Beyond Developmentality: Constructing Inclusive Freedom and Sustainability

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BEYOND Developmentality Constructing Inclusive Freedom and Sustainability

BEYOND Developmentality Constructing Inclusive Freedom and Sustainability

Debal Deb

London • Sterling, VA

First published by Earthscan in the UK and USA in 2009 First published in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar and Afghanistan by Dhruva Narayan for Daanish Books in 2009 Copyright © Debal Deb, 2009 All rights reserved ISBN:

978-1-84407-711-3 hardback 978-1-84407-712-0 paperback

Editorial assistance: Urmila Desor Production assistance: Akhilesh Choudhary Cover design: Susanne Harris For a full list of publications please contact: Earthscan Dunstan House 14a St Cross St London, EC1N 8XA, UK Tel: +44 (0)20 7841 1930 Fax: +44 (0)20 7242 1474 Email: [email protected] Web: www.earthscan.co.uk 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166-2012, USA Earthscan publishes in association with the International Institute for Environment and Development A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for At Earthscan we strive to minimize our environmental impacts and carbon footprint through reducing waste, recycling and offsetting our CO2 emissions, including those created through publication of this book. For more details of our environmental policy, see www.earthscan.co.uk. This book was printed in the UK by Antony Rowe. The paper used is FSC certified and the inks are vegetable based.

I dedicate this work to my parents: Smt. Jaya Deb and the late Amarendra Krishna Deb, and the mentor of my teens: the late Susanta Kumar Basu, who nurtured in me the desire to eclose from the cocoon of conformity.

Contents

Acknowledgements ................................................................................................... xvii Preface: A View from America ................................................................................. xix by Richard Norgaard Introduction

1

Chapter 1 The Doctrine of Development

15

1.1 The Epistemology of Development ................................................................... 16 1.2 Enlightenment, Progress and Imperialism ....................................................... 22 1.3 Technology, Nature and Development .............................................................. 33 1.4 Development and the Western Hegemony ....................................................... 41

Chapter 2 Myths and Misconceptions

55

2.1 Fallacies in Assumptions ..................................................................................... 55 2.1.1 Economic Rationality ................................................................................ 56 2.1.2 Technological Fixes.................................................................................... 61 2.1.3 The Value of Natural Resources ............................................................... 63 2.1.4 The Myth of Substitutability ..................................................................... 69 2.1.5 Rates of Profit and Discounting ............................................................... 70 2.1.6 Linkages between Positive Rates of Profit and Growth ........................ 75 vii

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2.1.7 The Presumption of GNP as Prosperity ................................................. 77 2.1.8 The Belief in the Omnipotence of the Market ....................................... 81 2.8.9 The False Linkage of Commodities with Happiness ............................. 83 2.2. Revisions and Reconciliation .............................................................................. 86 2.1.1 Fine-tuning the GNP Index ..................................................................... 86 2.1.2 Counting Natural Capital ......................................................................... 90 2.1.3 Costing the Uncostable ............................................................................. 92 2.1.4 GNP and Environmental Care ................................................................. 96 2.1.5 Prosperity vs Capability ............................................................................ 97 2.3 Persistent Failures, Nonetheless ......................................................................... 98

Chapter 3 Propagating Profligacy

103

3.1 The Colonial Campaign of Development ....................................................... 104 3.2 Post-colonial Idioms of Development ............................................................. 115 3.2.1 Crimes of Development .......................................................................... 122 3.2.2 Malthusian Metaphors ............................................................................ 132 3.2.3 Plunder by Aid and Trade ...................................................................... 150

Chapter 4 Fantasies and Falsities

165

4.1 The Fantastic World of Consumerism............................................................. 166 4.2 The Swollen Face of Development ................................................................... 174 4.2.1 Forest Development................................................................................. 181 4.2.2 Agricultural Development ...................................................................... 192 4.3 Genetic Engineering in Agriculture: Another Green Revolution?.............. 218 4.4 Neither Green nor Productive .......................................................................... 221

Chapter 5 Arguments for Alternatives

225

5.1 A Legacy of Questioning Progress ................................................................... 225 5.2 Golden Past, Doomed Future, Wise East ........................................................ 230 5.3 Quest for Alternatives ........................................................................................ 236 5.4 The Emergence of Environmental Ethics........................................................ 240

Contents

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Chapter 6 Search for Sustainability

