CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION:

Poles Apart:

Compassion means justice … The person who understands what I say about justice understands everything I have to say’ (Meister Eckhart cited in Fox 1983:286).

Marriage is defined [Becker 1976] as an arrangement to secure the mutual benefit of exchange between two agents of different endowments. Essentially, two people marry because they expect to raise their levels of utility by doing so. … These household commodities include the quality of meals, the quality and quantity of children, prestige, recreation, companionship, love, and health status. … Love can be considered to be a ‘non-marketable household commodity’ (Hamilton 1994:23-24).

These two quotes epitomise the two major ideological and epistemological stances apparent in the world today. The first could be the credo of Max Weber’s Wertrational man, and the second the parallel statement of the Zweckrational one. Wertrationality is defined as substantive rationality - interested primarily in the value of ends, and zweckrationality as formal rationality - interested primarily in the calculability of means and procedures (Brubaker 1984:36). The first is process, the second is form.

The body of work to be studied in this thesis is essentially wertrational, and sits well with Polanyi’s separation of formal and substantive economics. Polanyi maintains that only a substantive approach will effectively analyse non-Western economies, as formal economics of the Western style is culturally bound, and cannot be applied to the entirely different set of cultural conditions found in Third World societies (Prattis 1987:16).

However, there are dangers in taking too essentialist a stance in light of the degree of interpenetration of the Western and non-Western economies in a global world; they can no longer be seen, if ever they could, as discrete and differentiated cultural models.

There is the continual danger of conceiving of the encounter as consisting of two discrete worlds facing each other rather than of social worlds that are part of each other yet constituted differently. This conceptualisation can result in forms of reactivism whereby the West’s distortion of the Third World or of the Orient are countered by distorted images of the West or by nativistic stereotypes. In such an encounter closed systems, conceptualised as holistic cultures, face each other as uncompromising totalities [Tucker 1999:16].

In the issue under discussion in this thesis we are not looking merely at two different viewpoints, but rather at two antagonistic epistemological paradigms. Different viewpoints on ‘development’ have been around for many years, particularly the various Marxist as opposed to Capitalist approaches, but both ideologies accepted the basic developmental paradigm whilst looking for different ways of achieving it (e.g., Braverman 1974:15-16, Tucker 1999:12). But the debate now is about the very concept of development itself.

Theorists within the epistemology of science have long pointed out that ‘competing paradigms are incommensurable.’ Each side will use different meanings for the same term (‘development’ is one such term which will demonstrate this point dramatically in the discussion that follows), and both see the world with different eyes and from different contexts (Rouse 1987:29). Writers on both sides of the development divide underrate the complexity of the opposing argument and ignore both the inconsistencies within their own approach and the fluidity and possibilities for change within the other (Pieterse 2000:183). They also tend to ignore the overlap between the two approaches.

Positions and counter positions in the development field often appear as simplistic dichotomies: modernity versus tradition, science versus indigenous knowledge, the impersonal versus the personal, the global versus the local. Critiques of development modernism also often take the form of dualisms which in effect replicate the thinking of modernism. Does it make sense to subject modernity to the same simplistic treatment to which the project of modernity has subjected social life? (Sardar 1999:73)

Others find a more holistic approach to be productive, seeing good and bad points to both stances, and seeking a positive dialectic between them. Nevertheless, I believe that even using the most scrupulous of holistic approaches, each analyst will ultimately come down firmly on one side or other of the epistemological (dare I say, characterological) divide, however willing they may be to recognise weaknesses in their own argument and strengths in the opposing one, or the interconnections between the two worlds. 

Three major terms will need to be adequately defined; ‘development’, ‘globalisation’, and ‘subsistence perspective’. In broad terms the first two can be conflated, and the dichotomy between this development/globalisation concept and the subsistence perspective is the primary issue to be explored in this thesis. However, there are confusions and subtleties in their meanings which both further separate them from one another, and in other senses bring them together. In the process of finding these definitions the epistemological split will be clearly delineated, which will in turn require a clear delineation of Western and non-Western epistemologies.

Defining the Terms:

Development

The gap between economic development and social and cultural development, or the hard and soft dimensions of development, is reproduced in the institutional division between the Bretton Woods institutions and UN agencies, in which the former hold the purse strings (Pieterse 1999:72).

The term ‘Development’  holds within its meaning a sense of an evolutionary progress from lower to higher. One’s personality ‘develops’ from immaturity to maturity; a symphonic piece ‘develops’ a theme from simplicity to complexity; a society ‘develops’ from ‘traditional’ to ‘modern’ (themselves problematic terms) political and economic structures. In Development Theory, indeed, a nation is seen to ‘progress via social and cultural differentiation and increasing adaptation until they reached their inevitable destiny in the ‘complex’ form of the Western industrial nation state’ (Taylor & Turton 1988:10). This belief in progress has become an ideological blinker, almost a Kuhnian paradigmatic ‘field of knowledge [that] defines its own questions, brushing aside as illegitimate other questions, and evidence, which do not fit its assumptions’ (Shanin 1997:69). It is also mirrored in the equally paradigmatic belief in the absolute necessity for continuing economic growth, which is inextricably tied up with dominant definitions of ‘development’ and ‘globalisation’.

It should be noted at this point that the Subsistence Perspective and its Post-Development allies deny the necessity of development at all in an evolutionary sense, so that the term ‘sustainability’ becomes an antonym for development. The Muslim academic Sardar (1997:38), in his discussion of Islamic economics, makes the point most strongly that whichever definition of development one uses, it is inapplicable to non-Western societies: it is simply not the universal concept Western economists believe it to be. This point will be developed later in the thesis, but even among those who accept development as necessary, there are major differences.

And herein lies the definitional problem with the term ‘development’. Even within this evolutionary understanding of development there are distinct ruptures between the holistic sense of development as involving cultural, social, and human as well as economic and political elements, and the specific sense in which the term is usually used in the development discourse - that is, as a self-evident process of ‘economic growth, efficiency, increased production and consumption’. It is this latter definition that seems to dominate ‘development practice, development policy and also development studies’ and which is predicated on neoliberal economic theories (Tucker 1997:3-4). It is, in fact, so dominant a definition that even its opponents appear now to speak of development almost purely from this perspective, reaching for alternative terminology to describe developmental aspects that fall outside of this definition (Pieterse 2000:198). 

Some critics of post-development theory (into which the Subsistence Perspective clearly fits) try to dismiss it by pointing out the degree of human and cultural development which has occurred during the ‘development decades’ (e.g., Corbridge 1998:144), as evidenced by large rises in social indicators. Certainly, in the holistic definition of ‘development’ these are important issues, but the burden of post-development theory is that the dominant definition of ‘development’ no longer contains these as issues, that they have, in fact, become part of what might be termed ‘alternative’ development. I will be studying the Kerala model (and its Cuban parallels) in some detail later in the thesis to demonstrate the point that human social and cultural development occur quite independently of the issues so important in the dominant development paradigm, that is, economic development, industrialisation, and globalized ‘free’ trade.

The subsistence perspectives tend to originate within the feminist and Indian academic traditions, but in recent years Islamic economists have paralleled many of the understandings and critiques of these writers.

The notions that the sole goal of economic activity is to maximise profit, that individual preferences are the most important aspects of human well-being, that individuals should be given total freedom - unhindered by government or by collective value judgements, to pursue their self-interests, and that selfish individual self-interest will unselfishly end up serving the whole community, are central to not just capitalism but also to the discipline of development economics (Sardar 1997:40)

The theory of maximisation says nothing about what is to be maximised (Prattis 1987:14-15); in terms of economies, it is Western society that makes individual profit the important goal. In non-Western societies, as we will see, what is sought to be maximised is community survival and sustenance. Status, being embedded in the outward symbols of success, whatever they may be in a particular society, differs also between societies: in Western societies, one can generalise and suggest that status is found in that very maximisation of economic success, even if some individuals or groups may find other ways; in traditional societies status is more often found in non-economic ways - including one’s ability to maximise community survival and sustenance.

The definition of ‘development’ that emerges, then, from these post-development, subsistence perspective, Islamic, feminist, and alternative development (and even dependency) critiques is the hegemonic Western concept of ‘….economic growth, industrial development and the establishment of complementary social and political institutions designed on the model of the USA’ (Tucker 1999:3).

By this definition, all other definitions of development are seen as resistance to modernisation, development, and global economics. What confuses the issue is the fact that this rupture in meaning, with the term ‘globalisation’ as well as we will see, is mentioned often yet seemingly ignored in practice; the result is often two viewpoints using oppositional definitions of the crucial terms within the debate.

Globalisation

I have suggested above that the terms ‘development’ and ‘globalisation’ have become conflated, at least within this dominant definition of ‘development’. As Tucker (1997:11) puts it, ‘‘Development’ poses as a form of globalized knowledge claiming universal validity over submerged and marginalised forms of knowledge’.

As with ‘development’, ‘globalisation’ has a general meaning which includes cultural and social elements, and a specific one which is primarily economic, and often the two meanings have little in common. When anti-globalisation activists protest, it is not at the availability of world cuisine, or world music, or the intermingling of these and other cultural artefacts through the increased communication and transportation possibilities in today’s global world; they are protesting the very specific economic and political meaning of the term ‘globalisation’ as it is practised (imposed) through the Western economic paradigm and the global organisations that support it (the World Bank, IMF, GATT, Conservation International (CI) and WTO etc.).

In the general sense, ‘globalisation’ is ‘the rapidly developing process of complex interconnections between societies, cultures, institutions and individuals world-wide’, a social process relating to the shrinkage of time, space, and distance (Tomlinson 1997:22-23). In the specific sense used by post-development theorists and anti-globalisation activists (often the same thing), these more benign elements of globalisation are set aside, as with the human-social elements of development. They are praised, perhaps, as ‘real’ globalisation, but omitted from the discussion of ‘globalisation’ (in inverted commas) on the grounds that those ‘in charge’ of globalisation (the aforementioned IMF etc.) are no more interested in these aspects than they are in poverty alleviation or non-economic human development. This an exaggeration, no doubt, but at least partially valid. Again, critics of post-development discourse argue against this often essentialist definition placed on ‘globalisation’ by its opponents, but in a very real sense, they are only playing with words.

It can still be argued that, when all is said and done and all these criticisms met, Western cultural practices and institutions remain firmly in the driving seat of global cultural development. No amount of attention to the processes of cultural reception and translation, no anthropological scruples about the complexities of particular local contexts and no dialectical theorising can argue away the manifest power of Western capitalism, both as a general cultural configuration (the co modification of everyday experience, consumer culture) and as a specific set of global cultural industries (CNN, Times-Warner, News International)’ (Tomlinson 1997:29).

It is the development paradigm and its ideology, as defined in the previous section, which drives economic globalisation processes, and in practical terms, says the post-development critique, economic globalisation and development have far more dramatic day-to-day effect on people’s lives than do the social and cultural elements. And further, they say, this ideology of development and globalisation represents the imposition of ‘the priorities, patterns, and prejudices of the West’ (Shiva 1997:10).

The driving force in this Western ideology, as encompassed in the so-called Washington Consensus, is neoliberalism, which puts the market at the centre of development. Under current market theory, this means, among other things, deregulation of fiscal controls and removal of all trade barriers. Nation-states are ‘encouraged’ to run their national economies in accord with these principles, thus facilitating the emergence of economic globalisation (Geddes 1997a:193-194).

The specific processes by which this is done is Structural Adjustment programs.

