Just out... "We mined our way to growth," UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. "We burned our way to prosperity. We believed in consumption without consequences. Those days are gone. In the 21st century, supplies are running short and the global thermostat is running high. ... It is easy to mouth the words 'sustainable development,' but to make it happen we have to be prepared to make major changes - in our lifestyles, our economic models, our social organization, and our political life,"Here is the full press release. Ban has some other great quotes in there, I just hope he actually gets heard.
Back to SIB - After, doing a fairly good job of explaining the deficiencies of our current economic systems and how those aspects are passed on to our development methodology Schumacher launches into his proposal. It hinges on two aspects; intermediate technology and rural development.
Schumacher uses an example to define intermediate technology which developed into Practical Action which Jordan has mentioned before. If a symbolic technology costs $1 in the developing world it may cost $1000 in the developed world. (Think hoe vs tractor which has an even greater disparity.) Schumacher agrees that the $1 technology holds back the user and needs to be improved on but he is adamant that the $1000 technology simply represents a leap far to large not only economically but educationally and from an socio-economic perspective. The development of a $100 technology would not only be much more achievable for the target economy but also more sustainable. He argues that much more effort needs to be put into developing those $100 technologies; most of the world's effort goes into developing $1000 technology for the developed world.
His second point which he makes in a chapter called "Two Million Villages" is that this intermediate technology will enable a sustainable rural population. (He views urbanization as a self perpetuating sickness. Zero jobs rurally means people move to the city for the slightest chance of employment which means that more resources are focused on urban centers and the rural setting becomes even more of an nonviable lifestyle.) The intermediate technology will keep many rural people employed. (He strongly opposes $1000 technology because, while it may be much more efficient in terms of output per person, it keeps very few people actually employed and therefore harms the economy even further. Sorry for all the parentheses!)
So for most of his points he's preaching to the choir but here I'm not so sure. I've seen some very intermediate technology that is still inappropriate for the end user, maybe the education was still lacking but I'm not sure. As well, I'm not so sure that more effort developing an intermediate technology is needed. IMHO, India and China are superb sources of intermediate technology (I'm thinking of the ubiquitous black mamba bike as one example) and they will identify intermediate technology and create the device and market if it is an option.
I think he hits the nail on the head with his "proofs" that development work should concentrate on providing employment. Schumacher stresses this point from a number of angles and in my opinion that should be a fundamental question that provides a backdrop to any development work. How much employment, what kind, how long, etc. Instead we think about just the results (clean water, electricity, child health and infant mortality, etc). Any comments on development efforts that are very specifically about providing meaningful and sustainable employment?
Kurtis (in Waterloo)
Kurt - great post. I have a few comments:
ReplyDelete1. It's great that Mr. Ban Ki Moon and the UN come out with such enlightened statements (and some great Human Development Reports), but they can't direct global development policy. No one listens and it's impossible to push anything through the UN with any kind of teeth intact on the other side. Death by compromise. So keep, talking Ban, but nobody's listening. Sad.
2. With regard to intermediate technology or intermediate industrialization, I wonder how different the situation was in the 70s? I don't feel like there is such an infatuation with high-tech industrialization as there seemed to be in Schumacher's day. I want to understand the concept better, because I think it sounds great. I really like Schumacher's comment that people in his day seemed to belief that industrialization emerged, fully (and perfectly) formed in 1970.
3. With regard to employment and development. I think this is really an important point in Small is Beautiful, but I feel like I'm not informed enough to critique Schumacher's ideas. Employment or creating employment is not as straightforward as he seems to think, but I agree that employment is crucial and his quote from Thomas Acquine, to the extent that all humans have a need for work that uses hands and head, really resonates with me.
Yeah, I'm not quite sure how to respond to the technology question.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to use the hoe vs tractor example you gave.
After living a year in Rural Kenya (last year), I noticed how inefficient it was for a family, who depended on farming for half of their income, to do so much traveling.
The Mama would walk anywhere between 10 minutes, to 1 hour to small farm maybe twice as big as the ground floor of a normal North American House.
This is a problem on a few levels, not just technologically, but also socially, etc. (am I getting off topic?)
Anyway, so Tractors wouldn't work in this situation. But hoes are definitly not a solution either. In my North American Mindset, the only solution I can see is having people move to the city, and sell their land to someone who can afford to do "north american" farming.
And you see some places where "north american farming" works in Kenya. If you travel further from Nairobi there are many massive farms, where one has to, and does, use a tractor.
I guess a good example of intermediate technologies on this scale could be drip irrigation though. Small set ups for small farms so that a small scale farmer can increase their productivity without using complicated tech.
The issue in many cases is Westerners can't possibly conceive of a solution other then THEIR solution.
So I think that the only solution is Education: teaching the people to think for themselves, to develop their OWN solutions...
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ReplyDeleteThanks for these thoughts! I think Schumacher would pick up on a couple of points:
ReplyDelete- inefficient: you mention this with regard to travel time and later imply the tractors inherent efficiency. Notice that these efficiencies are ranked in terms of yield per person work. So the more output with the least work is the best. To the extreme, 1 person feeding all of Kenya would be the ideal case.
Schumacher ranks efficiency in terms of number of people gainfully employed. I think he would say that as long as people get a fair wage for their work then that should be good. It is our economically based efficiency that drives tractors to the fields and crop prices down and farmers out of business and people to the city. (In his opinion this last result is one of the greatest evils of our time.)
But it is a case of tragedy of the commons. The fact remains that people need an income and can't compete against the crop prices that corporate farms drive so they sell off and go to the city. But therein lies the irony. Its long known that bigger farms simply do not take care of the land as much as smaller farms. In other words, smaller farms use the land MORE efficiently because the land can be used longer with fewer inputs. (Sorry no links for this last point.) Cheers!
That's true... I disregarded employment in my comment...
ReplyDeleteI guess I feel like Kenya has a lot of infrastructure, and could fill up all the unemployed and then some with a bit of creativity, but that's another topic.
On your comment about smaller farms used longer... are you talking about crop rotation?