which either helped or harmed their nations. Despite recent historical examples of the violent rejection of dependency, it is none the less realistic to assume that most industrialized-country governments will prefer to support Third World economic partners doubling as political allies. Real development always implies gains for some and losses for others (at least temporarily) and many northern governments would probably find the political costs of undermining some of the interests of Third World elites that presently support them too great. Rich countries also back the activities of their own corporations, consulting firms, etc., which, as we have seen, find considerable profit in interference in Third World food systems. Thus governments would have a good many difficulties in altering their development policies so that they might bring greater benefits to the majorities of poor and hungry people. It is normal that States act on considerations of political power and economic advantage; they cannot be expected to behave altruistically nor respond to moral exhortation. This being said, it is still important to be somewhat 'utopian'. Governments are not monolithic; the role that particular individuals and agencies can play in reshaping at least some aspects of policy should not be discounted. Let us indulge, then, in a 'conditional idealism' and venture on to the problematical ground of the possible, rather than confining ourselves to the pessimism of the probable. Assuming the developed countries are interested in lessening Third World dependency, how might they help southern hemisphere food systems evolve towards greater authenticity?
A Re-examination of Industrialized Countries' Consumption Patterns
First of all, rich countries would need to carry out a self- examination, facing squarely the situation in which their own past or present practices and demands have placed the developing countries. This would involve a critical look at the way their own consumption patterns influence land use and investment in the Third World. They should particularly try to discourage the relatively recent, so less entrenched, production of luxury foods (the aforementioned off-season vegetable products, meat, fish, and pet-foods) produced on some of the Third World's best agricultural land; and which contribute marginally if at all to the well- being of developed-country citizens. This might be done by placing heavy import taxes on such items.
The New International Economic Order (NIEO), particularly as it concerns fairer and more stable prices for tropical commodities, would not of itself create authentic development, partly because incremental revenues would accrue mostly to dominant groups; partly because of the substitution phenomenon discussed above. It should, nevertheless, be supported, because it would provide the only means available for Third World governments to plan land and resource use more rationally. At present, they are devoting huge areas and heavy investments to cash crops because 'boom and bust' cycles make this structurally necessary. That is to say, when the price of commodity X rises, producing countries (which have no mechanisms for consu
ltations among themselves) try to grow more of that crop to take advantage of this price. When these unconcerted actions result in a glut - as they eventually do - the producing countries still try to grow more so as to keep their revenues stable in the face of falling prices. The NIEO, properly applied, could have the result of diminishing the area used for cash crops which are today more a part of the problem than a part of the solution.
Food Aid Policy
Since direct food assistance represents a high proportion of total development aid, a thorough examination of the impact of past policies should pay particular attention to it. Stepped-up food aid in the Sahel has, for example, had a number of negative consequences. It has resulted in taste-changes, prompting huge increases in wheat and maize demand (+ 234 per cent and +207 per cent respectively between 1965 to 1967 and 1975 to 1977) whereas local wheat production covers only 2 per cent of requirements. In a recent report to an inter-governmental conference called by the Club du Sahel and the CILSS (Permanent Inter-State Committee on Drought in the Sahel), an FAO expert spoke of the 'desire for bread' and pointed out that:
Due to changes in feeding habits, the outlets available to traditional cereals remain limited and the incentives to increase production are small. In such a context, food assistance appears to be an easy solution, enabling urban populations - or privileged groups - to be supplied at relatively low prices, but failing by this very fact to achieve self-sufficiency in the matter of food supplies ... Whereas Sahel States have granted, since the 1960s, priority to the extension of ... groundnuts and cotton and have sometimes achieved spectacular success ... it cannot be said that any real cereals policies have been implemented so far.39
Much the same could be said for other major food aid recipients like Bangladesh, where donations rarely reach the people most in need, but whose sale to the better-off provides a substantial part of the national budget. Food assistance has frequently been specifically geared to increasing subsequent cash sales (this objective figures, for example, in the text of the US 'Food for Peace' law). Industrialized countries must determine whether they choose to aid themselves (by getting rid of surplus or increasing commercial food exports), political/military 'clients' (who will in turn sell the food aid to their own clientele) or, rather, populations which are truly at risk. If authentic food systems are the goal, policies stressing short-term, disaster-related food aid and direct relief for the poorest would be much more beneficial than the present long- term institutionalized programmes. Low-cost food imports should never be allowed to compete with local food production and thus destroy local incentive.40
The Case for a Temporary Reduction in Development Aid Funding
The suggestion of a temporary reduction in development aid is, perhaps, the ultimate heresy, and as such would doubtless be seen by northern governments as a political liability (or an easy alibi) and by southern ones as another proof of First World selfishness. But there is ample evidence that present levels of aid are actually accelerating rural polarization, especially landlessness and loss of employment, because so much of it accrues to the higher strata of Third World societies.
