Development and colonialism

I doubt if anyone today would dare state in public that the policies we are applying to improve the welfare of the people of the Third World have proved effective. Their ineffectiveness is apparent in every domain. Some critics might go further and suggest that, not only are they ineffective but rather than solve the problems of the Third World, they are in fact exacerbating them. Others would go further and suggest that, they are in fact the basic cause of the escalating poverty, malnutrition and famine - which we are now witnessing throughout the Third World.

Whichever one of these positions one adopts, the case for reconsidering these policies appears to be very strong. In fact not to reconsider them appears to be at best irresponsible, at worst callous arid cynical. Those responsible for our policies must befully aware of this. Indeed they assure us that the old type of development is over, to be replaced by 'appropriate' or 'eco' development (a term used in particular by the United Nations Environment Programme) or 'sustainable' development (one particularly favoured by the World Bank).

However, it is difficult to see how the vast livestock projects, the huge dams and other water development schemes and the mechanised plantations which are still routinely set up by the Development Industry can in any way be regarded as 'appropriate', 'ecological' or 'sustainable'. Indeed it is the rhetoric that has changed, the policies remain the same.

Development and colonialism

Why, we might ask, are we so keen to develop the Third World? Obviously for the same reason that we were once keen to colonise it. The object of colonialism, let us not forget, was a purely practical one. It was to obtain access to cheap raw materials, cheap labour and a captive market for manufactured products. Thus, in Tanzania, according to Spearring (1984):

"it was to meet the demands of an increasingly affluent Europe that the trade in ivory, having begun with India, expanded greatly in the 19th century. With the trade in ivory came the trade in slaves and firearms. At the same time Tanzania provided a ready market for Europe's textiles. There can be no question but that the British and German interests were dominated by commercial motives. These interests were encouraged, but not subordinated, to humanitarian and religious concerns. clearly political domination followed tradersand missionaries. The 'scramble for Africa', in which Tanzania was one ofthe prizes, was primarily the consequence of commercial necessity. The need was met by bringing Tanzania and the rest of Africa under the commercial and political dominance of Europe." [Spearring, 1984]

That such was the reason for colonialism was explicitly stated by the early promoters of colonialism themselves. Cecil Rhodes (quoted in Dumont & Cohen, 1980) for instance, declared that:

"We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labour that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories".

Lord Lugard said much the same thing:

"We have spoken already of the vital necessity of new markets for the old world. It is, therefore, to our very obvious advantage to teach the millions of Africa the wants of civilisation, so that whilst supplying them we may receive in return the products of their country and the labour of their hands". [Lugard, 1595]

The consequences of colonial rule

It is interesting to see just how the colonial system functioned. Harle (1978) describes it thus:

"The colonial government sector was controlled in such manner that most government revenues were derived from the trade sector and development expenditures were directed toward promoting growth of exports. This pattern was not dependent on de jure political control by the developed country. Foreign influence, while more subtle, was no less important in controlling the trade and government sectors of the countries now under de jure control.

In any case, there appeared a circular development process within the controlled countries: government expenditures heavily favoured public works, which encouraged the expansion of export production, which led to the further growth of government revenues and expenditures due to the dependency of revenues on exports. The dynamic relationship of increased exports, increased revenues, and increased expenditures tended to increase exports of food and agricultural raw materials.

The colonial rule simplified the diversified production of food plants to single cash crops - often to the exclusion of staple foods. The seeds of famine were inherent in this process. For example, rice farming was once common in Gambia, but with colonial rule so much of the best land was taken over by groundnuts - for the European markets - that rice had to be imported to counter the mounting prospect of famine. Through a production system based on enriching the large landowners, Vietnam became the world's largest exporter of rice by the 1930's, and yet many landless Vietnamese went hungry.

Colonial powers had to force the production of cash crops. The first strategy was to use physical or economic force to get the local population to grow cash crops instead of food on their own plots and to then turn them over tothe coloniser for export. The strategy was the direct takeover of the landby large scale plantations growing crops for export.

In effect, colonialism forced peasants to replace food crops with cash crops that were then expropriated at very low rates, took over the best agricultural land for export crop plantations, and then forced the most able-bodied workers to leave the fields to work as slaves or for very low wages on plantations, encouraged a dependence on imported food, and blocked native peasant cash crop production from competing with cash crops produced by settlers or foreign firms". [Harle, 1978]

The colonialist process described above explains the simultaneous existence of under-and overproduction of agricultural products in the Third World. It also explained the terrible ecological damage that occurred during the colonial period. On this subject, Baker (1984) notes with regards to the French African Empire that it:

"was divided into major crop zones specialising in groundnuts, cotton or rice. Cotton planted. year after year exposed the topsoil in places such as Mali to serious erosion and depletion as the same spectrum of nutrients was extracted continually with nothing added. Wind and water were able to work their ravages on the soil leaving the scarred and gullied landscape we see today. Continuous cultivation of groundnuts drained the soils of Senegal.

It was assumed of course that once Third World countries achieved independence: they would abandon those colonialist policies and seek to repair the social and ecological destruction that they had caused. Such an assumption was perhaps naive. In any case, nothing like this .has happened. Third World Governments, once they take over the reins of power, pursue what are in effect the same policies as their colonialist predecessors. Baker sees things very much the same way:

"Essentially the story is one of continuity. Virtually nowhere was there any attempt to look back into history at the rationale of the so-called 'traditional' systems of land use ... Those who emerged to form the elite did so within the mores of the colonial system - whatever the rhetoric leading up to independence. This elite was often embarrassed by the precolonial past since they had always seen it portrayed as barbaric, primitive or chaotic ..."

At the same time continuity was a characteristic of the economic system and the 'development' models of most Third World countries. In the context of "modernisation" the Third World sees itself often as engaged in a struggle with the developed world to 'catch. up': to emulate the rich. Most of the Brandt literature is based on liberalising the system to allow this "catching up" to take place. In this model the cash crop economy and the pursuit of foreign exchange is critical, especially sincethe oil price rises of 1974 and 1979." [Baker, 1984]

Emancipation has, in effect, done nothing for the rural masses. Ironically, the peasants, who, as Jacoby (1983) notes: "identified the struggle for national independence with the fight for land", never recovered their land. National independence simply led to its take-over by a new brand of colonialists.