253

6.1 Development of an Epistemology .................................................................... 253 6.2 Ecological Prudence and Sustainability .......................................................... 268 6.3 Economic Efficiency vs Ecological Efficiency ................................................ 276 6.4 Sustainable Development: A Panoply of Meanings ....................................... 281 6.4.1 Weak Sustainability: Sustaining Industrial Growth ............................ 282 6.4.2 Strong Sustainability: Ecocentric Considerations ............................... 285 6.5 Empirical Ground for Sustainability: Sustainable Agriculture .................... 297 6.5.1 Models of Sustainable Agriculture ........................................................ 300 6.5.2 Taking Stock: Benefits from Ecological Agriculture ........................... 310

Chapter 7 Consilience and Change

327

7.1 ‘Post-modern Ecology’: A Paradigm Shift? ................................................... 328 7.2 The Science and Economics of Sustainability ............................................... 334 7.3 Pre-industrial Societies and Models of Sustainability ................................... 338 7.3.1 The Traditional and the Indigenous ...................................................... 339 7.3.2 Indigenous Societies and the Prudent Use of Resources ................................................................ 345 7.3.3 The Commons and the Communitarian Ethos ................................... 348 7.4 Sustainability, Freedom and Ethics5 ................................................................. 350 7.4.1 Sustainability and Democracy ............................................................... 352 7.4.2 The Market vs. the Commons ................................................................ 355 7.4.3 Freedom and Sustainability .................................................................... 357 7.4.4 The Market as Liberator? ........................................................................ 358 7.4.5 Exclusive Freedom vs Freedom of Counterfactual Choice ............................................................................ 360 7.4.6 Freedom and Right to Informed Choice .............................................. 361 7.4.7 Freedom and Power ................................................................................. 363 7.4.8 Toward an Inclusive Freedom ................................................................ 366 7.5 Agents of Change ............................................................................................... 368 7.5.1 The Civic Community ............................................................................. 369 7.5.2 Individuals ................................................................................................ 384

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Chapter 8 Superstructural Superpositions

389

8.1 ABC of Social Statics: Academia, Bureaucracy, Commerce......................... 391 8.1.1 The Elite View of Environmentalism .................................................... 392 8.1.2 Science, Policy and Development ......................................................... 401 8.1.3 Policy, Conformity and Bureaucratic Inertia ....................................... 417 8.1.4 Commerce, Corruption and Developmentality .................................. 423 8.2 Sabotaging Sustainability................................................................................... 433 8.2.1 Corporations, Unite!................................................................................ 433 8.2.2 Free Market (Di)Versions of Sustainability .......................................... 451 8.2.3 Contracting Development ...................................................................... 457 8.3 Public Understanding of Science and Developmentality ..................................464 8.3.1 Science in Ideology .................................................................................. 467 8.3.2 Political Co-optation of Environmentalism ......................................... 473 8.4 Media, Alternative Voice and Development .................................................. 479 8.4.1 The Prevailing Educational System Fostering Mainstream Development Ethic ............................................................ 484 8.4.2 The Tradition of Estrangement of the Environmental Issues from Electoral Politics ..................................... 486 8.4.3 Corporate Control over Media .............................................................. 488 8.4.4 The General Apathy of the Body Politic toward Alternatives ........... 491

Chapter 9 Inferences and Implications

495

9.1 Comprehending the Crisis ................................................................................ 496 9.2 Prerequisites for Eco-Socialist Transformation ............................................ 498 9.2.1 9.2.2 9.2.3 9.2.4 9.2.5

Environmental Literacy........................................................................... 499 Ecological Ethic ........................................................................................ 500 Civic Democracy...................................................................................... 503 Inclusive Freedom .................................................................................... 505 Dissolution of Private as well as State Ownership of Natural Resources ............................................................................... 505 9.2.6 Accretion of Radicals to a Threshold Number .................................... 507 9.3 Conceptual Blocks and Empirical Hurdles ..................................................... 509 9.4 Prognosticating a Sustainable World ............................................................... 517

