THE THIRD WAVE
The First Wave strategy has been applied on a much broader basis as well. Thus hi 1978 the new government of India, still reeling from oil and fertilizer price hikes and from disappointment with the Second Wave strategies followed by Nehru and Indira Gandhi, actually banned further expansion of its mechanized textile industry and urged increased production of fabrics on handlooms instead of power looms. The intent was not merely to increase employment but to retard urbanization by favoring rural cottage industry.
There is much about this new formula that admittedly makes excellent sense. It confronts the need to slow down the massive migration to the cities. It aims to make the villages—where the bulk of the world’s poor dwell—more livable. It is sensitive to ecological factors. It stresses the use of cheap local resources rather than expensive imports. It challenges conventional, all-too-narrow definitions of “efficiency.” It suggests a less technocratic approach to development, taking local custom and culture into account. It emphasizes improving the conditions of the poor rather than passing capital through the hands of the rich in the hopes that some will trickle down.
Yet after all due credit is given, the First Wave formula remains just that—a strategy for ameliorating the worst of First Wave conditions without ever transforming them. It is a Band-Aid, not a cure, and it is perceived in exactly these terms by many governments around the world.
Indonesian President Suharto expressed a widely held view when he charged that such a strategy “may be the new form of imperialism. If the West contributes only to small-scale grassroots projects, our plight may be alleviated somewhat but we will never grow.”
The sudden love affair with labor-intensivity is also subject to the charge that it is self-serving for the rich. The longer the poor countries remain under First Wave conditions, the fewer competitive goods they are likely to shove onto an overloaded world market. The longer they stay down on the farm, so to speak, the less oil, gas, and other scarce resources they will siphon off, and the weaker and less troublesome they will remain politically.
There is also, built deep into the First Wave stragegy, a paternalistic assumption that while other factors of production need to be economized, the time and energy of the laborer needn’t be—that unrelieved backbreaking toil in the fields or rice paddies is fine—so long as it is done by somebody else.
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