The concept of 'development'

The idea that Third World countries. should 'develop' and that development was in their own interests, as opposed to ours, was a new idea that was first formulated after the last war. President Truman is supposed to have been the first to have used 'development' in this new sense of the term. [Nandy, 1986] It has provided a subtler method than political colonialism for bringing Third World countries within the orbit of international trade. Let us see how it was set into motion.

The first step was to set up a local elite imbued with our values and committed to our lifestyle and hence capable of. fulfilling the same functions that were previously fulfilled by colonial administrators and settlers. This work was already set into motion by the missionaries. Bohannan (1964) notes:

"It was they who taught the Africans to read and write and thereby supplied government clerks and traders' clerks ... and ultimately the national leaders".

The missionaries thus provided the core of the local elite that we required. Since then, by 'educating' ever greater numbers of young people from the Third World, both locally and in our schools and universities, we have greatly extended the size of the elite and the extent of its indoctrination with western values and 'knowledge'.

To provide this elite with the necessary power, it was then necessary to set up the monolithic nation state on the western model. It is important to note, that in the Third World, there is no precedent for the nation state. It plays no part in the culture of Third World peoples who previously lived in tribal societies or other vernacular social groupings in which there were no formal governmental institutions, the governmental functions usually being carried out by the society itself headed by its elders.

What is more, the boundaries of the nation states we set up in the Third World were totally artificial, corresponding to no ethnic realities. Their governments, usually derived from a dominant ethnic group, were and still are seen by members of other groupings as totally alien and often hostile bodies. The interests ofthese governments, though they may coincide with those of the commercial elite from whose ranks they are often drawn, are very different from those of the traditional societies that survive in the countryside.

The fact is that Third World elites have been absorbed into the Western socio-economic system. They are our representatives in the countries that they dominate just as were their colonial predecessors - and as, in the case of the latter, their interests, as Partant (1982) notes, are largely "antagonistic to those of the bulk of their countrymen".

The final requirement was to provide this elite with capital and in exchange impose on it a set of rules governing the way this capital was to be used - compliance with which would lead it to adopt those policies which best satisfied our political and economic requirements. The device for assuring the Third World countries did just this was called 'aid'! Ironically though it was supposed to relieve the growing poverty of Third World people it was paid to precisely those who, in such countries, must contribute to creating it.

Aid

Only those with a superficial knowledge of the development process remain convinced that aid is designed to help Third World people. In the face of the worst and most widespread famine Africa has ever known, the British government has actually reduced its aid to the people of that continent so that, as Madeley (1986) noted, "there is more in the kitty for better off countries such as Turkey and Mexico", which unlike the Africans have the money with which to buy British manufactured goods.

This is the crux of the matter. Indeed the US Department of Agriculture admits that American food aid is a means of creating a demand for imports from the US. It declares:

"Food Aid can pave the way for US commercial exports. For example. in 1956-58 the United States food aid to 17 overseas markets was $3.1 billion, and commercial sales of all goods were $3.6 billion. Two decades later, food aid from the United States 10 these same countries was only $756 million, and commercial sales had grown to $43 billion" [US Department of Agriculture, Yearbook 1985]

One of the main reasons why aid is sound commercial practice is that much of it is officially tied. In the same way that colonies were once forced to buy their manufactured goods from the country that had colonised them, aid recipients must spend much of the money that is supposed to relieve their poverty and malnutrition, on irrelevant manufactured goods that are produced by the donor countries.

What is more, if they dare refuse to buy any of our manufactured goods or sell us some resource, that for some reason, they want to keep for themselves or simply conserve - they are immediately brought to heel by the simple expedient of threatening to cut off aid on which they tend to become highly dependent

Thus Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries of the world, decided a few years ago to take seriously WHO's study, that revealed that only a fraction of commercial pharmaceutical preparations was of any real therapeutic use, by banning the superfluous ones. The US government immediately reacted by threatening to withhold food-aid if Bangladesh discriminated in this way against US pharmaceutical manufacturers.

Last year, the British government behaved in a similar manner with the government of India by threatening to cut off aid it it did not go ahead with its plan to buy 21 'Westland 30' Helicopters costing $60 million - an effort which, it is encouraging to note, was bitterly opposed by responsible elements within the CDA.

This is simply a slightly more sophisticated means of achieving what Commodore Perry achieved by bombarding Osaka in 1854 in order to force the Japanese to trade with America and what Britain achieved in going to war with China so as to force that country to buy opium from British merchants in India.

However, it was at the Bretton Wood Conference in 1944, held under US leadership that 'aid' was institutionalised as the Industrial World's principal tool of economic colonialism. At that conference, 44 nations agreed to set up the key international institutions. They were the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (IBRD) and the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GAU). These highly interconnected agencies formed a single integrative structure for world trade which until the early 1970s was basically dominated by the United States of America. [Tofler, 1980]

The original role of the IMF was to make sure that member nations pegged their currency to the US dollar or to gold, of which 72 percent of world supply were in the possession of the USA. This expedient was among other things to make it difficult for Third World doctors to get out of their financial obligations to the Western Banking System by manipulating their currencies.

The World Bank, whose first function was to reconstruct Europe's shattered economy, soon moved into the business of Third World development, its main activity, for a long time being to build roads, harbours, ports etc. i.e. the infrastructure required for making possible the import of manufactured products and the export of raw materials and agricultural produce. It then invested heavily in energy generation, in particular in hydro-power.

More recently, since the 1970s, it has played a leading role in financing the commercialisation of agriculture in the Third World and in particular the substitution of export oriented plantations and livestock rearing schemes for traditional subsistence farming designed to feed local people. In doing this, it has, as we shall see, made a massive contribution to the growth of poverty and famine in Africa and South East Asia.

The role of GATT, the third of those institutions, was to liberalise trade and hence to make sure that Third World countries should not try to manufacture locally products they could buy from western countries, ie, indulge in highly frowned upon 'import substitution'.The IMF has of course complemented the work of GAU in this respect. Loans, either from the IMF itself or the World Bank, have only been provided to governments that have undertaken to observe IMF 'conditionalities'.

This had meant above all, abolishing import quotas and reducing import tariffs to a minimum, thereby preventing Third World countries from protecting their fledgling industries against competition from the established. and highly capitalised enterprises of the industrial world - industries that during the early stages of their own development were themselves well protected from foreign competition - and many of which still are.