Even conclusive evidence that certain development projects would cost less and have a much greater positive impact on poor local people will not prevent the adoption of their exact opposites. Comparative cost/income calculations showed in 1974, for example, that for oil palm development schemes in Nigeria, if 'based on village processing units, growers' family incomes would be approximately 50 per cent higher and overall investment in transport and processing facilities 75 per cent lower than in a large-scale industrial scheme'.41 The World Bank nevertheless made loans in 1975 and 1978 totalling $95 million - for large-scale, centralized industrial oil palm development in Nigeria.42
The cynical view of such activities is that agencies dominated by First World governments will encourage dependency by promoting projects relying on equipment procurable only from industrialized countries. A somewhat more charitable opinion would hold that lending agencies are (or at least want to be) permanent institutions and are thus obliged to spend huge sums of money, even if they worsen the position of the poor, because they must dispose of this year's budget in order to secure next year's. One would like to recommend, with little hope of being heard, a brief moratorium on aid combined with much higher spending on research (and a commitment to accept the policy implications of that research 43).
A brief hiatus could institute much longer time-scales for project implementation. There is now much talk of 'local participation', but few agencies are willing to allocate the necessary time for detailed research and necessarily complex consultations. Real participation would even entail, in many cases, the building up of rural organizations in order that their members might speak out without fear of reprisal from powerful local interests. Despite their crucial role in food production, processing (and sometimes marketing), rural Third World women are the most forgotten group of all, possibly because most development planners are men. Schemes that do not take women's specific skills and problems into account deserve to fail. Unfortunately, they sometimes 'succeed' by making women's lives even harder.44 Time 'lost' in obtaining popular participation, including that of the lowest social strata and women, would be made up in time gained in effective project implementation. If the rural poor are convinced they have something to gain from a project, they will act as fast as any agency could wish, but they will quite properly resist 'modernization' from which only the better-off groups (or only men) stand to benefit.
Lower cost projects, relying on a high labour content, are furthermore the only ones that stand a chance of replication throughout the country as a whole. It may be possible to create developed 'pockets' by saturating a small area with capital and personnel, but such islands have little significance for the economy of the country as a whole and merely increase inequalities because they are too costly to generalize.
Recognizing the Relativity of Industrialized Country Food Systems
This is a complex recommendation because it runs counter not only to entrenched interests but also to entrenched mentalities. Industrialized countries should nevertheless try to re-examine the axioms of their development policies in order to accept the cultural, economic and environmental relativity of their own food systems, as outlined above, rather than continue to think of them as panaceas for radically different societies. If this relativity could be accepted, it would amount to an intellectual revolution and could bring the goal of authentic food systems closer. If the industrialized countries could view their own systems not as universally applicable, but as local solutions to local problems and conditions, they would simultaneously have an effect on decision-makers in poorer countries - helping to rehabilitate the prestige of local solutions in these countries as well.
The introduction of the dominant food system has pushed Third World countries towards the kind of homogeneity which now prevails in industrialized countries; for example, hyper- specialized monoculture and reduced genetic variety; commercially induced food habits encouraging the consumption of identical products throughout the world (bread where no wheat is raised, soft drinks, infant formula, etc.). The structural homogeneity of the developed countries' food systems is masked by an end product exhibiting great commercial pseudo-variety (one observer recently counted eighty-five different kinds of bottled salad dressing in an American supermarket). But this variety is spurious and is controlled in reality by a very few firms using diverse labels made 'different' through advertising.
Traditional Third World food systems may, on the contrary, be characterized by relative monotony of diet (broken by festivals and feasts) but be based on wide genetic and species heterogeneity. One Philippine tribe practising shifting cultivation is able, for example, to identify and use 1,600 different plants. In one part of Tanzania, peasants cultivate twenty-four different kinds of rice; other examples of this empirical knowledge of species could be cited.45 Traditional cultivation systems are also founded on heterogeneit
y - mixed cropping of trees, bushes, standing plants, and even certain 'weeds' which play a positive protective role. Such techniques are time-tested responses to risk: homogeneity is vulnerable, but diversity is resistant and risk-spreading. Systems breakdowns are far more likely under conditions of structural homogeneity (blights over large areas, as have occurred in the Philippines and Indonesia - not to mention the Irish potato famine or the US corn blight). Monoculture is linear, seeking a single product year after year and paying the price in industrial inputs. Traditional systems are circular and return to the land what has been taken from it.
Peasants, left to themselves and given enough physical space, are environment improvers. The first farmers did not follow Ricardo's principles by using the best land Burst (it was beyond the physical capacity of the farming group, mostly women, to clear it) but the more easily worked terrain. As Professor Michel Cepede notes, 'Fertility is progressively built up on naturally poor land.'46 Even today, in poorer countries, small plots worked by peasants have proved up to thirteen times as productive as large mechanized holdings,47 although this is no longer possible when the resources available to them are drastically reduced. Then they are accused of 'overcultivating' and 'overgrazing' the little that has been left them - as indeed they must if they hope to ensure immediate survival.