List of Tables

Table 3.1. Population Sizes and Indexes of Development, Resource Consumption and Environmental Impact for Selected Countries ................................................................................... 146 Table 4.1. Toxic Agrochemical Residues found in Human viscera samples from major cities in north India. ............................................................................................... 211 Table 6.1. Characteristics of Rice Landraces Desired by Indigenous Farmers in the Philippines and West Bengal, India ................................................................................... 303 Table 6.2. Annual Per Hectare Production Profiles of Multiple-cropping and Monoculture Farms ........................................ 318 Table 6.3. Practices Affecting Biodiversity in Agroecosystems ........................... 322 Table 8.1. An Illustrative List of Bankrolled Organizations Promoting Corporate Interests .............................................................. 444

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List of figures

Figure 1. Population extinction caused by a constant harvest rate Hcrit = 490. .......................................................... 65 Figure 2. Weighted mean income per capita (M) for a population with a fraction n1 whose total income is $1. ...................................................................................... 90 Figure 3. Ilustrative Use Values and Non-use Values of Biodiversity and Economic Valuation Techniques................................ 95 Figure 4. Malthusian Population Growth with r = 0.69. ..................................... 137 Figure 5. Regression of Total Fertility Rates against Infant Mortality Rates. ............................................................... 143 Figure 6. Regression of Crude Birth (per 1000) against Infant Mortality Rates ................................................................ 143 Figure 7. The Growth of Maquiladora Firms in Mexico..................................... 155 Figure 8. Increases in land under cultivation, irrigation coverage and production of wheat (top) and rice (bottom). .................................... 200

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Figure 9. The Power Function Relationship of Production (P) of Rice and Wheat with Expansion of Cropland Area (A) ................ 201 Figure 10. Regression of Production of Rice and Wheat against Proportion of Irrigation Coverage .............................. 202 Figure 11. Recent Trend of Major Cereals Yield in India ..................................... 204 Figure 12. Annual Growth in Foodgrain Production (percent per annum compounded) ....................................................... 204 Figure 13. Logistic Population Growth (r = 1.2 and K = 100). ............................ 261 Figure 14. Stable Oscillation of Population (r = 2 and K = 100) ......................... 262 Figure 15. Logistic Growth of a Prey Population, and Prey-dependent Growth of a Predator Population...................... 262 Figure 16. Logistic Growth of a Single Species Population ................................. 263 Figure 17. Conservation Consequences of Biophilous Ethic in Indigenous Cultures. ........................................................................... 273 Figure 18. Profiles of Benefit, Cost, and Efficiency of the Economy based on Natural Resource Extraction .................... 279 Figure 19. Growth of a Species Population X(t) with r = 1.1 and Xc = 0.2, Below which It Fails to Survive .............................................. 287 Figure 20. An Illustrative Relationship of the Function of Utility of a Resource with Its Consumption Level (expressed as fraction of all available resources) ................................. 289 Figure 21. Relationship of Loge-transformed Net Farm Profit with Loge-transformed Crop Species Number ............................................. 318 Figure 22. Involvement of NGOs in ADB Loan Approvals in Member Countries .............................................................................. 460

List of Boxes & Technical Discussion

Boxes Box 3.1: Chixoy Dam Project ................................................................................... 126 Box 3.2: Singur and Nandigram: Faces of State Terrorism and Development ............................................ 128 Box 4.1: Joint Forest Management: An Altered Forestry Approach ................... 189 Box 6.1: Fire Control Strategies of Mizo Shifting Cultivators ............................. 306 Box 6.2: Shifting Cultivation and Forest Flora ...................................................... 324 Box 7.1: Sacred Groves and Ponds of the Indian Subcontinent .......................... 345 Box 7.2: The Radical Green and the Traditional Left ........................................... 373 Box 7.3: Jadugoda Uranium Miners’ Health Safety Litigation Case ................... 379 Box 8.1: All the King’s Men vs Tehelka.com .......................................................... 429 Box 8.2: Bhopal: Crime and Complicity ................................................................. 431 Box 8.3: EIA: Easy Income for Assessors? .............................................................. 440 xv