Third World governments must also undertake to mechanise their food production, i.e. adopt the Green Revolution, which provides an important market for our agricultural machinery and agro-chemical industries. They must also replace subsistence agriculture with export oriented agriculture so as to provide us with the agricultural produce we require, through this they have to do in any case in order to pay for the capital equipment they need for mechanising their agriculture and for financing the mass of manufactured goods that must flow inevitably flow into their countries.

This package of policy prescriptions has been imposed on Third World countries by all the multilateral development banks as a condition forgranting them loans. Since the early seventies, the amount of capital pumped into the Third World to finance such policies has increased massively, as has the destruction it has financed. The reason has been the need to recycle the vast sums of money accumulated by the OPEC countries into the western economic system.

Unfortunately, the process is about to be repeated, since, with the aid of the World Bank, we now plan to recycle, via the economies of Third World countries, Japan's annual $50 billion surplus - which is equivalent to the OPEC surpluses of the late 1970s. [US Dept. Agriculture, Yearbook 1985]

The impact that the vast development schemes, that alone can sop up all that money, must inevitably have on the already devastated environment of the Third World, is too awful to contemplate.

Traditional agriculture

At the turn of the century, the British government sent an agricultural expert called Voelcker to study Indian agriculture with a view to "working out ways in which it could be modernised". Contrary to what was expected, he was extremely impressed by what he saw:

"I do not share the opinions which have been expressed as to Indian agriculture being, as a whole, primitive and backward, but I believe that in many parts there is little or nothing that can be improved... I make bold to say that it is a much easier task to propose improvements in English agriculture than to make really valuable suggestions for that of India ..." [Voelcker, 1983]

According to Susan George (1984), one can show scientifically that, in general, "indigenous cropping systems use labour more efficiently, give more stable yields from year to year and are 'intrinsically higher yielding' than monoculture". She considers that "The subsistence farmer has developed a highly sophisticated system ... based on good economic sense". The same is true of traditional pastoralism, indeed a recent Dutch study quoted by the Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues (1985) concludes that:

"traditional herders produce as much protein per hectare as do ranchers in areas of equal rainfall in the United States and Australia; the Sahelian herders, however, accomplish this with infinitely less mechanical energy inputs, relying for the most part on manpower".

If traditional agriculture provides such a sophisticated means of feeding people why, the uninitiated might ask, are we so keen to abolish it and introduce modern agriculture in its place? In a World Bank report on the subject of the development of Papua New Guinea, the World Bank admits that:

"a characteristic of Papua New Guinea's subsistence agriculture is its relative richness. Over much of the country nature's bounty produces enough to eat with relatively little expenditure of effort".

Why then change it? The answer is clear:

"Until enough subsistence farmers have their traditional lifestyles changed by the growth of new consumption wants, this labour constraint may make it difficult to introduce new crops." [Payer, 1982]

and that, of course, is the object of the operation.

Even in the World Bank's iniquitous Berg report, it is acknowledged that the dominance of this type of agriculture or "subsistence production"

"presented obstacles to agricultural development. The farmers had to be induced to produce for the market, adopt new crops and undertake new risks." [World Bank, 1981]

This attitude is not new. Indeed, in the colonial days the greatest obstacle to the adoption of rational techniques and rational policies for development, as Rogers (1970) has accentuated, was "traditional culture".

One of the most usual criticisms of traditional agriculture is that it only provides a means of 'subsistence' and hence that traditional peoples are incapable of producing a surplus, which means that they inevitably hover on the verge of starvation. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Pollard tells us when that vast area of the Sudan at present irrigated by the notorious Gezira schema was visited by the first European travellers, Poncet and Brevedent, they described "pleasant forests of flowering acacias full of little green parrots" and "fruitful and well-cultivated plains"; indeed they called it "God's country" (Belad-Allah) by reason of the great plenty. They also described how, when they reached Senna in 1699, they were met by the king who received them "with great vessels filled with butter, honey and other refreshments, and two oxen and two sheep". [Pollard, 1981]

The truth is that subsistence agriculturalists achieved a considerable surplus. If this is not clear it is that it was not distributed via the market system and hence not subject to quantitative appraisal. It was distributed instead by individual farmers in such a way to satisfy their kinship obligations and by the more enterprising ones so as to achievesocial prestige which usually meant redistributing it to members of the community at large on the occasion of great feats. Food in fact was distributed so as to satisfy biological and social rather than economic requirements.

All this is now common knowledge, but it has not been allowed to dampen the quasi-religious fervour with which we seek to change, indeed transform every aspect of the lives of traditional peoples. This is particularly ironic when we consider that traditional societies create none of the problems that are at present threatening life itself on our planet. They do not cut down whole forests. They do not erode or desertify their land, nor contaminate their rivers and their seas.

Nor do their activities change the chemical composition of the atmosphere so as to threaten the very stability of world climate. Nor do they build atom bombs and threaten to use them for obliterating their neighbours and rendering their land uninhabitable for millennia to come. Yet by forcing them to adopt ourway of life we are assuring that they do create such problems and hence also contribute towards rendering our planet ever less fit for human habitation.

Of course people will often point out that traditional people are lacking in some basic requirements. They may for instance have a high infant mortality rate which could easily be reduced with the aid of antibiotics and other modern medicines. What we forget is that to render such a society capable of importing such products or indeed of manufacturing them itself, we must provide it with just about all the other features of amodern industrial society.

The fact is that one cannot simply transfer one of the features of a modern industrial society without transferring the rest - it is a package deal. If children have antibiotics at their disposal so must they also eventually have the cocaine and heroin to which much of our urban youth is now addicted. If they can build factories to churn out antibiotics so can they build others to churn out machine guns and eventually atom bombs.

Breakdown in control

It is essential to realise that the behaviour pattern of a traditional society constitutes a coherent whole - not just as with ours, a patchwork of often antagonistic expedients. Its role is to assure the society's stability or homeostasis within its particular environment, not just to satisfy petty anti-social interests of individual members.

For this to be possible all behavioural activities must be closely co-ordinated and the only means of doing so is to bring them all under the control of the society's cultural pattern, which in a traditional society, is a highly sophisticated cybernetic device.

Thus food production among traditional societies was never geared to maximising yields. To begin with, agricultural activities had to satisfy social requirements, so they were conducted in such a way that they did not interfere with traditional social practices. This meant, amongother things, that they had to be carried out by the family unit in co-operation with the community of which it was part.