Typically, the [IMF] stabilisation package has four parts…:

                1.             Abolition or liberalisation of foreign exchange and import controls.

                2.             Devaluation of the official exchange rate.

                3.             A stringent domestic anti-inflation program consisting of:

                                (a) control of bank credits to raise interest rates and reserve requirements;

                                (b) control of the government deficit through curbs on spending, especially in the areas of social services for the poor and staple food subsidies, along with increases in taxes and in public enterprise prices;

(c) control of wage increases, in particular insuring that such increases are at rates  less than the inflation rate (i.e., abolishing wage indexing); and (d) dismantling of various forms of price controls and promoting freer markets

4.             Greater hospitality to foreign investment and a general opening up of the economy to international commerce.

It is not difficult to see why this package of economic reforms has been met with resistance and, in some quarters, horror. If implemented in an indiscriminate way, the package of economic reforms could create widespread economic hardship and even destitution. Alas, the record of reform has often revealed levels of insensitivity which have now been labelled as unacceptable (Remenyi 1999:82).

One might add that this list bears a remarkable resemblance to what is happening today in the First world economies, a point I will return to when discussing urban subsistence initiatives.

It is this aspect of development/globalisation that drives much of the post-development critique, as it has driven Marxist critique (via dependency theory) for several decades. However, even mainstream analysts are beginning to question the value of this neoliberal package. Nobel Laureate (Economics) Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist for the World Bank and economic advisor to President Clinton, is possibly the most notable of these internal critics.

Professor Stiglitz reports considerable dissension within the World Bank over the draft of the Bank’s 2000 World Development Report. In an approach strongly supported by Stiglitz and the Bank’s President Wolfensohn, Professor Ravi Kanbur (Cornell Economics) based his report around field interviews with the international poor, and was highly critical of the IMF’s efforts to impose punitive measures against Third World nations during the Asian Crisis. Stiglitz himself openly accused the IMF of doing so deliberately to benefit US financial interests at the behest of the US Treasury department, a stance which cost him his job. He also points out that the measures imposed on Third World countries are precisely the opposite of what is done in the US in times of recession, and that these measures seemed deliberately designed to turn recession into depression. He sees a focus on job creation (he is still pro-development) as far better than fiscal severity; poverty alleviation must be a priority (Background Briefing - Radio National 03/03/02 and 7.30 Report ABC Television 14/08/02).

One other aspect of globalisation must be mentioned, and that is the tendency to see globalisation and ‘localisation’ as mutually exclusive and antagonistic, whereas they are more productively seen as mutually dependent and interrelated (Hughes 1997:182).  The modernist perspective seems to reify the global; some elements of the subsistence perspectives reify the local (Tucker 1997:14). The results of this dichotomy are, in the first instance, the obliteration of local perspectives (which will be dealt with in my case study on the Green Revolution), and in the latter instance, in the rejection of all forms of development and an anti-science approach. Whilst it may be fruitful to take the attitude that individuals cannot encompass the global, as in the slogan ‘think global, act local’, as it is too complex and emotionally and intellectually overpowering, and that one should therefore think and act local on the grounds that this way practical change can be effected (Esteva & Prakesh 1998), taking this to its extreme leads to an essentialist approach as destructive as the approach which says that the local is ‘primitive’, outdated, and revisionist.

Thus we have two differing versions of development (and growth) and globalisation, one of which is primarily quantitative and the other qualitative: put in quantitative terms, rational and irrational; put in qualitative terms, abstract and human. In Weberian terms we are looking at the difference between Zweckrationalitat and Wertrationalitat, or formal versus value rationality (and economics). The burden of most of the post-development and subsistence discourse is that these two versions reflect two versions of epistemology, which I will now discuss.

CHAPTER TWO

THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL SPLIT:

And Never the Twain Shall Meet:

As a first approximation it might be fruitful to simplify by sketching modern and non-modern systems of knowledge as ideal types. The distinguishing characteristics of the former are disembeddedness, universalism, individualism, objectivity and instrumentalism, while the latter are characterised by embeddedness, locality, community, a lack of separation between subject and object as well as a non-instrumental approach (Banuri & Marglin 1993a:1).

The same danger exists in this comparison of the two epistemological systems that we have seen in the approaches to development; that is, of seeing them as discrete, oppositional worlds rather than being intertwined but different elements of one world. Both knowledge systems have strengths and weaknesses; they can be treated as heuristically different ‘worlds’ in certain theoretical circumstances, but neither is superior at the epistemological level. There is, however, a distinct hegemony of the Western over the non-Western at a social, political, technological, and economic level (Turnbull 1991:4).

The Indian philosopher Panikkar refers to the difference as being between an anthropocentric and a ‘cosmocentric’ view of the world. Western man places himself at the centre of the universe, and believes that he controls it; he takes a linear rather than a cyclic view of time and place; he seeks control rather than harmony; and he concentrates on doing rather than being. Panikkar sees these as facets of a flawed and deficient spirit, as do many other critics of Western rationality, particularly many Western feminists and many of those who espouse the Subsistence Perspective (Verhelst 1987:24).

They have, perhaps, good reason. It is quite clear that, in the main, the Western paradigm which drives ‘development’ and economic globalisation does see indigenous or local knowledge as inferior on all counts, including the epistemological (Banuri & Marglin 1993a:10). This will be quite evident in the later case studies on forestry (Chipko) and the Green Revolution. What concerns critics of the Western knowledge system is not just its arrogant belief in the universality and validity of its tenets, and the economic repercussions that arise from this, but also the environmental repercussions, and for feminist critics, the effects this paradigm has on women and nature in general. One of the originators of the Subsistence Perspective approach, Indian activist and academic Vandana Shiva, sums up her critique in the statement, ‘The reductionist world-view, the industrial revolution and the capitalist economy are the philosophical, technological and economic components of the same process’ (Mies and Shiva 1993a:24). She calls this process the Monoculture of the Mind, and it is her argument (and Mies’ complementary Subsistence Perspective argument) which I will be following in detail during the course of this thesis.

As metaphor, the monoculture of the mind is best illustrated in the knowledge and practice of forestry and agriculture. ‘Scientific’ forestry and ‘scientific’ agriculture, split the plant artificially into separate, non-overlapping domains, on the basis of separate commodity markets to which they supply raw materials and resources. In local knowledge systems, the plant world is not artificially separated between a forest supplying commercial wood and agricultural land supplying food commodities. The forest and field are in ecological continuum, and activities in the forest contribute to the food needs of the local community, while agriculture itself is modelled on the ecology of the tropical forest (Shiva 1993b:12-14).

Western Economics:

As one of the opening quotes of this thesis suggests, economics is prime exemplar of Western epistemology and its global dominance, and shows up in clear detail the aspects which the Subsistence perspectives criticise most strongly. Western economics is seen to apply ‘a distorted view of the world, one that is rigid, partial and doctrinaire, one that lacks compassion, objectifies people and seems to symbolise the one-sidedness of the world’; it sees human motivation as entirely caught up in maximising personal welfare, and applies this description of humankind universally; it is based on accumulation, competition, and self-interest (Hamilton 1994:2 ff.); it is based on a paradigm of continuing growth and expansion: ‘Its aim is limitless growth, or money in search of more of itself. Profit is the means of expansion, and also the goal of expansion. Every capitalist institution and cultural practice is organised for profit and capital accumulation’ (O’Connor 1998:10).

The Western counter argument to this critique, based primarily in instrumental logic and rationality, is that growth, development, capitalism, industrialisation, globalisation, and so forth are all parts of the solution to poverty, unemployment, unequal wealth and income distribution, the ‘trickle down’ theory being the flagship of this particular argument. It thus, in fact, claims these perceived weaknesses in its system as its strengths, so wide is the epistemological divide. Western economists will also blame occasional ‘excesses’ on unscrupulous individuals (its critics claim that such lack of scruples is inbuilt into the Western system), but suggest that the system itself is fair and equal and open to all. It also claims that its dominance is justified, on the simple grounds that since it has clearly overwhelmed other epistemologies, winning the ‘war’ between the two worlds, it is obviously ‘better’, a somewhat arrogant, circular, and specious argument in the eyes of its critics. Non-Western ways of thinking see these things not as the solution, but as the problem itself, or, at least, a major part of the problem. For instance:

When economic growth, as measured by the total production of material goods, becomes an objective in itself, it is increasingly accompanied by a tendency toward the subordination of all other aspects of social life; this concept of ‘progress’ tends to ignore the specificity of cultures and all qualitative features of life that cannot be expressed in economic terms (Herrera et. al. 1976:19).

Ecologists point out that endless quantitative growth in a finite world is impossible, and it is suicidal to attempt it (Suzuki & McConnell 1997:212); in this view, sustainable development and growth (qualitative) follow different laws altogether, the laws that the Subsistence Perspective sets out to address, but in stating this, ecologists use the benign definitions of these terms which, as we have seen, are no longer considered relevant in a global economy (Goodland & Daly 1995:105). When economists and ecologists debate they are often at cross purposes because of this definitional chasm.

Western Hegemony:

An important facet of this argument, one taken up by many other post-Development critics, is the hegemony which Western knowledge systems have gained over all other systems, which Sardar (1999:44) encapsulates in his argument about the Eurocentric nature of the dominant worldview. He makes the important point that this Eurocentric viewpoint has been internalised by many of the intellectuals, academics, writers, thinkers, novelists, politicians and decision-makers in Asia, Africa and Latin America - that they ‘use the West, almost instinctively, as the yardstick for measuring the social and political progress of their own societies’. Further, he suggests that the true nexus of Western hegemony is in its power to define - e.g., ‘freedom, progress, and civil behaviour; law, tradition and community; reason, mathematics and science; what is real and what it means to be human’.

The Subsistence Perspective and other Post-Development critiques argue fairly compellingly that the Western paradigm is merely a local tradition which has gained global hegemony through economic, military, political, and intellectual colonialism (Shiva 1993b:10).

Modern western knowledge is a particular cultural system with a particular relationship to power. It has, however, been projected as above and beyond culture and politics. Its relationship with the project of economic development has been invisible; and therefore it has become a more effective legitimizer for the homogenisation of the world and the erosion of its ecological and cultural richness. The tyranny and hierarchy privileges that are part of the development drive are also part of the globalising knowledge in which the development paradigm is rooted and from which it derives its rationalisation and legitimisation. The power by which the dominant knowledge system has subjugated all others makes it exclusive and undemocratic (Shiva 1993b:60).

Such hegemony creates inequalities; if the assertion that the two forms of knowledge are epistemologically equal is correct, then the dominance of one form in all practical issues generates an entire class of unjustifiably delegitimized ideas, processes, beliefs, and, most importantly, people. The hegemonic strength of the Western paradigm is that, for those who support it, it holds out the promise of material wealth and comfort, and a share of the power, a promise now offered to the economically educated non-Westerner. But to honour this promise requires a ‘scarcity’ approach to economic life: that is, in wealthy societies, expectations about assets, wealth, and success are based on the belief that there are insufficient resources to satisfy the needs of all humans, so all must compete for these scarce resources. This creates a psychology of win/lose, where the strong, clever, and unscrupulous accumulate wealth and power, and the weak, stupid, and honourable are the losers. Thus, ‘insufficiency of material means becomes the explicit, calculable starting point of all economic activity’ (Sahlins 1997:5-6).

The dominant discourse is about winners, because the dominant paradigm is competitive; thus the losers and their concerns and history get swept under the carpet; the subsistence and post-development discourses valorise the losers; but the more losers there are, and the bigger the gap between winners and losers becomes, the less possible it is to sweep them under that carpet.