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Technical Discussions Technical Discussion 1: Resource, Population and Critical Harvest Level .................................................................................. 64 Technical Discussion 2: Positive Rate of Discount and Quantitative Growth .................................................................................... 71 Technical Discussion 3: Positive Rates of Profit and Economic Growth ........................................................................................ 76 Technical Discussion 4: Calculating Resource-Weighted Mean Income ................................................................................................ 89 Technical Discussion 5: Malthusian Population Growth and Doubling Time ............................................................................................ 136 Technical Discussion 6: The Handicap Principle and Conspicuous Consumption ...................................................................... 171 Technical Discussion 7: Stability and Resilience of Ecosystems............................ 257 Technical Discussion 8: Environmental Carrying Capacity and Population Dynamics................................................................................. 261 Technical Discussion 9: Ecological Inefficiency of an Extractive Economy .............................................................................. 278 Technical Discussion 10: Minimum Viable Population.......................................... 287 Technical Discussion 11: Resource Utility and Social Welfare Function ............................................................................. 288 Technical Discussion 12: Maintaining Resource Stock for Undiminishing Future Welfare ................................................................. 294 Technical Discussion 13: The Spread of a Meme in a Population with Biased Transmission .......................................................................... 509

Acknowledgements

T

his work began with support from Ford Foundation Culture and Environmental Residential Fellowship at Institute of International Studies of the University of California at Berkeley in Fall 2001. I owe special thanks to Prof. Michael Watts of IIS for all the logistic and intellectual support he provided me, and to Heather, Dena and Tami for the care they took of me during my stay at Berkeley. Soon after I returned home from Berkeley, my brother, a social worker, was arrested on fictitious charges. In my battle to save him and his work from the clutches of the district administration, my work on this book halted. A refreshed knowledge about the state’s welfare operations made me feel too anguished to finish the book. At this time, emotional support and encouragement from my love Mita, my old pals Kajal and Debashis, and my brother Kunal brought me back to work on the book. My mother’s constant care allowed me to disregard many important matters and concentrate on the work. My colleagues Debdulal, Haru, Raju and Swapan shared most of the workload at my research station, thus sparing me enough time in the field. Mere words cannot express my gratitude to them. I am no expert in many of the topics that I have discussed. Yet I have ventured into this task because obviously, I am not prudent, but also because some of the people I greatly admire encouraged me to brave the challenge. Prof. Asish K Ghosh, Prof. Richard Norgaard, Prof. John Bellamy Foster, Prof. Michael Watts, Dr. Tapas K Ghose, Paolo Roberto Imperiali, Roberto Cerrina, and Steve Walsh are among them. I have extensively drawn on ideas, insights and works of numerous experts in diverse fields. It is impossible to record a comprehensive account of xvii

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my intellectual debt to them, most of whom I know only through their writings. Some of them are cited in the text. Numerous people have helped me in shaping my ideas, refining my opinion, revising the draft, polishing the argument, correcting syntaxes and keeping me abreast of current research. A list of all their names will be too long. I must especially mention Celine Dutilly, Dave Rowe, Debashis Biswas, Debashis Sen, Heather Hansen, Martyn Brown, Partha Majumdar, Samantak Das and Tathagata Banerjee, for their most perceptive comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript. Swati Sircar of the University of Washington helped me find solution to a nutty equation, which I have used in a technical discussion on sustainable harvest of a limiting resource. Gregor Weingart of UC-Berkeley emboldened me to use some maths to clarify my points, and refined them, especially my discussion of the harmonic average of per capita income. Martyn and Celine offered point-by-point suggestions to improve style and sharpen my ideas. Mere words of thanks cannot express my gratitude to all these wonderful people, who keep this world inhabitable. Dr. Vandana Shiva, a great inspiration to many activists and thinkers, inspired me to collate my ideas and work on sustainable agriculture. The outcome was my book Industrial versus Ecological Agriculture, published in 2004 by Research Foundation for Science Technology and Ecology, New Delhi. Sections 4.2.2 and 6.5 are excerpted from this book. A slightly modified version of the contents of Section 7.4 and part of Section 9.4 was published as ‘Development against freedom and sustainability’ in Capitalism Nature Socialism 17(3) (September 2006): 49–70. I owe special thanks to Prof. Joel Kovel for his valuable suggestions that enabled me to explicitly articulate the eco-socialist principles. A note on the hands behind this publication: Dhruva Narayan of Daanish Books took a courageous decision in 2006 to publish it, and showed remarkable patience to put up with successive phases of up-dating of the text, and all my idiosyncrasies, for two years. In this context, I would like to record my delight as 1 remember how my amazing e-friend Dr. Oliver Springate-Baginski of the University of East Anglia took a pro-active role to introduce my MS to Rob West of Earthscan, who is kind enough to have readily agreed to co-publish it. I am thankful to Dhruva and Rob for assuring me of the book’s value. Finally, I thank all my friends who reinforce my ecological optimism, countervailing all the pessimistic notes that I have written here about our civilization. Debal Deb Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies Barrackpore