Secondly, they had to assure that agricultural practices did not cause ecological damage such as soil erosion, water logging, salinisation etc. or if it did, then clearly the society could not survive for long.

Social arrangements with the accent on co-operation, also maximised security and thereby helped assure that everyone was properly fed. Thus Nyerere (1968) points out that:

"Both the rich and the poor individual were completely secure in African Society... Nobody starved, either of food or human dignity, because he lacked personal wealth; he could depend on the wealth possessed by the community of which he was a member".

It is thus clear that if, both in a tribal and, in a peasant society, agricultural yields are low, and the surplus food produced is not put into the market, this is not because of the 'ignorance' or 'idleness' of the farmers nor because of the 'primitive' techniques which they employ, as the promoters of economic development insist today. On the contrary, yields must be kept low and the surplus must bedistributed in the traditional way in order to satisfy social and ecological requirements which alone can assure that everyone within the society is property fed - and on a sustainable basis.

The promoters of economic development, and in particular ofthe 'green revolution' pride themselves in having achieved more higher yields, but then this is no great feat, if it is achieved by ignoring such social and ecological considerations. At the level of a human society, once people are no loner subjected to social constraints, their behaviour will simply be that which satisfied the immediate advantage of whoever succeeds in exerting some sort of power. This is precisely what is happening in the Third World - which is literally up for grabs. In the general free for all which our policies have given rise to - every politician, bureaucrat and businessman is grabbing what he can, and to hell with the consequences.

The destruction of our land, the contamination of our waterways andthe annihilation of our forests can only be understood as a consequence of this total breakdown in social control. In Indonesia it is generally conceded that each minister has his own private forest concession. In India the chief ministers of a number of states have made millions literally by selling off the forests under their control.

B. B Vohra, one of the most respected authorities on forestry and agriculture in India, and for many years President of the Environmental Planning Council, himself admits that country's forests have been cut down by what he refers to as "formidable mafias based on a triangular alliance between the corrupt bureaucrat, corrupt politicians and the corrupt businessman". [Vohra, 1985] Such an alliance is irresistible since It controls the finances, the police force, the army and unfortunately too, in many cases, the law courts.

It is an alliance that is pillaging the biosphere and pauperising those who live off it - all in the interests of quick personal gain. Ironically and indeed tragically, this pillaging is occurring in strict compliance with the rules of both modern economics and development theory.

Exports

In Central America the World Bank policy of funding highly intensive livestock rearing schemes geared to the export trade has led to a drastic reduction in the amount of beef available to local people. As Patricia Adams notes with regard to Guatemala,

"beef exports increased from zero to 15,000 tons per year in the last decade, but Guatemalans today eat 50 percent less beef." [Adams & Solomon, 1985]

It will be argued by the Development Industry that food can be imported to feed the peasants, but this is not realistic. To begin with what will be bought will inevitably be of lower quality, a fact well documented by Kent (1985). In addition, there is no mechanism for making the imparted food available to those who really need it. We know in advance that most of it will remain in the cities. In any case, the facilities for transporting the food to the villages are unlikely to exist and even if they did, the people in the villages do not have the money with which to buy it.

The principle that the export oriented economy can, in the Third World, only lead to malnutrition and famine, can be best documented by the experience of the Sudan. Less than a decade ago, that vast country was supposed to become the 'breadbasket' of the Middle East. Today, a considerable proportion of its populationis starving. How could this possibly have happened?

It is all the more difficult to explain if one considers that as late as 1978, the Sudan had succeeded in producing just about all the food it required but at the cost of cutting down on its cotton exports. Since it did not cut its imports, it obviously encountered balance of payments difficulties. So in the late1970s a new financial package was negotiated with the IMF, one of whose principal conditions was that, in the words of Charles Gurdon of the Economist Intelligence Unit, "cotton production and exports had to be increased, even at the expense of food crops". [Gurdon, 1986]

The government of the Sudan apparently did everything to satisfy IMF's requirements, and as a result cotton production rose from 518,000 million bales in 1981 - 82 to 1.2 million bales in 1983-84, while export revenues from cotton increased from 60 million to 447 million Sudanese pounds. What was the result? Inevitably,

"food crop production declined ... Between 1981/82 and 1983/84 the area under sorghum fell from 9.2 million to 8.7 million feddans, and production from 3.35 million tons to 1.98 million tons. While this was partially due to drought in rainfed areas - which produce the vast majority of Sudan's food requirements while the irrigated sector produces export crops - there were also other factors. The area under food crops in the irrigated sector was reduced, as land was turned over to cotton. At the same time investment and agricultural inputs were also concentrated on the cotton crop and production incentives were increased."

Needless to say that the effects of the changes, in the words of Gurdon "were disastrous when the drought struck Sudan a few years later".

The Development Industry's strategy for dealing with the threat of famine is theoretically at least to build up stocks of food in the cities for distribution to the starving. But this is totally unrealistic. In the Sudan, stocks of food were indeed built up - not by a responsible authority committed to fighting malnutrition and famine, however, but by speculators. Indeed, the latter bought up available stocks of sorghum in the cities so as to sell them at a profit once the famine really got underway.

Many of the larger banks were apparently involved in this racket, the principal one being the Faisal Islamic Bank that, during the 1983 - 4 famine in Kordofan, is supposed to. have bought up and hoarded about 30 percent of the sorghum crop and to have financed much of the hoarding by local merchants. [Gurdan, 1985]

Not surprisingly, during the course of the famine a bag of sorghum - which provides the staple diet of the Sudanese - rose from Su.10 to Su.280 in the summer of 1985, that is by 28 times. How, one might ask, could there not be famine in such conditions? It is thus impossible to deny that IMF policies have directly contributed to the death of hundreds of thousands of Sudanese people who have since died of starvation and of the infectious diseases to which underfed people are particularly prone.

Very much the same thing happened, in Sahelia. The famine there was largely caused by government action to increase the export of cotton which necessarily had to be at the cost of food production. In the years between 1960 and 1970 production of cotton in the Upper Volta increased ten fold from a little less than 3,000 tonnes in 1961 to 30,000 tonnes in 1969. This increase, as Gervais (1984) points out,

"is not the result of a love for growing cotton on the part of peasants ... The failure to recognize this reality leads a number of experts to misconstrue the problem of the Sahel famine as a problem strictly of drought."