Perceptions of Poverty:

‘Scarcity’ is closely tied up with differing definitions of ‘poverty. ‘Sachs (1989) distinguishes between frugality, as in subsistence economies; destitution, which can arise when subsistence economies are weakened through the interference of growth strategies; and scarcity, which arises when the logic of growth and accumulation has taken over and commodity-based need becomes the overriding logic’ (Pieterse 2000:177).

These three terms, frugality, destitution, and scarcity, represent another example of the epistemological split. The first two belong to the subsistence perspective, and the latter to the Western system of economic thought. If ‘scarcity’ is used in subsistence thought, it is to describe the situation in cases of natural disasters, droughts, floods, etc. which, in pre-modern times or in Third World situations, affect almost everybody, not just the poor. Destitution is the absolute poverty of the refugee, or of the masses of starving Africans we see so often in Western television  documentaries, from the comfort of our carpeted lounge rooms.

‘Poverty’ is a cultural conception (Shiva 1993c:72). Western culture defines wealth in terms of relative affluence, of relative ability to ‘to maintain the levels of accumulation and consumption of goods and services which [are] required for the social statuses which people [have attained]’ (Geddes 1997a:196). In such a view, mere subsistence, or self-provisioning, is seen as poverty, or deprivation, but this is based on a view of wealth which is itself embedded in an ideology of accumulation and consumption. In non-Western thought systems, self-provisioning which satisfies basic needs is not poor in the sense of deprivation or destitution; people living in this manner have a reasonably secure food supply, adequate shelter, plenty of time for leisure (contrary to perceptions that their lives are a constant battle for survival), and are generally content with what they have unless seduced by Western consumerism. The primary difference is not one between poverty and wealth; it is a difference in expectations, lifestyles, and standards of living.

Wants may be ‘easily satisfied’ either by producing much or desiring little. The familiar conception, the Galbraithian way, makes assumptions peculiarly appropriate to market economies: that man’s wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his means are limited, although improvable: thus, the gap between means and ends can be narrowed by industrial productivity, at least to the point that ‘urgent good’ becomes plentiful. But there is also a Zen road to affluence, departing from premises somewhat different from our own: that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate. Adopting the Zen strategy, a people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty - with a low standard of living’ (Sahlins 1997:4)

Westerners used to their high standard of living quite understandably find the concept of subsistence living, with its concomitant much lower standard of living, as absurd and unnecessary. But the Western standards are certainly going to have to be modified drastically in the not too distant future if the world’s biosphere and human life is to survive in any reasonable sense, a point even the World Bank has publicly recognised (World Bank 2002). What many critics of the development ideology believe is that the stated ambition of development, that is, to bring the underdeveloped world up to the standards of the developed world, is sheer insanity.

Many sets of figures are quoted dealing with the massive over-use of resources found in the West, with America, as the biggest culprit, usually being the benchmark. Since much of my reference work in this thesis involves India, it seems reasonable to compare India with the USA. One estimate is that ‘each American is, by virtue of the technology at his direct or indirect command, about sixty times as colossal as each Indian’ (Catton 1985:76). If the current Indian population were to be raised to this American standard, their use of energy and other resources would be the equivalent of some 54 billion more people on the earth. Add in China, Pakistan, Bangladesh and we can see there is no point in following the extrapolation any further. Quite clearly, ‘achieving the U.S. standard of living is impossible for the rest of the world, based both on the projections of future resource availability and population growth’ (Pimental 1995:241). In fact, most such critiques take the line that sheer practical necessity, let alone any ideological or ethical considerations, will force the First World to significantly reduce its own over-use of resources, and sooner probably than later.

In light of this environmental concern, what such critics would claim to be an environmental imperative, subsistence living may well be forced back onto the entire world through the collapse of industrial society brought about by environmental change and/or the internal contradictions of global capitalism, and/or the mass resistance of the underprivileged. The propounders of the Subsistence Perspective suggest that it would be wiser to voluntarily make a start now by modifying the development ideology, and allowing those who choose to opt out of the global market to do so.

The Secular State - or Native Wisdom?:

Supporters of the Western knowledge systems reject the alternative epistemology on numerous grounds: it is impractical, outdated, ‘primitive’, subjective, irrational, and, above all, religious. (And it lost the ‘war’, although its many supporters might argue that all it lost was the first few battles, and the war isn’t over yet.)

Secularism is so ingrained in the Western system that we forget that its origin was in the battle for power between Church and State in Europe; as a result, the West is totally intolerant of the spirituality of the indigenous knowledge systems (Tucker 1999:20). Many feminist ecologists are actively hostile, for instance, to the element within their own ranks which deals with feminist spirituality, seemingly so enamoured of the secular ideal that they cannot differentiate between ecofeminist spirituality and bureaucratised Christianity (Warren 1993:119), tarring both with the same brush. Many of these same feminists also have trouble in dealing with the perceptions of non-Western women, preferring to see all women as part of one universal group, thus proving guilty of the same sin of which they accuse androcentric and patriarchal men.

Westerners have created an entirely different ‘moral culture’, or ‘moral economy’ through this secularity. ‘Moral economy’ is a term I will be returning to in relation to the subsistence perspective, but its use there is as oppositional in substance as are the different uses of the terms ‘development’, ‘growth’, and ‘globalisation’ discussed above. Westerners believe in a concept based on individual human nature, human will, human rights, and human reason; the subsistence perspective defines ‘moral economy’ in terms of communal reason and relationships. Our secular approach, one of the ‘essences’ of Modernity (Lidz 1990:80), is based on instrumental rationality and the individual; the non-secular approach on value rationality and the communal.

This secularity is, of course, a huge sticking point for Muslims, who refuse to separate economics from religion. ‘The practice of tazkiyah [purification] demands that preservation of moral and environmental integrity, cultural strength and the practice of such vital Islamic concepts as ijma (consensus of the people), shura (co-operation for the good) and istislah (public interest) must be the cornerstones of science, technology and economic policy’ (Sardar 1999:58). Islamic economists make many of the same criticisms of Western economics as do post-developmental, dependency, alternative development, and subsistence perspective writers: they see the dominant paradigm (and they include in this, as do others, socialist methods as well as capitalist) as being responsible for ‘severe injustices, inefficiencies, and moral failures’; as being callous and exploitative; or, in the socialist case, tyrannical and inequitable (Kuran 1993:304). They are working toward an interest-free banking system based around risk-sharing (muduraba or musharaka, depending on the degree of risk the entrepreneur himself is liable for) between bank and customers. Collateral is relatively unimportant (a factor I will investigate in looking at the Grameen bank and its replications in the sub-Continent), and the bank is more involved in the running of the businesses than in normal Western systems (Kuran 1993:297 ff.).

The secular-spiritual divide is an important element of the epistemological split, not just for Muslims, but also for most non-Christian societies, most, if not all, indigenous peoples, and many feminists and even environmentalists. The ‘wisdom of the Elders’ concept has gained considerable support within post-development discourses:

Increasingly, some of the leading scientific thinkers who are trying to find solutions to the ecocrisis are using terms hitherto considered inappropriate in science. Thus, Stanford University ecologist Paul Ehrlich believes that the answer to the global difficulties will be ‘quasi-religious’. He suggests that our main dilemma is not a lack of information or technological capacity. Rather, our problem is inherent in the way we perceive our relationship with the rest of Nature and our role in the grand scheme of things’ (Knudtson & Suzuki 1992: pxxiv).

Indian tribal views of the cosmos, the Aboriginal Dreaming, North and South American Native cosmologies, and African mythology all reflect similar views of the human-nature complex, which differ diametrically from the Modernist Western separation of humankind from nature. These native cosmologies all effect a stewardship and partnership with nature, even if not self-consciously seeing their actions in those terms, rather than the imposed control over nature of Western epistemology. Traditional and subsistence systems ‘are embedded in the social, cultural and moral milieu of their particular community’ - all actions and thoughts are seen to have inherent ‘social, political, moral and cosmological implications’, whether in questions of agricultural production, household work or social function (Banuri & Marglin 1993a:11). The Western attempt to apply pure economic and technical logic to non-Western agricultural or forestry practices often founders under the weight of its failure to take this into account.

Banuri and Marglin also point out that one of the longer-term consequences of this failure is the annihilation of cultures which hold the knowledge of how to keep the environment safe from our own predations - once the knowledge is lost, it will be very hard to regain, as has already become obvious with the loss of indigenous myth, ritual, and traditional knowledge around the world.

Western critics of this ‘native wisdom’ approach accuse it of being naively romantic, ethereal, or disconnected from ordinary life. The same sort of criticism is levelled at those who espouse the Subsistence Perspective - it is seen as valorising and idealising life in a mud hut without electricity, health care, or all the other Modern comforts. This is, of course, an example of the caricaturising mentioned in the introduction, and I will deal with it at more length in the next section. But as regards Native Wisdom, even highly trained Western scientists like Suzuki have long been putting the view that ‘Native knowledge about nature is firmly rooted in reality, in keen personal observation, interaction, and thought, sharpened by the daily rigours of daily survival. Its validity rests largely upon the authority of hard-won personal experience ….’ (Knudtson & Suzuki 1992:16).

Conclusion:

The following section on the Subsistence Perspective will expand some of these themes, but summing up at this point we find that there are several binary oppositions in evidence: Western epistemology revolves around the secular, accumulative, competitive individual, is strongly anthropocentric, and to all practical purposes holds a hegemonic position in the world in relation to other epistemologies. Non-Western thought systems are spiritual and community-oriented, produce for use not accumulation, are cosmocentric, and are subordinated to Western epistemology. Western hegemony is created and sustained through its economic power, its development ideology, and its global control of trade and the major international agencies.

Seen in this way the picture is bleak for non-Western societies, but an important element is hidden by the apparent binary nature of the debate and the apparently overwhelming hegemony of the West. Power is never complete, and while anthropological, sociological, developmental, economic, and historical analyses of colonialism, post-colonialism, globalisation, and so forth which demonstrate the extent of hegemonic power are perhaps meaningful to some extent, they are accurate only as far as it is accurate to say, for example, that India is a Hindu nation; all this means, in reality, is that India’s majority population is Hindu, and that therefore the political processes mostly reflect Hindu concerns, but it omits the importance of the significant minority population which is not Hindu, and which has its own concerns and processes which are not necessarily totally subordinate to those of the majority. Which is a long-winded way of saying that non-Western societies have and exercise the agency to resist, and that the Western hegemony is far from as effective or overwhelming as some doomsday critics would have us believe. This issue of grassroots agency and resistance will play an important role later in this thesis.

CHAPTER THREE

THE SUBSISTENCE PERSPECTIVE:

Self-Provisioning:

The concept of self-provisioning is, in our opinion, far too limiting because it refers only to the economic dimension. ‘Subsistence’ encompasses concepts like ‘moral economy’, a new way of life in all its dimensions: economy, culture, society, politics, language etcetera, dimensions which can no longer be separated from each other (Bennholdt-Thompson & Mies 1999:19)

Self-provisioning, as Bennholdt-Thompson & Mies point out, is only one aspect of the Subsistence Perspective, and while it is still a viable process for peasants, particularly in the Third World, and an important part of the Subsistence Perspective, it is far from the whole story, and it is probably not a significant option for urban populations. But both of those points require caveats.