P r e f a c e

A View from America

E

very culture has a life story explaining the creation of the heavens and the earth; a narrative that positions the mountains, streams, and great oceans; an account of relations between plants and animals and people and gods. Life stories guide individual and collective behaviour, pattern social structures, and inform the ways people transform nature. Historically, there were many cultures and hence many life stories. The stories were always evolving, cross-breeding with other life stories, or dying out with the people they sometimes led astray. Now we have one dominant story – the development story of economic growth without limits, the story of unending happiness from the possession of more and more things. This story is destroying nature, driving greater injustices each day, and threatening the future of humanity. This is the story, now clearly leading us astray, that Debal Deb tackles in this book. Over the past five hundred years in the West, the Judeo-Christian life story cross-bred with the Western science story it had tried to suppress, putting scientists up with the angels where they could objectively see how the world worked and pull its strings themselves. And they saw and began to manipulate the world as if it were merely a bunch of separate parts organized as a giant machine. As enlightenment reduced the remaining mysteries of nature to simply puzzles yet to be explained, bright and clever philosophers, soon to be known as economists, began to tell people that social organization could be understood in the same way and then expanded and improved upon. The complexities of care people showed for each other were reduced to exchange contracts to maximize individual utility. Material well-being, once bounded by physiological needs, became defined in xix

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terms of new urban necessities and what others had. Markets multiplied and expanded, national boundaries became moot, and communities became defined by economic interests and scientific disciplines rather than by physical association and networks of mutual aid. And as the Western story continued to evolve and spread, it invaded the territories of other stories, conquered them, and promised utopia for all. Unfortunately, the Western life story evolved around an immature, expurgated, truncated account of the richness of Western science we now have and the complexity of nature it allows us to see. The old mechanical worldview holding out the possibilities of prediction and control and the atomistic assumption that whole problems can be solved in parts became embodied in physical structures, the rationales for institutions, and the canons of public discourse. The idea that people, their values, and their patterns of thinking stand apart from reality; the premise of universality; and the presumption that the separate parts of science would surely fit together still reign, despite all evidence to the contrary. The enlightenment, as it played out over time, allowed a few people to shine very bright lights in a few spots, but the light on the whole grew dimmer, and dimmer for all, until only a few had any vision of the big picture at all. As great life stories go, the West’s story promoted dying over becoming, death over being, species by species, culture by culture. Yet I write in an ephemeral euphoric interlude. After six years of inexplicable mass delusion, of rallying around slogans and lies as if they were beacons of truth, Americans have voted against the theocrats and neocons. Surely it is important to reject leaders with no interest in logic, evidence, or reasoned deliberation let alone accountability. Surely it is good to turn away from those who falsely joined Americans in cultural conflagrations at home and abroad, reduced rights in the name of freedom, attacked social justice in the name of family values, and burdened children with debt. Yet my joy is highly tempered. America’s fit of collective insanity was not a stage of economic growth laid out by economist W.W. Rostow half a century ago. For that matter, neither was globalization through capital flows nor climate change in anyone’s hopes for humankind in my youth. We are way off course from any vision of where modernity would lead. Some really serious collective thinking, truly moral discourse, pragmatic democratic practice, and visioning are sorely needed. Without a more serious awakening than we are now experiencing, however, America will simply undo the ineffective reign of Bush II and return to more subtle and sure ways of achieving corporate goals and imperialistic ends. Political debates barely touch on the material needs of the world’s poor, the richness of human culture, or the complexities of adapting to a rapidly changing global envi-