Development and in particular the setting up of vast development schemes to export agricultural produce must cause malnutrition and famine. Such is the inevitable result of forcing Third World countries into the orbit ofinternational trade - which is unfortunately an essential feature of economic development. Kent demonstrates very convincingly that "one of the major effects of increasing the involvement of poor countries in international trade is to increase the extent to which the poor supply the rich"; [Kent, 1985] and when the poor are already malnourished this can only mean famine.

Dispossessing the peasants

It must be realised that 'economic development' necessarily involves removing land from traditional cultivators. This has serious consequences, for it puts an end to traditional land tenure systems which were previously under social control. We have seen how this occurred very close to home in the Scottish Highlands towards the end of the 18th century with the development of the Cheviot sheep. This triggered off, in effect, Scotland's 'green' or rather 'white revolution', for the Cheviot could survive out of doors even during the extremely cold winters which prevail in the Scottish Highlands.

The lairds, most of whom lived in London, and who, rather like the members of Third World elites today, had little in common with the communities they originally sprang from, were told that their income could be increased four or five fold by allowing Cheviot sheep to be reared on their lands. There was, of course, one small problem - their lands were occupied by crofters - traditional cultivators engaged in subsistence agriculture, who paid the lairds a small rent for the privilege of doing so.

It was, of course, easy to show that crofting was 'uneconomic', and hence that it was in the 'national interest' that the crofters should be replaced by the Cheviot sheep. Indeed, on the basis of all the laws of modem economics, the crofters had to go, just as their equivalents throughout the Third World today must also be sacrificed.

Fortunately for them, or at least for those who survived the journey, there was a vast relatively 'empty' continent on the other side of the Atlantic to which they could be consigned, but the tribesmen and peasants who are evicted, in very similar circumstances throughout the Third World today, are less fortunate. There are no more 'empty' continents to consign them to and, in the ever more over-populated tropics, once subsistence farmers are displaced, they are literally condemned to impoverishment and famine.

Many are condemned to become landless labourers whose plight is difficult for people in the industrial world to imagine. They are usually grossly underpaid, even by Third World standards, and are often employed in an irregular manner and have no means of sustenance when their services are not required. As Susan George puts it,

"To predict levels of hunger and malnutrition in any country, one. need look only at the degree of land concentration, the circumstances of tenancy, and the proportion of landless labourers. The more unequal the holdings, the more insecure the tenancies, the higher the proportion of landless people, the greater the incidence of hunger will be." [George, 1981]

The fate of most landless labourers in the Third World is probably to end up in the city slums. Baker points out how in Colombia

"half the population now lives in the capital city often in the most degrading conditions, whilst large areas of the countryside are given over to livestock, fruits or even flowers."

In these circumstances, he writes, "Soil erosion and urban crime ... are related phenomena with the same underlying cause". [Baker, 1984] The numbers of people displaced increase of course as agricultural techniques are modernised, since the more 'advanced' the technology, the fewer the numbers of workers needed and the greater the size of the farming unit required to make economic use of it.

In the USA, where the technology used is the most 'advanced', it has been estimated that whereas in 1969, a farmer needed a minimum of a thousand acres to take advantage of modern equipment and technology, by 1976 with the further modernisation of agricultural techniques he required "at least 3,000 acres of wheat or a thousand acres of corn to afford a tractor". (Solkoff, 1985). Not surprisingly 985,000 corn farmers in the US have been pushed off the land since 1969. The very idea of introducing into the tropical countries of the Third World, American type mechanised farming, is preposterous. As Susan George notes,

"The North American system grew up under unique historical conditions which included a vast frontier and relatively few people to farm it. Consequently, the whole thrust of this agriculture has always been to obtain the greatest possible yields per person, not per unit of land. Conditions in most developing countries are exactly the opposite: they have relatively small amounts of arable land per person and vast numbers of rural people who need employment. What could be less 'modem' - if eliminating hunger is the goal -. then to model development or a system expressly designed to substitute fossil fuel and industrial products for work done by people? No wonder Third World rural unemployment is on the rise." [George, 1981]

What, one might ask the FAO, or the World Bank for that matter, is to be done with such an incredible mass of redundant and destitute humanity? I doubt if any of those who promote the modernisation and hence the mechanisation of agriculture in the Third World have even bothered to ask themselves that question.

Yet the question is not a purely academic one. Indeed, the development of farms that would be regarded as massive even in the USA, has already occurred in Africa. Thus Zambia embarked in 1981 on a 10 year national food production programme costing something like $500 million. It involved establishing 18 mechanised state farms of about 20,000 hectares each. Needless to say this totally irresponsible programme has been backed by bilateral aid and international organisations. [Hines & Dinham, 1984]

But even if the capital inputs were provided free what good would they do? Tractors do not produce food: they only save labour and that is of no account in the Third World today. Nor do herbicides produce food. They simply save weeding time which again is of no account in the Third World. All those who have studied traditional agriculture know full well that the most sophisticated agricultural practices are possible without the aid of any machinery or chemical inputs.

What is required is the traditional know-how, which, in a traditional society, is transmitted from father toson, a lot of co-operation between members of the family and the local community, and a lot of what Fritz Schumacher called 'TLC' (tender loving care) which traditional peoples were capable of bestowing on their agricultural activities in a way that the modern mechanised farm manager or labourer will never be capable of.

The US Department of Agriculture (1980) produced a report which established that organic agriculture was a perfectly viable option for the US - a report which needless to say has now been duly shelved. This is even truer for tropical countries, where soils require organic matter to maintain their structure and prevent erosion by wind and water.

Chemification of agriculture

The miracle strains developed in the Green Revolution have permitted increases in India of 50 percent in wheat yields and 25 percent in rice yields, while the consumption of fertilisers according to Banerjee and Kothari (1985) has since their introduction increased from 212,000 tonnes in 1960-61 to 4,263,000 tonnes in 1982-83, a more than 20 times increase in two decades.

In spite of this poor performance of the chemical inputs, the Development Industry, and in particular the FAO with its huge budget and staff of 2,500 people that includes hundreds of experts one very aspect of food production, is totally committed to the use of chemical intensive agriculture into the tropics.