Self-provisioning for Third World (and perhaps even Western) peasant classes is reliant on them being allowed to subsist without interference. Food, shelter, fuel and fodder, animal products, clothing and so on can potentially be self-provided still for most rural peoples throughout the world, ‘providing neither their land nor their produce be snatched from the peasants and misappropriated for the purpose of consumption by local elites or for export’ (Verhelst 1987:87). It is the Western development ideology and economic globalisation which makes it harder and harder for these peoples to do so, by directly interfering with their traditional ways, sometimes inadvertently but just as often quite deliberately, all in the name of Western understandings of ‘progress’. This point will be expanded in the Chipko case study.

As a further indication of the totality of the epistemological split, Subsistence Perspective and other post-development critics of Western development blame it for most of the environmental degradation, destruction of biodiversity, human poverty and so on in Third World regions; on the other hand, the World Bank (and Conservation International, another Western-funded and oriented organisation) claims that it is impoverished indigenous peoples who are destroying biodiversity and the environment by living traditionally, burning woods for fuel, poaching for food and income, and ‘living off the land’ (World Bank 2002). This is, in effect, a pre-emptive denial of the validity of the Subsistence Perspective.

Its supporters believe passionately (and passion is an important element in the wertrational approach to life) that ‘the subsistence perspective is not only practically and theoretically necessary, it is also possible and it has already begun’. Peasant resistance movements around the world arise from the practical (rarely theoretical) understanding that modernisation extracts from them a price, part of which is the loss of their autonomy, for which they receive very little, and that what little they receive is not on their own terms or in what they see as their own interests (Bennholdt-Thompson & Mies 1999:21-22). Mostly what they seek, as we will see with the Chipko movement, is the freedom to practice their traditional subsistence way of life without outside (government and business) interference. Modernists, of course, see this as a retrograde and unreasonable response to the wonderful things Modernity and globalisation have to offer. The peasants respond by pointing out that it is precisely these ‘wonderful’ things which have caused their major problems in the first place.

The Subsistence Perspective is not a call to return to mud huts and primitive agriculture; it is arguing for a perspective ‘born of our own times’, in which exchange relations and technology are not rejected, but are sought in forms suited both to the reciprocal relations of traditional societies and  late twentieth century conditions of global communications and heterogeneity (Bennholdt-Thompson & Mies 199983).

The other caveat regards the point that self-provisioning is unlikely to be significant in urban situations. In light of the large number of urban communal garden projects springing up around the world, the development of urban-based Community Supported Agriculture projects, and the proliferation of schemes such as LETS or Grameen-style community banks even in Canada, the USA, Australia, Germany, the UK and so on, some degree of self-provisioning and self-financing outside the global economy is clearly practicable in urban terms.

However, the major points to be made about the Subsistence Perspective are in its basis in the  different epistemological framework I analysed in the previous section. Most important is the Subsistence attitude to production. It is not, despite the belittling efforts of mainstream critics, purely in self-provisioning, but in its espousal of use-value production in preference to exchange-value production, and in its environmental and feminist applications (Bennholdt-Thompson & Mies 1999:21).

Exchange-Value/Use-Value:

The Moral Economy:

Western economics and development are based around exchange value and the market paradigm. This is based on unlimited growth and open-ended accumulation, especially of abstract wealth. In this respect it is doubly abstract, for the money accumulated is not even concrete in itself, being mostly in the form of magnetised tapes in computers, representing, as Donald Horne put it, ‘billions of dollars that do not exist except in our acquiescence’ (1976:48). Use-Value, one of the basic elements of the Subsistence Perspective, is predicated on the satisfaction of concrete, day-to-day living needs (Bennholdt-Thompson & Mies 1999:57-58). ‘The closer we get to use value theoretically, the closer we get to real places and real, live people practically’ argues the Marxist ecologist James O’Connor (1998:128), and this human element is crucially important to the value-rationality of the Subsistence Perspective.

Marx pointed out that in traditional systems the flow is commodity - money - commodity, that is, use-value is exchanged for use-value with money merely the vehicle for the exchange. In capitalism the flow is reversed, so that it is money - commodity - money, meaning that commodities become the vehicle and money the aim. The consequence of this in capitalist systems is that as the standard-of-living goes up quality-of-life goes down, as the quality or usefulness of the commodity is in practical terms irrelevant - for example, one could refer to the oft-heard and objectively justifiable complaint that fruit and vegetables no longer taste as good as they used to, since, for reasons of commercial expediency, they are no longer vine-ripened or fresh. Subsistence Perspective adherents suggest that while a non-accumulative, use-value lifestyle is unable to achieve the material standard of living that is found in capitalist society, the quality of life is greatly superior (Bennholdt-Thompson & Mies 1999). Sahlin’s work (among others) on hunter gatherers, cited in the previous section, emphasises this point. Only a consumerist definition of ‘quality of life’ could substitute ‘things’ for ‘values’.

One of the mainstream criticisms of the Subsistence Perspective, based on the universalistic, global scale of endeavour that Western ideologies so valorise, is that it can only work on the small-scale, a point that Bennholdt-Thompson & Mies not only willingly concede, but count as one of the strengths of their proposition. In line with much environmentalist rhetoric, they see decentralisation and regional governance as essential, ‘as it is only in this way that use-value production and consumption can be integrated in such a way that the interests of the producers and the consumers are not antagonistic’ (Bennholdt-Thompson & Mies 1999:58). It is also the only way, they believe, that the damage caused by limitless growth of money and commodities can be ameliorated. This is a point often emphasised by supporters of direct democracy as well, seeing decentralisation as a means for the empowerment of ordinary citizens, their organisations and communities, and an ‘indispensable part of a popular alternative that can confront neo-liberal privatisation in the one hand, and the omnipotence of the central state (as was common in the Soviet bloc) on the other (Kaufman 1997:21).

The Western exchange-value system simply does not see subsistence work (or, for that matter other self-sustaining labour such as housework, or the ‘creative’ work of artisans, craftspeople, or artists etc.) as ‘real’ work. Real work is ‘being employed, obtaining cash income which can be used to improve one’s social status’ (Geddes 1997b:144-145). The myth is that self-produced consumption is not production, because it doesn’t pass through the market system, and creates no increase in national economic figures (Shiva 1993d:269).

Bennholdt-Thompson & Mies and others within the Alternative Development discourse derive much of their thought about the Subsistence perspective from Peasant Studies, and make a point of the terms ‘moral economy’ and the ‘commons’. 

Operating largely outside the market framework but articulated with it, the moral economy is of critical importance to the livelihood of both small peasants and the urban poor. It is based on the principal of reciprocal exchange among kin, near-kin, neighbours, and friends, and it governs clientalistic relations to patrons. Notwithstanding the importance of non-market relations in the survival economy, money continues to be required by even the poorest. Small peasants in particular, though producing primarily for their own use, are obliged to sell part of what they produce to purchase essential commodities and to fulfil their social obligations, which, in turn, gives them a measure of security in the moral economy (Friedmann 1992:17)

This underlines the impact modernisation and globalisation have had on subsistence cultures, although cash money has no doubt always played a small role in such societies. Today wage labour has become an important element of the subsistence economy, through sheer necessity. In some Third World regions, remittances from absent kin working in other regions or even countries have sometimes become essential to survival of the (usually) women and children left behind.

Subsistence economies are not and never have been without market concepts or exchange relations. In the debate about world-system (Wallerstein) versus world system (Frank) economics, Frank has emphasised the existence of trading systems between states throughout history, but European, or industrial Capitalism is on a different level (Frank 1991:180), and the purposes and processes of traditional markets are quite distinct.

But there is no clear separation any more, if ever there was, between the economies of capital accumulation and of subsistence. Macro changes create micro change. People respond to the changes in their social context, and globalisation, commercialisation, and industrialisation certainly create changes in social context (Prattis 1987:26).

What is distinctive about subsistence economies, in contrast with Capitalist ones, is that they do not exist for the sake of accumulation, but for reproduction, or sustainability of a way of life which revolves around modest living (frugality), reciprocity, and community. ‘The peasant economy is guided by a different world-view from that of growth economics: it recognises the finite basis of economic activity in land, water, forests, plants and animals, and the need to operate with corresponding care and restraint. In principle, then, if not in every detail, the farm economy is also an ecological economy’, as Bennholdt-Thompson & Mies (1999:86) emphasise.

Community is an important element of this entire perspective. To the individualistic Western mind, community has overtones of social control of initiative, of personal identity, of individual autonomy, and Bennholdt-Thompson & Mies recognise this as a valid point. It is quite likely that much of the attraction cities hold for young people is the chance to escape this control (Bennholdt-Thompson & Mies 1999:86-87), and many Western critics of this community perspective work on the premise that ‘traditional communities can be, and normally have been, oppressive. Community in the form of mechanical solidarity crushes individual autonomy and exerts a compelling pressure towards conformism’ (Giddens 1994:126).

But many others have also pointed out that our own Western society has its own forms of imposed conformity; individualism itself (differentiated from individuality) is a form of conformity, as the entire fashion phenomenon shows us, where we are supposed to fit into certain cultural parameters if we wish to be taken seriously by our contemporaries (Miles 1998:59). Simply because traditional societies appear to honour the community over the individual does not mean that these societies are not made up of individuals; ‘there seems little reason to suppose that sociality and individuality must be mutually exclusive’ (Cohen 1994:54), and conformism to norms is much the same in whichever society we study, even if the norms are quite different.

A primary aspect of the moral economy is that it does away with competition for resources. That is, each individual carries on his or her ‘economic’ activities in such a way that others are not disadvantaged in their claims on communal resources. Unlike our ‘Christian’ Capitalist society, where genuine Christians (and other humanists) have to fight tooth and nail for every dollar they spend in the battle to keep the losers in the economic war that is Western society fed, housed, and clothed, subsistence societies ensure that no-one goes hungry or cold unless all do. ‘Social behaviour is thus determined not by competition but by reciprocity’ (Bennholdt-Thompson & Mies 1999:87).

This really should not be alien to Westerners. As Polanyi pointed out in his seminal 1957 work The Great Transformation, ‘all economic systems known to us up to the end of feudalism in Western Europe were organised either on the principles of reciprocity or redistribution, or house holding or some combination of the three’ (1957:54-55). In historical terms this is not a long time ago, and Bennholdt-Thompson & Mies constantly remind us throughout their book that in many parts of Europe this form of peasant economy was still working perfectly well 20 - 30 years ago, and perhaps still exists in small pockets of resistance. In the Third World large proportions of the population are still trying to make it work against ferocious opposition from the Western economic system.

The Commons:

The commons formed part of moral economies within which everybody belonging to the community had customary rights and could find the means to produce his or her survival. Today this type of economy simply does not exist within the narrow range of categories in affluent, culturally ignorant societies. The social and at the same time economic aspect of commons has become invisible. Commons, on the contrary, become highly idealised, and everybody feels entitled to ‘protect’ them, that is, to manipulate them according to what is said to be ‘everybody’s’ interests. By means of this process commons are being idealised, apparently de-economised and then expropriated from those who used to rely on them for their living (Bennholdt-Thompson & Mies 1999:158).

