Development and social destruction

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 to son, 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 of Brazil’s soils. In many areas, these abandoned coffee lands are so ruined that they can hardly ever be restored to crop production. In others, 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 some way 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 because of 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.