The story of how the agro-chemical industry came to colonise FAO is told by Chapin and Wasserstrom (1983). In the 1960s, concern grew about the effects of DDT and other pesticides. The agro-chemical industry was worried. It decided to form a lobbying organisation called GIFAP(Groupement International des Associations Nationales de Pesticides).

One of the things it did was to persuade the FAO to form a joint bureau called the Industry Cooperative Programme (ICP), in which GIFAP representatives could work hand in hand with FAO technicians. By the early 1970s joint FAO-ICP seminars had been organised in various parts of the Third World to "promote new and better ways of distributing agricultural poisons". [Gerrits, 1983]

At the same time GIFAP was asked by FAO and WHO "to play an active role in agency 'consultations' and other internal meetings". As Chapin and Wasserstrom (1983) note,

"the lobbyists openly dominated several of the sub-committees which were responsible for formulating UN policy on essential matters."

What clearly illustrated the way the agro-chemical industry dominates FAO and WHO, was the fact that neither of the agencies

"felt compelled to include representatives from other international constituencies such as environmental groups, labour unions or farmers' organisations." [Gerrits, 1983]

Among other things, they "took a leading role in organising the World Food Conference" held in Rome in 1975. It was at this meeting that plans for combating the escalating malnutrition and famine in the Third World were drawn up by the international community. Yet, as Chapin and Wasserstrom (1983) make clear, the object of that meeting was not to feed the starving, but to sell them agro-chemicals.

Today, though the ICP no longer has offices in the FAO building in Rome (it has moved to the UNDP), the FAO is still resembling an agency for pushing the selling of agro-chemicals and agricultural machinery. As Gerrits (1983) notes,

"The United States and Federal German representatives are extremely active in FAO organs in their attempts to get as many representatives of their own pesticide industries as possible into the leadership of the FAO pest control programmes.

One can be certain that similar pressures are applied on other UN agencies and on international funding institutions such as the World Bank to adopt policies that favour petty economic interests regardless of their consequences to the people or to their natural environment.

Increasing yields, malnutrition and destruction

According to government claims, India has increased food production from around 60 million tonnes in 1950-51 to 150-200 million tonnes in 1983-84. However as Banerjee and Kothari (1985) note,

"a closer look reveals a reality of chronic undernourishment of a growing number of people with a declining amount of food at their disposal."

The reason is that

"food resources such as forest foods, food crops, fish, milk as well as fuel to with, are being systematically diverted from the rural areas, where the bulk of a population lives, to the large urban centres or else exported so as to earn foreign exchange with which to finance further development which must inevitably lead to the further food resources from where they are most required".

As Lappe and Collins (1977) state, "The process of creating more food reduced peoples' ability to grow or produce food". Susan George (1976), argues that "the Green Revolution has been a flagrant example of a 'development solution that has brought nothing but misery to the poor". The reason is clear. Agricultural production, as already noted, can of course be increased, but the produce has been exported rather than consumed at home.

Human activities within a traditional society are under social and which means that they are highly co-ordinated and contribute to the goal; the maintenance of its long-term stable relationship with its and hence its survival. Development and modernisation involve freeing our activities from ecological and social constraints so that they may satisfy short-term political and economic requirements.

What is particularly depressing is that CDI particular modern economics only serves to rationalise our pre-occupation with the short-term. Thus our activities are judged to be 'economic' and the extent that they maximise short-term financial returns; the have in the long-term, by virtue of the social and ecological cause, is not even regarded as relevant. Indeed, to develop a resource is above all to cash it in.

In the case of New Zealand the first thing Europeans did when develop (that is, cash in) the whales that abounded off the coast. When there were none left they cashed in the seals. When these had been annihilated they cashed in the Kauri trees. There were originally three million acres of those massive trees many of which were thousands of years old, but within a few decades, only a few thousand acres of them were left (Trussell, 1982).

They then found that Kauris produced a valuable gum which could be found in the soil in which they profusely grew. The soil was everywhere dug up and the gum cashed in. Most of the remaining forest of the two islands were then burnt down, to accommodate an eventual 70 million sheep.The process of cashing in the soil had now begun and much fertile land in hilly areas became seriously eroded.

It was then found that the seas around the islands of New Zealand teemed with fish. This resource too had to be 'developed'. In 1963 the Marlborough scallop beds began to be cashed in. Catches went up to 9,000 tonnes a year around 1976. By 1982 they were down to zero. Then it was the turn of the crayfish in the nearby Chatham Islands. Catches went up from zero in 1964 to 6,000 tonnes in 1969. They are now down to practically zero again, and so it has been for most other commercial fish species in New Zealand. [Struik, 1982]

Today, the last relics of New Zealand's unique forests are still being cashed in, even though the bulk of the population is in favour of preserving them. What is more, we are witnessing the same pattern of resource development throughout the developing world. Borgstrom in his book The Hungry Planet shows how the coffee planters have destroyed the soils of Brazil. He writes:

"The almost predatory exploitations by the coffee planters have ruined a considerable proportion ol Brazil's soils. In many areas, these abandoned coffee landsare so ruined that they can hardly ever be restored to crop production. Inothers, a varying portion of the topsoil has been removed, or the humus content al the soil has been seriously reduced. In most regions, a mere one-tenth now remains of the amount of humus present when coffee cultivation was started. Therefore the coffee plantations have always been on the march, grabbing new lands and leaving behind eroded or impoverished soils." [Borgstrom, 1967]

The same can be said of groundnut plantations in French West Africa. Indeed it has been estimated, Franke and Chasin write, that:

"after only two successive years of peanut growing, there is a loss of 30 percent of the soil's organic matter and 60 percent of the colloidal humus. In two successive years of peanut planting, the second year's yield will be from 20 to 40 percent lower than the first." [Franke & Chasm, 1981]

The same can be said too of the cultivation of many of the other export crops grown in the tropics such as sugar cane, cotton and tobacco. Even more so the live-stock rearing schemes which take little time to destroy the highly vulnerable soils of the dry tropics.

Not surprisingly this environmental degradation must inevitably have an effect on agricultural production. Thus in spite of all the efforts made to maximise agricultural production in Africa, yields are now beginning to fall over a wide area, in particular in Algeria, Nigeria, Zaire, Mozambique, Zambia, Sudan and Tanzania where they were actually lower in 1980-82 than they were in 1970-72, in the last named country, according to Brown (1985) by as much as 27 percent.