Garrett Hardin is not a popular figure with Subsistence Perspective supporters. He is a genetic biologist whose pronouncements seem to have had out-of-proportion influence in Western economic think tanks. Apart from his coining of the term ‘lifeboat ethics’, where ‘the poor, the weak are a surplus population, putting an unnecessary burden on the planet’s resources’, and in which he advocates a triage approach to poverty and hunger (Shiva 1993c:86), he is also responsible for a thesis entitled The Tragedy of the Commons (1977) in which he advocates that the ‘commons’ must be protected from their traditional owners, an approach which the economic mainstream has adopted wholeheartedly, as mentioned above in reference to the World Development Report 2003 (World Bank 2002). This is also in line with other opinions that see subsistence peasants, landless rural workers, and others displaced by the rush to globalisation as obstructive and supernumerary; they ‘siphon off capital for relatively unproductive public expenditure on housing, education, and health, and … subsistence peasants obstruct necessary modernisation in agricultural production’ (Friedmann 1992:14)

Hardin bases his theory on the belief, mentioned often in respect to western economic psychology, that since every man is out to maximise his economic advantages, then the commons will necessarily be destroyed by man’s universal greed - in complete contradiction to millennia of proof to the contrary (Bennholdt-Thompson & Mies 1999:156). Commons have always been protected and carefully regulated by the communities that relied on them, for the very good reason that any other approach was likely to be somewhat counterproductive in terms of group and individual survival.

The commons have become private rather than public property, just as communal labour has become wage labour, and intellectual commons, the traditional knowledge of the peasants, has now become the private property of TNCs through Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), an offshoot of the GATT treaty. But these changes do not effect merely land and knowledge; they also alter the entire lifeworld of the peoples who have lost their commons, of whichever kind, to Modernity. Entire communities have been destroyed through displacement or destitution (Bennholdt-Thompson & Mies 1999:143). This ‘piracy’, a perhaps somewhat polemical if justifiable term from the more ‘enraged’ elements of the development critique, is seen as inherent in the Western paradigm.

Urban Subsistence:

Reinvention of the commons is a key element in subsistence theory. The possibilities of doing so in what are still semi-peasant societies is seen as difficult but not impossible, assuming that the global project can be modified in the immediate future, but, as suggested earlier in this section, reinventing the commons in the First World, or in urban centres, is considerably more problematic. Or is it?

It is obvious that ‘reinventing the commons’ in local communities in industrialised societies will appear to be an almost impossible task, at least at the present juncture. And yet precisely this is already happening in a number of social experiments in Europe and the US, partly out of necessity (because the welfare state no longer takes care of a growing number of people), partly because people on their own want to try out new forms of producing and living that are not dictated by the logic of private property and accumulation. The creation of communal gardens in the midst of the ruins of de-industrialised cities could be called a movement towards new commons. Similarly, movements towards building new communities through local and regional economies, new systems of direct exchange of services and goods (like LETS experiments with new forms of money) are all trying to overcome the limitations of a society made up of atomised egotistic individuals, dependent on capital and the state for their survival (Bennholdt-Thompson 1999:154).

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is one such movement which is making significant gains. This program teaches ‘urban people how to support small local farmers who farm with wisdom, caring for local soils, waters and intestines’ (Esteva & Prakesh 1998:25). It is a type of pact between producers and consumers in which the latter provide finance and other assistance, guarantee purchases, and have a certain right of say. In the United States alone there are now over 300 such farms, and they are appearing in Germany and Switzerland (under the name of Producer-Consumer Co-operatives or PCCs), and in Britain as ‘subscription farming’ (Bennholdt-Thompson 1999:104). The motivations are mixed, but in many respects there is an element of deliberate ‘delinking’ from the dominant market system involved, along with a desire for farm-fresh, organically produced food, and perhaps an element of being ‘in touch’ with nature.

Barter circles, of which the LETS programs are the most common present manifestation, also began in urban settings in the USA in response to the economic downturn under Reaganomics, and were transported to Britain where Thatcherism created the same economic conditions, and from thence to many other parts of the developed world, especially Germany where there are over 300 such groups registered. They are an imitation of the reciprocal economics of subsistence societies. In the 1990s some of these groups worldwide took on something of the nature of CSAs with a move toward extending their system to the self-provisioning field (Bennholdt-Thompson & Mies 1999:132, 81).

Numerous other projects of similar type are mentioned in the literature, like the community gardens created on unused inner suburban sites in many cities around the world. And these projects are not merely a response to situational poverty, as for instance in the shanty towns of South America, or in the worst hit sections of the former Soviet bloc where they are necessary to survival, but have self-conscious ideological elements as well. The Russian example merely shows how quickly the basis of industrial society can collapse, and this is an important issue to consider in any analysis of development. And since it seems incontrovertible that a welfare system as we know it is economically quite impossible for the Third World, the search for alternative (informal and subsistence) economies for the underprivileged is a matter of urgent necessity in both hemispheres (Bennholdt-Thompson & Mies 1999:126 ff.).

Most of what is being discussed in this thesis has referred exclusively to Third World issues, but the growth model is having similar effects in the West. Rifkin has pointed out (2000:15) that the logic of innovation in labour-saving technology is leading to unprecedented levels of technological unemployment and a precipitous decline in consumer purchasing power. And relocation off-shore adds to the equation. ‘The relocation to cheap-labour countries of labour-intensive, environmentally polluting plants in such industrial sectors as the steel industry, coal mining, ship and car production has led to massive layoffs of skilled workers, mainly male, in Europe and the USA’ (Mies 1996:357). The conventional answers to this problem in the West are the same as in the SAPs imposed on the Third World: deregulation, privatisation, flexibilisation of labour, lower wages, and the dismantling of the welfare state (Bennholdt-Thompson & Mies 1999:38).

The limited but demonstrable success of the initiatives mentioned above at least gives hope that this is no utopian dream, and that such economies can be created successfully in urban conditions. And they may well have to be in view of the changes in Western society in recent years.

Critique of the Subsistence Perspective:

Even many Westerners who are sympathetic to the plight of Third World peasants, but who still believe in the basic premise of ‘development’ tend to damn the subsistence concept with faint praise. They see it as an answer, perhaps, for ‘backward’ Third World groups who wish to maintain ‘traditional’ (pejoratively used) lifestyles in the privacy of their own back yards, an ‘answer’ accepted purely on the abstract principle that they have the right to be as stupid as they desire to be. It can have no relevance to the industrialised, ‘developed’ world.

This attitude is closely related to opinions which claim that subsistence perspectives are utopian and unrealistic in any situation. They are seen as projecting a desired rather than an existing reality (Collins 1997:58). In reply to this, it could be validly pointed out that without desired realities nothing would ever get changed. Perhaps more to the point, the world that Western global practice is attempting to create is also a ‘desired reality’ which, in light of both external resistance and its own internal contradictions and weaknesses, does not yet exist; and the world that Alternative Development offers is yet another ‘desired reality’ which is more real in theory than practice. All three are, in many senses, competing utopias, each seeing the other as either dystopian or unrealistic.

The Western view, as we have seen in its economic principles, is that humankind is inherently greedy and selfish, and that utopian concepts of communality and mutual support are unrealistic and naïve. Thus populist ideals of grassroots participation and governance, and the communal use of common lands and resources will break down under the weight of human greed and power drives, and ideological, psychological, class, and ethnic antagonisms. Historical analyses which argue that this view is not universal but an inherent element of the Western context are open to a number of valid criticisms (which also apply to opposing views of the historical record) which effectively reduce the opposing viewpoints to a matter of differing opinion and orientation. Nevertheless, I would argue that the selfishness that will supposedly defeat utopian subsistence perspectives is merely a rational response in a society that institutionalises greed, competition, and a psychology of scarcity. In a society which emphasises reciprocity and frugality, selfishness returns to being a fault of single individuals, not a societal way of life.

Other critics point out that we have become dependent on what industrialisation brings, and the Subsistence Perspective seems to demand that we give up a lot of our comfort and the ‘gains’ of modernity, both points I hope have been adequately covered above. The complementary criticism is that the Subsistence Perspective is anti-technology, but Bennholdt-Thompson & Mies counter this with the argument that the ‘logic of a certain production system is inbuilt into its science and technology. They are non system-neutral. In a subsistence perspective, science and technology will have to follow a subsistence logic and not an accumulation logic’ (1999:60). In effect, they are saying that appropriate technology is acceptable, or, in other words, they are not against technological change per se. What this means in practical terms is not quite so clear, but they also make the point that subsistence initiatives cannot be held to any rigid theoretical model - they are very much situational and contextual. Thus answers to this critique, or answers as to what comprises appropriate technology for a subsistence society in the twenty-first century can only be effectively answered in respect of individual groups and situations.

I have touched on mainstream critiques which are based on the Western paradigm earlier in the thesis, and will again. However, since these are a case of one paradigm criticising another, oppositional and apparently irreconcilable, paradigm (and vice versa), where both are speaking ostensibly the same language but with quite different definitions of the prime terms in conflict, it is very hard to effectively line up the respective positions in any  fruitful sense. I will have to rely on situational and contextual examples as I work through the case studies.

CHAPTER FOUR

CASE STUDIES:

Hugging the Trees - The Chipko Phenomenon:

The Chipko (‘hug the tree’) Movement, a popular initiative to stem deforestation in the Uttarakhand Himalaya, is possibly the best-known ecological movement in the world. As a grassroots movement it has an authenticity somewhat lacking in purely intellectual appraisals of the ecological implications of modern industrialisation. A token genuflection to Chipko has, as a consequence, become a ritual in both Indian and international debates on development alternatives (Guha 1993:80).

The Chipko Movement brings light to bear on three issues important to this thesis: first, the Subsistence Perspective itself, as the issues of indigenous pre-colonial treatment of the local environment will demonstrate; second, it has much to say about monoculture, both of the mind and in practical silvicultural terms; and third, it demonstrates the potential for grassroots resistance to global processes.

The Chipko movement is not just an ecological protest, a function and intent ascribed to it by Western environmentalists, but instead is the manifestation of local protest over long-term and continuing exploitation by government and business generally. It is a genuine Gandhian peaceful revolt against the system, although it has attracted both Western and Marxist supporters who have given it a somewhat different slant. Both environmentalists and ecofeminists expropriate it for their own ends.

There is some justification for seeing the Movement as environmentalist, but only in its effects; it was never self-consciously so constructed (Cuomo 1996:43). It is less easy to accept it as feminist. Curtin (1997:86)) sees it as ‘a distinctively feminist political act growing out of typically women’s knowledge of the forest’. It would probably be more accurate to credit Gandhi’s satayagraha technique for the hugging than Curtin’s ‘The circling of trees can be understood as representing the broad circle of concerns that women understand’, and Guha suggests that the prime reason for the preponderance of women involved can be found in the high degree of emigrant male labour in the region rather than any specific female orientation to the protest - ‘the men have been forced to enter the cash economy in order to provide for the family and are for much of the year physically separated from the village arena …’ (Guha 1993:101). He also suggests that the important role women play in the agrarian economy makes their widespread participation more understandable (Guha 1993:81).

Once we return to the original impetus for the Chipko Movement, we find that its concerns were primarily with the deterioration in lifestyle and subsistence issues experienced by the Hill peoples. The element of protest was not new either, but followed a long tradition of resistance by these regions against first, their colonial masters, and later their own government and business interests. It was the ‘continuing denial of traditional forest rights that found expression through the medium of Chipko’ (Guha 1993:100).

I wrote earlier of the perception of current neo-liberal thinking that peasants cannot be trusted to care for the commons. However, the clear evidence is that deforestation in the Himalayas did not begin until commercial operations began. Commercial silviculturalists accuse the locals of a number of silvicultural sins, mostly based on European practice from entirely different climates and eco-cultures. Traditional silviculture is about sustainability and diversity of use, not exploitation which is not conducive to ongoing survival.

