UNDP as biotech salesman

By Vandana Shiva

Human Development Reports were till now pathbreaking because they broke free of ruling orthodoxies and dominant paradigms of development and growth. They literally turned development on its head.

The Human Development Report 2001 focussing on ``Making new technologies work for Human Development'' reverses the search for new perspectives and paradigms, especially for assessing technologies.

The report reinforces the myth of technology as politically neutral. It reinforces the old development paradigm based on technological determinism which perceives development as based primarily on technological development, in spite of the earlier human development reports having shown that industrialised societies can often be low in the human development indices.

It also reinforces the myth that the Third World is a ``technology follower,'' and the West is the source of all technology, even though modern organic agriculture was transferred to the West from Indian peasants by Sir Albert Howard, even though one in three U.S. citizens use Indian or Chinese medicine today and in spite of the blaring biopiracy of indigenous knowledge as in the case of neem, turmeric, basmati, tamarind etc. The Report has totally blocked out the existence and spread of technologies and innovations of the South, and the technology transfer from South to North so well documented in Dharampal's historical work `Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century.' Worse, it even justifies richness and poverty of the North and South which has been created by political and economic processes as based on an ``ecological divide.''

The interesting question to have been raised and answered was why in spite of being ecologically rich, the South has become economically poor, why in spite of being the source of agrobiodiversity and medicinal plant biodiversity, the agricultural and health systems of Third World countries are in crisis, why hunger and disease are growing. The relationships between technology and trade would then have thrown up interesting new perspectives for human development.

A central tenet of technological determinism is that technology shapes society and technological change is always positive and progressive. The UNDP report repeats the assumption that ``New technologies improve on the ones they replace.'' Large dams were supposed to improve on indigenous water harvesting structures but they have displaced millions of people and destroyed millions of acres of fertile land. Chemical pesticides were supposed to have been an improvement on natural pesticides, but they have led to increase in pests through build up of resistance. Plastics were supposed to be an improvement on cloth bags. Today getting rid of plastic bags is a big campaign everywhere. The ``new'' is not always better, the old need not always disappear. In fact, ecological concern is bringing back technologies which were considered obsolete.

The debate about technology today is about ecology, ethics, culture, livelihoods and justice. It is about cultural diversity and cross cultural fertilization of innovation. The technology report misses the core of contemporary technology debates. It is triply outmoded.

For example, it talks of 100,000 Indian software professionals going to the U.S. annually when 50,000 jobless Indian professionals from the U.S. IT sector are returning home because of the collapse of IT firms and the economic slowdown.

It talks of ``trust in technology'' and adoption to risks in the age of the Mad Cow and Foot and Mouth epidemics. It talks of reduction in undernutrition in South Asia and end of chronic famine at a time when starvation deaths and famines are making a comeback due to a decade of trade liberalisation policies and unregulated introduction of inappreciative capital intensive technologies in agriculture. It talks of industrialisation of the textile sector allowing employment and incomes to increase at a time when thousands of Indian weavers are being pushed to starvation and suicide because of unemployment caused by dismantling the policies that protected the handloom sector and handloom weavers.

Charkha's symbolism

For us in India, breaking free of mills of Manchester and Lancashire was necessary for freedom and survival. Ignoring the entire experience of India's freedom struggle through the spinning wheel (charkha), the UNDP report states in a section on ``costs of inertia versus costs of change'' - The crisis of unemployment and fall in incomes faced by weavers today was a crisis also generated a century and half ago by the mechanisation of the textile industry in Britain. There was also a devastating impact of the new textile mills opened in India on the handloom weavers.

Gandhi's critique of the industrialisation of India on the western model was based on his perception of the poverty, dispossession and destruction of livelihoods which resulted from it. ``Why must India become industrial in the western sense?', Gandhi has asked. ``What is good for one nation situated in one condition is not necessarily good for another differently situated. One man's food is often another man's poison....Mechanisation is good when hands are too few for the work intended to be accomplished. It is an evil where there are more hands than required for the work as is the case in India.''

People cannot be forced and coerced to adopt to technology as an end. With a totally one-sided view of the history of technology, the UNDP Technology report refers only to Britain's experience of mechanisation of textiles and describes defense of alternatives as ``inertia.''

In the debate on technology and genetic engineering, the report states that Western consumers who do not face food shortages or nutritional deficiencies or work in fields are more likely to focus on food safety and the potential loss of biodiversity, while farming communities in developing countries are more likely to focus on potentially higher yields and greater nutritional value, and on the reduced need to spray pesticides that can damage soil and sicken farmers. This is a very distorted and misleading caricature of the history of debates, negotiations and controversies on genetic engineering. Firstly, Western consumers rejected GM foods long after Third World farmers in India have burnt the trial crops of Monsanto's genetically engineered Bt. Cotton. Secondly, the movement for biosafety has not been led by Western consumers but by Third World governments. To erase the concerns of the South for safety and ecological risks of genetic engineering and reduce these to luxury concerns of Western consumers alone is a distortion of the history of the biosafety debate. That the UNDP should be playing a lead role in erasing the leadership of the South in shaping the biosafety debate is indeed tragic.

Much of the false promise of genetic engineering upheld by the biotech industry and the UNDP report is based on earlier myths about the Green Revolution. The report states in the Section on Food production and Nutrition that technological progress has played a similar role in accelerating food production. Unfortunately, the opposite is true. The Green Revolution focussed only on labour productivity, not resource productivity. In terms of nutrition per acre, both the Green Revolution and genetic engineering are inefficient and wasteful technologies and create nutritional poverty.

In the final analysis, all that the report has done is offer a desperate sales pitch for genetic engineering. That is how it is being used. It has failed to move the debate on technology forward. And it has failed miserably as a Human Development Report.

(The writer is Director, Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, New Delhi.)

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