Imports

A further, closely related reason why development, and in particular the IMF-World Bank road to it can only further impoverish the people of the Third World, is that it involves increasing their consumption of manufactured goods, in particular those imported from the industrial world. But, in the traditional Indian village, a farmer obtained his pots from the village potter, his tools from the village blacksmith, and would give them an amount of food in exchange, which had been established by tradition. Those imbued with the values of modern economics would object that such a system provided no inducement to producers to increase production, or indeed, improve the quality of their produce. In addition, such a system, they would argue, curtailed the freedom of the consumer to acquire products from other areas that might be in someway superior.

Such objections, however, miss the point. The trading relations between the different members of a traditional Indian village were not specifically designed to satisfy what we would regard as 'economic' goals. They were, as already stated, under social control, which means that their primary goal was the very much more important one of maintaining the structure and cohesion of the community and hence, among other things, the incredible social capital that it provides to the individual member. Mahatma Gandhi understood this well. One of the basic concepts of his philosophy was that of Swadeshi. To practise Swadeshi meant to maintain traditional trading relations with the members of one's village.

Economic development, of course, totally undermines the practice of Swadeshi since it is based on the very principles that all considerations, whether social or ecological, must be ruthlessly subordinated to short-term economics. The village community is, in fact, sacrificed to the overriding ideal of churning out ever greater quantities of bigger and better pots, and of influencing villages by every possible means, to increase their consumption of pots. Pots simply proliferate like cancerous cells.

Massive imports must also lead to environmental devastation becauseof the intensive methods of cultivation that are required to earn the money needed to pay for the imports. This in essence is what has happened as a result of the increasing pressure to which Third World countries are subjected by the IMF, the World Bank and other such institutions to maximise their imports and to refrain from indulging in uneconomic 'import substitution' which is taken to violate the key economic principle of 'comparative advantage'.

One major import category is armaments. From 1972 to 1982, according to Jacobsen (1985), military spending by developing countries rose to more than $165 billion. Egypt is apparently incurring debts of $800 million a year just to pay interest on this 'military debt'. The Argentine spends 61 percent of its export earnings for the same purpose. Military expenditure in Africa has now reached $16 billion a year, much of which must be paid for out of foreign exchange made from the sale of cash crops that use up land and resources which are essential for feeding already starving populations.

Population

Another reason why development cannot help combat malnutrition and famine is that it must inevitably give rise to population growth. The experience has been the same everywhere. As soon as a traditional society embarks on the path of economic development, its population simply explodes. It happened in Britain where the population was under 8 million when the industrial revolution began and where. it increased by more than 7 times before it eventually stabilised. It is happening to-day wherever economic development occurs throughout the Third World.

The populations of traditional societies, we tend to forget, were stable for centuries, if not millennia. They had to be, in order to preserve their social structure and their physical environment. The reasons for population stability were clear. To begin with they exploited all sorts of strategies that were built into their cultural patterns - such as taboos against sexual activity during lactation, and during the first years of widowhood, the prohibition against widow remarriage among certain casts in India, and many more, including abortion.

As a society's social structure and cultural pattern are destroyed by development such population control strategies are no longer operative which means that the population in question is now out of control. Needless to say that the adoption of 'hardware solutions' to the population problem is very convenient to the development industry. If it was really adopted it would unquestionably stimulate considerable economic activity.

Indeed, according to Brown (1985), the World Bank estimates that to achieve "a rapid fertility decline 'goal' in Sub-Saharan Africa would mean increasing the amount of money spent on 'family planning' by 20 times - by the end of the century". Think of the massive increase in the export of pills, condoms, IUCs and other forms of anti-birth gadgetry.

Interestingly enough, one of the official explanations of the population explosions is that, with development, food production increases, which means that more food is available to the local population which, in a true Malthusian manner, can be counted upon to breed up to the available food supplies. The opposite, however, seems to be true.

Let us look to the case of Ireland. During the 18th and early 19th centuries, the population exploded from 2 to 8 million. During that same period much of the arable land was taken away from the peasants by the big estates. That is why the peasants had to rely on the potato, the only crop that could feed a family from the small area of degraded land that remained at its disposal. During the course of the 19th century, an increasing proportion of food production was exported to England, and the exports were in no way reduced during the famine which killed something like 2 million people and forced another 2 million to seek refuge overseas.

The truth seems to be that, in an atomised society at least, the population explodes, not because it has more food to eat as conventional wisdom tells us, but because, on the contrary, it has less food to eat.

Of course we are assured that development will provide people with a new form of security, one provided by membership of the growing formal economy. As people become more secure, we are told, they will then have fewer children, as has happened in the West. What the development industry does not tell us however is that it is economic development that created the insecurity in the first place.

That the 'demographic transition' will occur in the Third World is in any case a pure act of faith. To begin with we are not at all sure why the population rate has fallen in the West. Is it in fact increased security, or are other factors implicated such as the fear of the future which looks ever grimmer or even the serious pollution of human spermatozoa, that has radically reduced the sperm count of young males in the western world and made a considerable proportion of them 'functionally sterile'?

Anyhow, the economy of Third World countries is not expanding fast enough to absorb the growing hordes of unemployed in the cities and is never likely to, hence the security that participation in the formal economy could provide is available to an even smaller proportion of the population. The Third World can never conceivably attain the level of material prosperity we know at present in the West and which has indeed been associated however superficially with a reduction in fertility.

What is certain is that this 'demographic transition' is not occurring in the Third World today. If the rate of population growth has fallen very slightly in the dry tropics today, it is probably because of an increased death rate from famine, malnutrition and the diseases to which underfed people are particularly vulnerable. It is only by such a crude mechanism that development can help control the population explosion that it has itself brought about.

Development - a dead end

To pretend that the Third World can become developed like the West is both callous and cynical, as Ehrlich comments,

"It is perfectly clear that development of the underdeveloped countries into industrialised countries modelled on today's overdeveloped countries is impossible." [Ehrlich & Harriman, 1971]

One can draw up a veritable catalogue of reasons why this must be so. Let us consider but a few.

1. The historical experience shows that practically all the industrial countries of today have financed their industry with funds obtained from agriculture. It is no coincidence that Britain's Industrial Revolution was preceded, in the 18th century, by an agricultural revolution which vastly increased food production.