Rural inhabitants rarely chop down trees; most collect dead branches or lop them from trees, and when fuel wood is in short supply, they tend to economise or to switch to other fuel, such as cow dung, crop stems and husks, and weeds. The pressure of fuel wood demand comes, if anything, from commercial rather than subsistence consumption. It should be remembered that these forests were preserved and protected for centuries by the same local villagers, and were decimated (within decades) only when villagers lost control of the forests to urban commercial interests (Banuri & Marglin 1993b:39)

Subsistence, or social, forestry has as its priorities the maximisation of the sustainable production of ‘diverse forms of biomass for food, fuel, fodder, fertiliser, fibre and medicine’ and so on - use value; commercial forestry, on the other hand, seeks only woody biomass suitable for commercial use, like pulp for thesis or wood for furniture - exchange value. The two cannot effectively overlap, because in the commercial view, many of the use-value products of the forest are at best a nuisance, and at worst a menace, and therefore have to be removed (Shiva 1993b:35).

Traditional users strictly limit the use of the various available resources to ensure sustainability, imposing stringent penalties on any individual or family which exceeded its quotas (Guha 1989:31). Religious and social custom was a major factor in enforcing these rules, but with the alienation of Hill communities from their traditional rights, social and spiritual cohesion have weakened to some extent and at present there are cases of ill-considered practice by villagers. But wherever they have been allowed to manage areas of the forest autonomously, these corrupted practices have ceased (Banuri & Marglin 1993:39 ff.).

It is a interesting insight into Western epistemology to note that commercial forestry considers that a managed, limited species, even-aged forest is ‘normal’, and that the natural forest habitat is ‘abnormal’ (Troup R. S. (1916) Silviculture Systems Oxford: Oxford University Press cited in Shiva 1993b:23), a prime example of Shiva’s ‘monoculture of the mind’. The Western process is designed to introduce order out of chaos. As an analogy, Shiva likens this process to the assembly line in a factory; ‘Tropical timber exploitation thus becomes like mining, and tropical forests become a timber mine’ (Shiva 1993b:19). This is in stark contrast to the traditional understanding that everything in the forest has a use and a role in sustaining the forest.

This definition of ‘normal’ has the ludicrous effect of declaring biodiversity as abnormal, which flies in the face of both common sense and basic ecological principles. And yet it would seem that this absurdity is intrinsic to the concept of monoculture, as seen both in silviculture and agriculture, which will be demonstrated in the following case study of the Green Revolution (Shiva 1993b:22-23). The issue is simply another element in the paradigmatic chasm I have been describing throughout the thesis.

The traditional methods utilise three specific techniques for using the forests - lopping, grazing, and burning off the undergrowth, all three of which run counter to commercial forestry’s rationalisation processes. In forestry ideology, these were seen as ‘declared enemies of the forest’ (Guha 1989:54-55). Cleared blocks cannot be grazed while they regenerate; burning-off is dangerous to saplings; lopping removes useful timber.

In recent years, although there has been considerable opposition in some quarters, forestry theory has begun to accept that these traditional practices are not, after all, against the premises of commercial forestry, but in fact help out by keeping down the undergrowth and allowing the favoured species to grow without undue competition (Guha 1989:50). Villagers are now ‘allowed’ to utilise oak and other broad-leaved species because this helps the ‘valuable’ conifers, and by banning indigenous use of these latter trees, the commercial foresters have managed to manipulate the villagers into creating the very monoculture they are fighting (Guha 198950-51).

Scientific forestry will always be damaging - because of inadequate knowledge or information, because of mismanagement, or because of the susceptibility of managers to commercial interests, but most importantly because of its basis in an instrumental attitude towards nature. Examples of the beneficial application of scientific forestry represent not its innate effectiveness, but rather the ability of local groups to effectively stalemate the instrumental perspective by a vigorous protective effort based on a conservationist attitude (Banuri & Marglin 1993:41)

Another technique they use is to give out individual licenses to use the forests, as this has proven less ‘damaging’ than allowing the traditional communal use. The effect of this on the villagers has been a further deterioration of their social cohesion, as individualism of this kind is a fundamental change in their traditional life-style (Guha 1989:55). 

This instrumental approach to the forest combines with other elements endemic to commercialisation to further alienate the villagers. The roads needed to bring out the commercial timber themselves caused considerable damage, not least of which was the accessibility it meant for tourists; one of the commercial applications was the tapping of resin, but with overuse of this resource the older trees died out, so the companies took the short-sighted choice of tapping younger trees, causing them to die and deforestation to accelerate; this resulted in the appropriation of the few stands set aside for indigenous use; the loss of large areas of formerly subsistence forest has forced most of the men into emigrant wage labour, further weakening the community cohesion; and even the small amount of income villagers could earn from tapping was threatened, both by the decrease in output and by corruption in the licence-granting procedures. If this were not enough, to the embarrassment of Forest Department officials, who funded the research, Indian ecologists have found that the ideology of ‘sustained yield’ supposedly practised in these forests is simply not attained - the output from the commercial stands regularly and significantly exceeds the new growth, thus further accelerating the deforestation process (Guha 1993:85).

The processes used by commercial forestry could almost be deliberately designed to bring about deforestation. What works in cold climate forests in the North is disastrous in the humid conditions of the tropical rain forests. Eucalyptus is a popular monoculture tree in these areas, but it ‘guzzles nutrients and water and, in the specific conditions of low rainfall zones, gives nothing back but terpines to the soil’ which inhibit the growth of plants beneficial to natural soil regeneration (Shiva 1993b:54-55).

The transformation of mixed natural forests into uniform monocultures allows the direct entry of tropical sun and rain, baking the forest soils dry in the heat, washing the soils off in the rain. Less humid conditions are the reason for rapid retrogression of tropical forest regions. The recent fires of Kalimantan are largely related to the aridisation caused by the conversion of rainforests into plantations of eucalyptus and acacias. Floods and drought are created where the tropical forest had earlier cushioned the discharge of water (Shiva 1993b:51).

In 1970, serious floods afflicted the region, bringing with them massive landslides which destroyed a number of villages and took many lives. It became painfully obvious that the villages worst affected were those lying down slope from the clear felled forests. ‘The causal relationship between increasing erosivity and floods on the one hand, and mass-scale felling of trees on the other, was recognised’ (Bhatt 1973:345 cited in Guha 1993:98). This accelerated the local resistance, which came to a head as what we now know as Chipko when the Indian Forest Department gave a stand of trees to a sports equipment manufacturer over the bid of local co-operatives, and blocking the felling of these trees became the first activist response.

Some sympathetic Western development thinkers try to effect change through finding alternative economic initiatives, but this is another example of Western misunderstanding of traditional epistemology. The economic and cultural realms are simply not separate issues for peasants; the protests are not purely, or even significantly based around economics, but around the threat to traditional cultural and communal values that scientific forestry represents. The economic issues are in addition to these more important concerns. As Guha puts it, ‘The conflicting perspectives rested on fundamentally different notions of the forest - on radically different systems of meaning’ (Guha 1993:87 ff.).

However, it mustn’t be imagined that Chipko has developed as an isolated, recent response. Forest protests have been endemic since the early twentieth century: 1916 & 1921 saw state-controlled forests deliberately burned by peasant protestors as a direct challenge to the state to relax forest regulations, and the protest was so popular that the government could not identify the direct culprits at any point. The protests were also very pointed: the only damage done was to monoculture stands, the natural forest being left well alone (Guha 1993:87). Chipko is simply the most recent and best known example of grassroots protest in the Hill regions.

The Green Revolution - Cure or Kill?

Even though a substantial amount of agricultural research is devoted to maintaining the gains of the green revolution, many other experts believe the era of dramatic yield increases based on the package of green revolution technologies is about over. One reason is that in many irrigated areas, especially in South-East Asia, plants have reached the limits of their capacity to absorb the nutrients in fertiliser. That means a point of diminishing returns has been reached, at which increases in fertiliser no longer convert into the high yields achieved during the peak years of the green revolution (Moffett 1994:74).

The Green Revolution is a prime example of the basic differences in approach between development theory and the subsistence perspectives. It is here that Shiva’s ‘monoculture of the mind’ is of particular use in analysing the non-Western perceptions of Western development programs.

The originators of the project were undoubtedly well-meaning; it was conceived as an answer to the looming threat of Third World famine, and its early results, as mentioned above, seemed positive. However, there were unexpected negatives even before it became apparent that the positives were to be short-lived. There seems to be strong theoretical and empirical support for the criticisms, despite the sometimes indignant, emotive, and even enraged rhetoric used in these exercises.

The negative consequences of the Green Revolution, as enumerated by its many critics, fall into three major categories: ecological, economic, and social.

Ecological Costs:

John Rouse, in his 1987 book Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Science, argues convincingly for the problems inherent in laboratory science, problems which impact on the Green Revolution technology. The laboratory is an artificial, closed environment, by necessity; if an experiment is to be rigorously controlled, no extraneous factors can be allowed, so transferring the results of an experiment into uncontrolled, natural environments often introduces factors not previously taken into account. In the case of the agricultural technology we are looking at here, the laboratory control of very precise amounts of irrigation, fertiliser, and pesticide is almost impossible to reproduce in natural environments and through the agency of farmers untrained in scientific techniques - who furthermore were often working under external constraints in projects which contradicted their own traditional wisdom and local knowledge (1987: 238 ff.).

The ecological costs are numerous, but most revolve around the monoculture process. Indigenous cropping systems are based only on internal organic inputs, with fertility controlled by farm output (manure, compost etc.), replacement crops by self-seeding, and pests by biodiversity (Shiva 1993b:42). Modern agricultural science will deny that pests can be controlled in this way, but the evidence is there - if one accepts the different priorities of indigenous systems, which are not particularly concerned with product presentation or uniformity. The loss of biodiversity removes this natural pest control.

Indigenous varieties or land races are resistant to locally occurring pests and diseases. Even if certain diseases occur, some of the strains may be susceptible, while others will have their resistance to survive. Crop rotations also help in pest control. Since many pests are specific to particular plants, planting crops in different seasons and different years causes large reductions in pest populations. On the other hand, planting the same crop over large areas year after year encourages pest build-ups. Cropping systems based on diversity thus have built-in protection (Shiva 1993:75).

Crop-diversity is also essential for maintaining soil fertility. Monocultures fed on chemical fertilisers destroy the basis of soil fertility; biodiversity enhances it. ‘The crisis of biodiversity is not just a crisis of the disappearance of species which have the potential of spinning dollars for corporate enterprises by serving as industrial raw material. It is, more basically, a crisis that threatens the life-support systems and livelihoods of millions of people in Third World countries’ (Shiva 1993b:68).

In addition, artificial pesticides at first lower, then ultimately increase, costs as pests become more chemical resistant and also as the chemicals poison the soil (O’Connor 1994:165-166). What ecological critics of the Green Revolution fear is that, even if these destructive practices are stopped, will the soil degradation caused by excessive fertiliser and pesticide use be reversible? An associated example is found in the consequences of commercial shrimp fisheries in the delta area of India’s east coast: rice-growing land has been appropriated for this purpose, and although there are valid criticisms to be made of the practice on purely economic and social grounds, the primary problem is that land used in this fashion, which requires flooding with salt water, is rendered useless for generations after the shrimp farms, which have a strictly limited life-span, are gone (Bennholdt-Thompson & Mies 1999:41-42).

