GANDHI WITH SATELLITES
Samir Amin, director of the Institute of African Economic Development and Planning, sums up, many of these views, saying that labor- intensive techniques have suddenly been rendered attractive, “thanks to a medley of hippie ideology, return to the myth of the golden age and the noble savage, and criticism of the reality of the capitalist world.”
Worse yet, the First Wave formula dangerously de-emphasizes the role of advanced science and technology. Many of the technologies now being promoted as “appropriate” are even more primitive than those available to the American farmer of 1776—closer by far to the sickle than to the harvester. When American and European farmers began to employ more “appropriate technology” 150 years ago, when they shifted from wooden to steel harrow teeth or to the iron plow, they did not turn their back on the world’s accumulated knowledge of engineering and metallurgy—they seized it.
At the Paris Exposition of 1855, according to a contemporary account, newly-invented threshing machines were dramatically demonstrated. “Six men were set to threshing with flails at the same moment that the different machines commenced operations, and the following were the results of an hour’s work:
“Six threshers with flails………….. 36 liters of wheat
Belgian threshing machine ‘……… 150 liters of wheat
French threshing machine……… 250 liters of wheat
English threshing machine……… 410 liters of wheat
American threshing machine…….. 740 liters of wheat”
Only those who have never spent years at grueling manual labor can lightly brush aside machinery that, as early as 1855, could thresh grain 123 times faster than a man.
Much of what we now call “advanced science” was developed by scientists in rich countries to solve the problems of the rich countries. Precious little research has been addressed to the everyday problems of the world’s poor. Nonetheless, any “development policy” that begins by blinding itself to the potentials of advanced scientific and technological knowledge condemns hundreds of millions of desperate, hungry, toiling peasants to perpetual degradation.
In some places, and at certain times, the First Wave strategy can improve life for large numbers of people. Yet there is painfully little evidence to show that any sizable country can ever produce enough, using premechanized First Wave methods, to invest in change. Indeed, a mass of evidence suggests the exact opposite.
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