GANDHI WITH SATELLITES
Almost overnight many governments and “development agencies,” including the World Bank, the Agency for International Development, and the Overseas Development Council, switched to what can only be called a First Wave strategy.
This formula is almost a carbon copy reverse of the Second Wave strategy: Instead of squeezing the peasants and forcing them into the overburdened cities, it calls for a new emphasis on rural development. Instead of concentrating on cash crops for export, it urges food self- sufficiency. Instead of striving blindly for higher GNP in the hopes that benefits will trickle down to the poor, it calls for resources to be channeled directly into “basic human needs.”
Instead of pushing for labor-saving technologies, the new approach stresses labor-intensive production with low capital, energy, and skill requirements. Instead of building giant steel mills or large-scale urban factories, it favors decentralized, small-scale facilities designed for the village.
Turning Second Wave arguments upside down, the advocates of the First Wave strategy were able to show that many industrial technologies were a disaster when transferred to a poor country. Machines broke down and went unrepaired. They needed high-cost, often imported raw materials. Trained labor was in short supply.Hence, the new argument ran, what was needed were “appropriate technologies.” Sometimes called “intermediate,” “soft,” or “alternative,” these would lie, as it were, “between the sickle and the combine harvester.”
Centers for the development of such technologies soon sprang up all over the United States and Europe—the Intermediate Technology Development Group founded in 1965 in Britain serving as an early model. But the developing countries, too, created such centers and began pouring out low-scale technological innovations.
The Mochudi Farmers Brigade in Botswana, for example, has developed an ox- or donkey-drawn device that can be used for plowing, planting, and spreading fertilizer in single or double row cultivation. The Department of Agriculture in Gambia has adopted a Senegalese tool-frame which can be used with a single moldboard plow, a groundnut lifter, a seeder, and a ridger. In Ghana work is going forward on a pedal-driven rice thresher, a screw press for spent brewer’s grain, and an all-wood squeezer to extract water from banana fiber.
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