As we saw with the forestry monoculture system, diversity becomes a nuisance to commercial frames of mind. Yet it is this very biological diversity which allowed the creation of the hybrid strains in the first place, and when we consider their susceptibility to pest and disease, the time will come when the practice of destroying the very building blocks on which the technology depends is going to come back and bite us. ‘In the words of Professor Garrison Wilkes of the University of Massachusetts, this is analogous to taking stones from a building’s foundation to repair the roof’ (Shiva 1993b:70-71).

Economic Costs:

Critics of the Green Revolution believe that, whatever the goodwill involved in the original development of this technology, it has now been appropriated by the TNCs that control and sell the seeds, the chemicals, the machinery, the ‘expertise’, and the fuel, and by the indigenous elites who accept monetary gain to support the TNCs. In this view, the mounting evidence of inadequacy and outright environmental damage is ignored because too much money is invested in continuing the Green Revolution technology.

A village of peasant rice-growers, prior to the Green Revolution, had a workable and integrated subsistence technology, perhaps increasingly supplemented by wage labour and widening markets with the growing city populations to feed, in which most of their needs were provided by the very processes of their subsistence agriculture. ‘Rice is not just grain, it provides straw for thatching and mat making, fodder for livestock, bran for fish ponds, husk for fuel. Local varieties of crops are selected to satisfy these multiple uses’ (Shiva 1993:48). The very animals used in ploughing and other heavy agricultural work also provided dairy products and fertiliser. Their economies were primarily subsistence, there was little hierarchical disparity in wealth, and the common good was the primary motivation of most activity. But to Western perceptions, such a life is ‘poor’ and ‘primitive’, and with typical missionary zeal, Western scientists and development experts set out to ‘improve’ the natives’ lot.

Supporters of the Green Revolution claim that it has brought economic improvement to peasant farmers. Donald Attwood is one development analyst who, although generally critical of the development paradigm as it is mostly practised, supports this particular aspect (Attwood 1988). However, he places all his eggs in the economic basket, as though economics can make up for all the ecological and social costs of the project. But although he quotes impressive figures for rises in yields, exports, and incomes in general, no note is made of the rise in actual cost of living brought about by the large ancillary costs to local farmers. He even admits (1988:14) that the project has widened income disparities while simultaneously claiming that there is no impoverishment. Furthermore, the only examples he gives of sustained improvement involves local co-operative initiatives in dry areas to use canal irrigation to grow sugar cane (1988:21 ff.)

Remenyi and Hancock (1999a:36) add to this faint praise with the information that cost to the local consumers of staple foods has fallen, as though farmers and consumers can be separated into unrelated categories. And one is left with the suspicion after reading these various economic success statistics that they apply primarily to recent events, and quite possibly represent nothing more than a partial return to parity after a distinct drop in standards of living. ‘Despite significantly increased aggregate food production, output on a per capita basis is actually well below what it was in the early decades of the century’ (Moffett 1994:71). And since so many of the peripheral costs for oil and artificial fertiliser are reliant on the Third World’s ability to pay for them, global events such as the Asian Crisis have the potential to seriously reduce the standard of living and could even lead to mass famine (Neurath 1994:153-154).

All of these analyses omit to mention the loss of all those peripheral products created in subsistence agriculture - food, fuel, fodder, fertiliser, fibre and medicine and so on - all of which have to be replaced by infinitely more expensive and often ecologically damaging replacements - the seeds, the chemicals, the machinery, the ‘expertise’, and the fuel, for instance.

They also omit to mention that the claims for the products themselves are often inflated or outright incorrect. Shiva suggests that the ‘high yield’ claims are little more than advertising rhetoric. The impression given is that these seeds are high-yield in comparison with local seeds, when in fact they are not - much as New and Improved OMO is 25% Cleaner and Whiter. The fact is that most of the local varieties will show similar or better yield improvements from similar fertiliser and irrigation inputs, but the local varieties are not popular in Western supermarkets (‘sticky’ rice, for instance, a local staple in many parts of SE Asia), nor do they require the services of seed companies. In essence, ‘these so-called HYV varieties increase grain production, by decreasing all other outputs, increasing external inputs, and introducing ecologically destructive impacts’ (Shiva 1993b:48).

Social Costs:

‘Development’, as a culturally biased process destroys wholesome and sustainable lifestyles and instead creates real material poverty, or misery, by denying the means of survival through the diversion of resources to resource-intensive commodity production. Cash crop production and food processing, by diverting land and water resources away from sustenance needs deprive increasingly large numbers of people from the means of satisfying their entitlements to food (Shiva 1993c:72-73)

In this quote the overlapping concerns of the Subsistence Perspective as represented by Bennholdt-Thompson & Mies, and the critique of monocultures as represented by Shiva, are clearly demonstrated. The processes of the Green Revolution change a sustainable economy, even if of low standard-of-living by Western parameters, into destitution and endemic poverty. 

Monoculture cannot effectively be applied to the small acreage that we find in typical peasant landholdings; the technology is designed for mass production agribusiness. The attempt to translate this big business model to a family farm context alters the economic balance within what are normally reciprocal economies, creating a climate of entrepreneurship in line with Western ideology, in which the better competitors displace the weaker. The essentially egalitarian nature of the social contract is transformed into a hierarchical and competitive system. Perhaps more importantly, agribusiness technology dramatically alters the need for, and therefore the economic value of, human agricultural labour. The result is ‘a massive reshaping of the social roles and practices of agricultural communities’ (Rouse 1987: 240).

Those who cannot compete effectively lose their farms and become either seasonal wage labourers without the capacity to support themselves in the off season, or they are forced to migrate, either in search of other seasonal work, or to the cities where they live in abject poverty. In many cases this forces the break-up of family units, which were previously the primary support structure of the Third World individual.

One of the most iniquitous results of this change to monocultures and cash cropping  is the phenomenon, most notable in South and Central America but also found in parts of Africa and Asia, of local populations suffering malnutrition and deprivation in the midst of plenty, because the fruits of their labour are grown for export to the North, or their agricultural acreage used for other export items: for example, strawberries from Mexico (Michaelson 1981:13), vegetables from Senegal, asparagus from Mexico (Capra & Spretnak 1984:168), subsistence agricultural and forest land in Brazil and Argentina cleared for beef cattle production for the hamburger chains of North America (Nations, Cesca, Martin, & Lacher 1995:270-271), soya beans in Brazil for cattle feed in the North, or bird seed grown in famine-stricken Sudan (Verhelst 1987:82), or any of a hundred more possible examples, while the workers who grow them go hungry. The choice land has all been subsumed for cash cropping, and subsistence crops are neglected.

Mies (1999:102) points out some of the consequences to Third World peasants of these practices: ‘destruction of areas traditionally used to feed the local population, concentration of the land and dispossession of the existing peasantry, chemical contamination of the soil and water’. The shrimp farms I mentioned earlier in another context have similar consequences: ‘the destruction of the local fishing and farming villages, who have lived from rice paddies and fishing for ages, have been robbed of their basis of subsistence’ (Bennholdt-Thompson & Mies 1999:41).

Another consequence of the monoculture ideology and the demand for food products to suit western tastes is the destruction of local plants which provide high levels of nutrition. Dietary experts have long criticised the processed white rice Westerners prefer to the brown and sticky rice varieties produced in Asia as lacking nutrition. By forcing Asian farmers to grow these Western varieties, and treating local ‘coarse grains’ with high nutritive value (such as mandua and ragi) as weeds because they inhibit the growth of the weaker hybrid seeds, the dietary consequences of economic deprivation are exacerbated by removal of local, high-value dietary supplements (Shiva 1993b:25).

Bathua is a local crop in India which has been labelled a weed by Western agricultural science because, given the same fertiliser, it is highly competitive with hybrid seeds; it is a high-nutrition, natural source of vitamin A, which is important in the growth of children because its lack causes night blindness; yet despite there being 40000 new cases of blindness in children each year in India, bathua is systematically poisoned (Shiva 1993b:25-26).

Summary:

There are clearly two ways of looking at the Green revolution. Supporters of ‘development’ and Western technology, with their manifest mission to improve the world, see it as a shining example of the wonders of modernisation, and an excellent example of good old capitalism at work into the bargain. Its more radical opponents see it as a form of institutionalised piracy; blind missionary zeal; technology gone mad; sheer bad science; or some combination of these. More objective analysts agree that there are problems with the project, but in the face of the perceived threat of famine due to overpopulation and continuing degradation of available agricultural land, can find no reasonable alternative.

The Subsistence Perspective, whilst not underestimating the difficulties involved, suggest that the answer lies in at least a partial return to subsistence lifestyles, boosted by appropriate technology and perhaps some form of economic assistance, at least initially (such as more backing for small loan banks like Grameen in Bangladesh, or those run by Action India and the Self-Employed Women’s Association [SEWA] in Gujarat and Kerala). The stumbling block to this suggestion is the entrenched development/growth/capitalist paradigm which is based on the oppositional epistemology of Western culture, and the massive forces which support Western epistemological hegemony.

CHAPTER FIVE:

ALTERNATIVE DEVELOPMENT OR ALTERNATIVES TO DEVELOPMENT?

The Myth of Development:

The myth of development constitutes part of the social imaginary of Western societies. It is for this reason that - despite the transfer of goods, gadgets, capital, technology, hospitals and roads - the economic policies and the socioeconomic accomplishments of the West cannot be replicated in Third World countries. From the material point of view everything is set to go, but the symbolic engine is missing (Rist 1990 cited in Tucker 1999:2).

Tucker works in the Alternative Development field, and is critical not of the concept of development itself, but of the western model of development I have been discussing throughout this thesis. Wignaraja (1993) falls part way between Alternative Development and the Subsistence Perspective, being primarily concerned with grassroots initiatives, particularly towards self-sustenance. Both writers see Western technology and expertise as supplementary to development, not, as is seen in the dominant paradigm, central to it. Both are far more interested in human and social development than they are in economic development, and both see local autonomy as crucial to the process. 

Tucker emphasises the power of Western hegemony. Western discourse is used as a tool to belittle and disempower non-Western epistemologies. He sees development as it is practised as ‘the process whereby other peoples are dominated and their destinies are shaped according to an essentially western way of conceiving and perceiving the world’. The hegemony is so obvious as to need little more comment, but Tucker also points out the issue that drives much of the Alternative Development critique: that people subject to this hegemony have their lives and futures shaped by others who share ‘neither their lifestyles, nor their hopes nor their values’. And furthermore, that this manipulation is wrapped up in a discourse that portrays it as a positive and desirable process (1999:1).

In light of the definition I suggested for ‘development’ in the introduction, ‘….economic growth, industrial development and the establishment of complementary social and political institutions designed on the model of the USA’ , he asks the crucial question: must Third World societies ‘develop or perish? Or, put differently, is civilisation as we know it compulsory?’ (Tucker 1999:3).

The most common phrase found throughout the critique of Western development, in writer after writer, is ‘the failure of development’ (Tucker 1999:1; Hancock 1999:159; de Sousa Santos 1999:35; Verhelst 1987:9, to name but a handful). Even those who still hold to a belief in development (of the benign, human-social kind) take this view of the current practice. The critiques are based on the objective evidence that shows that many parts of the world are worse off after fifty years of development than they were before; such societies have been promised a ‘trickle-down’ effect by which, eventually, benefits will come their way if only they will accept the intermediate deprivations: to date, after fifty years or so of such promises, there is very little evidence that anything has ever trickled down. The results of IMF and World bank adjustment and recovery programs have, instead, been ‘death, disease, alienation, riots and crisis. The political tensions that have accompanied monetarism have furthered repression, human rights abuses, riots and national disintegration’ (Ihonvbere 1994:51).