   Unfortunately, however, such a surplus cannot be achieved in the tropics today. The important reason for this is that ecological and climatic conditions in the tropics would never permit the achievement of the required surplus.

   To begin with, rainfall patterns do not favour it, nor do the soils which are usually thin and low in organic content and thus very vulnerable to erosion by wind and water. [Biswas, 1979] Climatic conditions also favour thriving pest populations which are often almost impossible to control. [Wood, 1976] Livestock too is afflicted by a wide variety of internal parasites which seriously reduce yields, which are typically as much as four time slower than in temperate areas. [Biswas, 1979]

   Partly because of the long hot nights, net photosynthesis (photosynthesis minus respiration) is much lower than in temperate areas. [Gates, 1971] It means, as Chang points out, that

   "environmental constraints make it impossible for the tropics to compete economically with the temperate zone, and this goes a long way towards explaining why all the developed nations lie outside the tropics." [Chang, 1977]

   What makes matters worse, is that conditions in the tropics are becoming still less favourable for sustained agricultural production:

   • rainfall patterns are changing, and for the worse, in part because of global deforestation and the chemical contamination of the atmosphere;
   • massive deforestation is leading to the drying up of streams and springs, while aquifers are depleted through over-exploitation;
   • erosion, desertification, water-logging and the salinisation of once fertile land are further reducing the ability of Third World countries to feed themselves, let alone achieve the agricultural surplus required to finance their economic development;
   • even where there is a surplus - for example, sugar or palm-oil - the market has collapsed. [Gott, 1985]

   The IMF admits that these trends are likely to continue with regard to most of the crops and indeed for most raw materials exported from the Third World. Many experts consider that these trends are not of a cyclical nature but are the results of structural changes that must permanently reduce the world market price of many food crops and, even more so of raw materials.

   In the words of Drucker (1986) "the primary products economy has come uncoupled from the industrial economy". This is one of the major changes to haye occurred in the world economy in the last decade.

2. Trainer (1985) notes that if Third World countries were to develop to that point at which their level of consumption was similar to that of Western countries, the impact of their activities on the environment would be 10 to 14 times greater. Indeed, to develop a country means, amongst other things, to increase its consumption of material goods. To pay for this means increasing production which in the Third World, largely means production from the land. As a result, the land is already being progressively eroded and desertified, a process that can only be reversed by reducing rather than increasing this impact. This means that in order to combat desertification and other forms of environmental degradation and hence to ensure the survival of Third World people, their consumption of material goods must decrease, not increase.

   Even if the world's environment, by some astonishing miracle, were capable of supporting this increased impact, where would all the resources required for such development come from? Trainer (1985) calculates that if the world population by the year 2050 which is officially (though unrealistically) estimated to be 10-11 billion people, were to use as much energy as the average Australian does today, then:

   "world energy consumption would be ten times what it is, and at that rate recoverable resources of consumable fuels would be exhausted in 20 years. While 10 of the basic 24 minerals items ... would be exhausted in about 35 years time."

3. Efforts to develop Third World countries have so far failed, as we have all seen, in spite of the incredible sums of money invested in development. Why should they prove more successful today, in conditions that are incomparably less propitious? If the conventional growth-maximising approach to development could not do the trick for the Third World in the boom years 1950-1970, what are we to expect from here on when no one believes similar conditions will return for many years, if at all?

   What is more, Third World governments still have to pay for the unsuccessful development methods of the last decades. Even if they never actually repay the capital they have borrowed for this purpose, they must in order to obtain further loans which they badly require for financing further development, continue to pay the annual interests on these loans. Yet interest payments already absorb anything up to 80 percent of their foreign earnings, which means that there is practically no surplus left to finance further development.

   Significantly, no solution has been found to this problem. All that is being done is to put off the repayment of interest whenever a serious crisis occurs. But what good will this do in the long run? Why should countries who cannot meet their interest payments today be able to do so in the future? On the contrary, since most of their foreign earnings are derived from selling the produce of the soil and the soil is everywhere deteriorating to the point where yields are beginning to fall, it is only realistic to expect reduced not increased foreign exchange earnings with the consequent reduction in their ability to pay interests on loans.

4. The financial position of Third World countries is worsening for other reasons. At the same time political instability in the Third World leads businessmen and companies, both local and foreign, to transfer their profits to the safe haven that is the USA and Europe. Trainer (1985) considers that:

   "at least $35 billion passes every year from the South to the rich North through the adverse terms of trade, repatriation of profits... the brain drain, and interest payments. This is two and a half times what the West spends on aid."

   Tinbergen (1976) considers when all factors are taken into account, $50-100 billion flow from the Third World to the rich every year.

5. There is a further factor which our economists do not appear to have even considered. One of the reasons why Western countries have been able to develop is that they obtained access to captive Third World markets and to cheap labour and raw materials from the Third World. Would they have been able to develop otherwise? It is extremely unlikely. This is one of the reasons why Mahatma Gandhi (1925) considered that India could never industrialise. He wrote,

   "to make India like England and America, is to find some other races and places of the earth for exploitation. So far it appears that the Western rations have divided all the known races outside Europe for exploitation and that there are no new worlds to discover."

   Harle (1978) makes the same point. In general, he writes:

   "it has been found that the two separate worlds (the industrial and non-industrial worlds) are just different sides of the same coin. One side is on the top largely because the other side is on the bottom."

Conclusion

There are many other reasons why the so-called developing countries could never become developed. There is no place to consider them here. The important point is that the Third World is being literally pillaged, forests annihilated, soils eroded, salinised, desertified, rivers dammed and polluted with industrial and agricultural chemicals, ground water reserves depleted and contaminated, societies destroyed and their inhabitants transformed into landless labourers and slum dwellers.

What is more, all this is being done in the name; of 'development' - a goal, whose desirability has never been established and which in any case, can never conceivably be achieved, but which unfortunately satisfies the squalid short-term interests of the politicians, industrialists, businessmen, bankers and bureaucrats that make up the development industry.

References

The Foundation for Eco-development

The Foundation for Eco-development (Stichfing Mondiaal Alternatief / SMA) was founded by Ernst Bartels and Fanny Rosenzweig in 1972. It promotes the worldwide social and ecological need for a conservation strategy for the entire biosphere, and publishes the periodical Ecoscript. It is not linked with any political or religious organization.

Website: www.mondiaalalternatief.nl/home.htm