Development as a practical and intellectual project has been steeped in optimism. Yet, after more than three decades of development, many areas of the world are worse off today than they were thirty years ago, despite development programs and aid. Millions of Africans suffer and die from starvation and malnutrition. In the face of such failure, deterioration and destruction, we cannot persist in talking about development as the harbinger of human emancipation. It would seem that the model of development now widely pursued is part of the problem rather than the solution (Tucker 1999:1)

Cultural Ignorance:

It cannot be suggested that Western development experts are congenitally stupid, so how can these disparities between rhetoric and practice occur? Clearly the epistemological split is part of the answer, and as a corollary of that split we can suggest that cultural ignorance plays a major part as well. Most critiques are based on the understanding that we must consider people’s values, ideas and beliefs, their identity and feelings, how they view the world and their place in it, and what is meaningful to them in any development program (Tucker 1999:4). The arrogance that comes with the Western hegemony refuses to consider cultural differences as a factor.

A Europe-centred development discourse has considerable difficulty in imagining that other ways of organising the world, other forms of rationality, other ways of life, can possibly provide coherence or satisfaction for their adherents. It tends to colonise and destroy the imaginary of others. In its failure to confront the historical roots of its own discourse, it reduces other worlds to its own mirror image (Tucker 1999:7-8).

Tucker is a champion of the cultural approach to development, and suggests that from the cultural perspective ‘the meaning of development cannot be taken for granted’. Without considering cultural differences in the way other societies and peoples describe and experience the world they live in, ‘development’ becomes a form of social engineering based on the western model of society - a theme which runs through much of this thesis (Tucker 1997:4).

In looking at the subject through a cultural lens, we can see how these different perceptions drive Third World resistance, giving the Third World a degree of agency that is mostly ignored by the Western hegemony argument, be it from either the modernisation or dependency standpoints; ‘we must also recognise that hegemony is never complete’ (Tucker 1999:14). What Western developers see as either inexplicable resistance or stupidity and ignorance on the part of ‘primitives’, anthropologists have long recognised as rational cultural responses to new social factors.

It seems we underestimate the ‘cultural resilience and dynamism’ of the non-Western cultures with which we interfere. They tend to ‘indigenise’ cultural imports (like Christianity, for example), giving them their own cultural meanings (Tomlinson 1997:27). Development interventions are ‘transformed, reformulated, adopted or resisted in local encounters’, in attempts to separate them from the ideological ‘baggage’ on which they are based (Nustad 2001:485). In Africa, for example, they often divert development programs to their own purposes, within their own logical and social parameters. Projects designed from the individualistic viewpoint of the West, aimed at individual maximisation of advantage, are transformed where possible into communal advantage, and ignored or resisted when that is not possible (Zaoual 1997:32). 

Tucker and others, with their emphasis on social and human development, see it as important that this counter hegemonic movement be incorporated into the Western development discourse (Tucker 1997:11).

Indeed if development is to be conceived of primarily in terms of the struggle for control of destinies then the development of most of the peoples of the globe will be largely an account of the ways in which they resisted, manipulated, accommodated and adapted to the forces impinging on them. It is this struggle for hegemony and counter hegemony, in which ‘development’ has become a contested site, that is the terrain of cultural analysis (Tucker 1997:7)

Human Development:

It is possible for a country to exhibit economic growth, with all the right statistical indicators clearly showing rises in real income over time, without any ‘true’ development. Economic development may have been associated with severe environmental costs of economic growth, little of which has been factored into the statistical measurements of national income (Remenyi 1999:70)

Development indicators and other forms of economic measures are highly contextual, and most observers consider them methodologically risky at best. Western mainstream development experts and economists use almost exclusively some form of Gross or National Domestic Product; critics of this point out that, (1) such measures attempt to reduce everything to economic terms, which ignores social and human issues, (2) that national income accounts are not merely ‘imperfect’ but actually misleading indicators because they are so easily manipulated to suit political purposes,  and (3) that they treat ‘externalised’ costs (ecological and social damage) as a positive in economic terms while denying their existence in practical and policy terms (Friedmann 1992:37 ff.).

Economists and development theorists use GDP and similar measures to indicate changes in the standard of living; evidence of the ‘success’ of a development program is found in rises in economic growth. Critics of the measures suggest that using economic growth alone overstates improvements in living standards on a number of counts, which in many ways overlap with the general critiques of the measures stated above: they count ‘defensive’ expenditures, expenditures incurred to maintain living standards in the face of adverse changes; they ignore externalities (industrial costs borne by society, like pollution or loss of biodiversity), which boost the figures while providing ‘negative benefit’; and they take no account changes in input, such as decreases in available resources, or increases in labour time (Dodds 1997:107).

Human development indicators, on the other hand, attempt to measure quality of life, in which economic issues are only a part of the equation. Economists are not comfortable with these measures, as they are, in some respects at least, based on subjective, sometimes intangible data. Both forms of indicator must be considered as crude approximations, even when not actually inaccurate factually (McGillivary & Hancock 199:48). However, at this point in time they are the best we can do if we insist on having objective measures of what are predominantly subjective phenomena.

Social development must be understood as a broad phenomenon - one which includes social and welfare services; progress in tackling problems such as unemployment, poverty, crime, violence, drugs and child labour; relations among different groups; development of institutions and promotion of human rights, gender equality, and participation … (Ghai 2000:2)

The alternative development approaches which concern themselves with this form of indicator are closely related to the subsistence perspectives, as they move the emphasis away from the state and reorient them at the level of the family or the local community (Friedmann 1992:31), and/or seek ‘alternative driving forces for a self-sustaining accumulation’ through ‘human development, growth, equity and technological change with a wiser and more creative use of local resources and knowledge’ (Wignaraja 1993:9).

Improvements in health and education, the two major areas of social development, do not necessarily indicate improvements in other social indicators such as  poverty or human rights, but they are almost certainly a prerequisite (Ghai 2000:2); by the same token, nor are they necessarily tied into economic performance. 

The claims of the development paradigm, through the international agencies, is that economic growth brings with it improvements in all areas. Even if income trickle-down theory is a fraction suspect, at least the social indicators improve with economic growth. It is thus necessary to follow the conventional wisdom, apply SAPs to the economy, and all will be well. And then there was the Asian Crisis. It is unnecessary to go into this in any detail, but one particular aspect of the crisis is important in the context of this section, and that is the performance of Malaysia (and the handful of other countries which refused to accept the IMF loans and SAPs), and who, in stark contrast to its closest neighbours Indonesia and Thailand, weathered the storm relatively easily and recovered much more quickly (Gershon & Hancock 1999:115). Critics of the Western development paradigm, including Professor Stiglitz in his critique of the IMF (above), find this a useful chink in the conventional wisdom’s armour. So do those who use the Kerala Model as an example of non-economic development success.

The Kerala Model:

In the last few years, the so-called ‘Kerala model’ has attracted the attention of students of Third World ‘development’. The model suggests that a highly politicised population can force a measure of land reform and improvements in public health, which will in return reduce infant mortality and lead to a falling birth rate, thus relieving ‘the grip of extreme deprivation’. In the Kerala example, all this happens without either an industrial or a political revolution. Literacy seems to be crucial in the process. Throughout the world, for example, high female literacy is usually correlated with lower fertility and a declining birth rate (Jeffrey 1987:467-468).

Kerala seems to be an anomaly. As one of the poorest states in India (whose own economic record in the past fifty years has been far from encouraging), and one of the least industrialised, one would expect it to show significant evidence of poverty, illiteracy, poor health, and so on. The figures do not bear out this prediction. India’s general figures for infant mortality and life expectancy, for instance, are significantly worse than Kerala’s, which compare favourably with many Western nations, including Australia. Kerala State shows that Third World people can make their lives better in the absence of industrialisation or large-scale economic growth (Franke & Chasin 1995:25). Kerala’s accomplishment shows that social development factors are not reliant on economic growth or industrialisation, a finding also in other areas of the Third World, although not as clearly so as in Kerala and Cuba (Ramachandran 2000:46).

Some Comparative Development Statistics

Fig. 1

Note: the figures in brackets are the OECD ranking of the country.

* Data from www.oedc.org

§ Data from www.undp.org

There are numerous suggestions as to why Kerala’s results are so impressive, but almost all of them revolve around literacy; Kerala also has an excellent record in relation to women’s conditions, generally seen as being related to literacy.  In 1991 Kerala was proclaimed the first totally literate state in India (Ghai 2000:27), and it also has ‘the highest female literacy rate, the highest ratio of females to males, and the second highest age of marriage for women in India’  (Liddle & Joshi 1986:187).

One element certainly appears to be the relatively high regard in which women have been held in Kerala since pre-colonial times. This is put down to the predominance of matrilineal customs in Kerala, through the Nayars and Ezhavas. As an early census report (compiled by a Brahmin) put it, ‘a female child is prized more highly than a male one’ in these matrilineal societies, and consequently there were fewer restrictions on female education in Kerala (Jeffrey 1987:465). Women have always outnumbered men in this region as well (Liddle & Joshi 1996:6), and this combination of high female valuation, literacy, and numerical superiority appears to have led to a social awareness unusual in Third World cultures. It is worth noting that it is Kerala and its neighbouring state Gujarat in which the influential Indian women’s union movement (SEWA) originated, and has had so much influence.

Education and literacy create awareness of social factors, like health and hygiene, family planning, and political activism (Ghai 2000:13); Ramachandran (2000) also considers important the fact that Kerala made the choice to push for vernacular literacy rather than English, and the consequent early establishment of vernacular newspapers. These elements must have gone a long way toward explaining the difference between Kerala and the rest of India; Kerala has remained closer to its roots in Indian culture as a result of these choices, whereas the rest of India chose to internalise the colonial system. The one has remained relatively attached to non-Western epistemology and subsistence perspectives, while the other has moved away from them.

But reading about community health does not necessarily make it happen; for all that critics of Modernity may rail at the excesses of science and technology, ‘science as technology can be liberating where it is labour-saving or life-saving’ (Corbridge 1998:143). And here perhaps lies an example of the contextual use of ‘appropriate technology’ that Mies speaks of as a part of a modern subsistence perspective. But the success of the Kerala model, revolving around literacy and education, shows that Modernity, with its medical techniques and understanding of hygiene and housing needs is not necessarily tied up with economic development.

The Cuban Parallels:

Cuba planned its post-revolutionary development around equality and poverty alleviation, and the success of this priority is clear. Infant mortality, for instance, is not quite as strong as in Kerala, but is nevertheless only fractionally worse than, say, Australia or Denmark, which rank 2 & 14 respectively in the OECD rankings where Cuba ranks down with India in the low 100s.

In the early 1990s, Cuba ranked among the top 5 per cent of 127 developing countries in such social indicators as life expectancy at birth, infant mortality and adult literacy. In fact, Cuba’s population fared better in these areas than did the people of several of the 47 higher-income ‘industrial countries’. Moreover, the data indicate that Cuba made considerable progress in social development during the past four decades, even though its economic growth during this period was not very strong and its economy suffered a very sharp decline in the early 1990s (Barraclough 2000:229).

As noted above, statistics on social indicators are risky, and in Cuba’s case perhaps more so because of its political isolation over the past thirty years. However, since precisely the same caveat can be made about figures which criticise Cuba, or, for that matter, play up the successes of ‘developed’ societies, we have little choice but to go with what we have (Barraclough 2000:231). And what we have shows remarkable similarity to figures found in the Kerala Model.

Fig. 2