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ronmental system on which all life depends. Legislators seem little more likely to address the consequences of conflating the meaning of life with ever more material consumption, now so manifest in American obesity and flagging health. How can a society with high rates of illiteracy, let alone scientific illiteracy, suicide, incarceration, mind-altering drug use, and violence toward the weak think of itself as leading the long march of human progress? With America well into the story of economic development, surely the story no longer inspires. Indeed, it is in deep trouble. Debal Deb documents, in excruciating detail, the contradictions and fallacies of the development story by which Americans live themselves and foist, along with other developed nations, on the rest of the world. Deb helps us see ‘developmentality’ as a cultural construction, a clearly detrimental one, comparable say to racism, that brings out unsocial, even inhumane outcome while destroying the planet. We need a new life story. We need an overarching story that respects a diversity of life stories. Living the story of economic development is destroying humanity and nature, us and a good many other species along with us. We need a master life story that puts our hope, compassion, brains, sociality, and diversity to new and constructive ends. Yes, a life story must be a constructed story, and we will have to consciously and conscientiously construct it ourselves. We will have to build it out of the good attributes and aspirations we share. I am not optimistic that we can rally human consciousness and redirect history. But I do harbour hope, a most essential of human traits, which keeps the unlikely, even the extremely unlikely, still in the realm of the possible. Among good attributes, our ability to empathize with and care for others surely is the most important. We see empathy and care in the behaviour of other species. And we find this endearing because empathy and care are precious to us. To care is surely the most important feeling we have; exercising care the most important thing we do. Care connects us to each other far more tightly than exchange. And yet we live in a world increasingly dominated by an economy driven by self-interest, structured on greed, instead of care. Economic organization has been taking over ever more of our lives. Markets structure the vast majority of moral decisions we make without our even having to think about who is being helped, who is hurt. We have structured our society so that those who care work quietly in the background for modest wages at best. Acts of care are not tallied in the national accounts. Caring for things has supplanted caring for life. Indeed, we kill to defend access to material resources. Care for each other needs to become a central part of our shared life story and of each of our multiple life stories.

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Caring for the earth that supports us is surely the second most important line of the new life story we will want to live. When we are close to nature, we sense wonder and feel care, but we have structured our lives so that we are rarely in tune with nature. And even those who work the land must respond to market incentives to survive, and markets are not driven by care for nature. The new life story must put people within the story of all life, not put us above it, closer to being God. Science in the new master life story must be directed toward how we can better fit within nature and achieve happiness rather than how we can redirect nature to our ends as if people could live apart from nature for very long. This brings us to the attribute of intelligence. Among human attributes, intelligence stands out. Surely our new life stories need to build on this human strength. A few other animals are smart; we should not underestimate the native intelligence of pigs or whales or even their abilities to communicate. However, largely due to opposable thumbs, only humans have technologies with which to see nature better, for communicating across space and time. Only people have libraries and other means to store information. We have mathematical models and simulation techniques to formalize and systemically explore complex relationships. Yet most of what we know comes through breaking things down and understanding their parts. Exercising highly fractured disciplinary understanding has been highly destructive to systems, from our bodies to communities and societies, to nature, and from the local to the global. And this specialized knowledge also serves and has increasingly become captured by special economic interests. Our new life stories must reclaim knowledge for the public interest and help us put it together systemically so that our collective intelligence can sustain the systems on which we depend. Our sociality is surely a human strength, but it can also be dysfunctional and put to bad ends. We know healthy families and communities exist. Increasingly, we understand both good science and functional democracy as a process of social deliberation and shared judgment. But we also see advertisers exploiting our desires to be in community, or ahead of our peers, through the purchase of the latest new clothing and gadgets. Desiring community, scientists cluster into disciplines and build disciplinary barriers to distinguish themselves from other scientists. Our communal nature can lead to disrespect for people with other beliefs or lifestyles. Our sociality needs to be balanced with respect, openness, pragmatism, and tolerance. Strong walls can be built up between different communities to avoid social conflicts, but then the benefits of diversity are lost. Balancing the human attribute of sociality is going to be difficult, but life stories that acknowledge both the strengths and the dangers of community can keep them in balance.

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The Newtonian worldview focuses our attention on efficiency, control, and optimization, narrowing our thinking toward one best possible solution. Western science, however, is less and less about levering a mechanical world. Evolutionary theory, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, cybernetics, game theory, and explorations of chaos among others, even statistics, have changed the way philosophers and scientists understand processes and the possible. Biology is teaching us that diversity is a good thing. Since Darwin, we have begun to see the importance of diversity and resilience in a world whose course is far less predictable or controllable than we see from a Newtonian perspective. Evolutionary options in an uncertain world rely on diversity. Appreciation of human qualities, forms of social organization, and other classes of phenomena requires that there be differences within them. New life stories need to bring back diversity. Dr. Deb describes how development went so far astray and lays out a path to sustainability with respect for justice, cultural diversity, and nature. He advocates turning away from a fixation on material growth and turning towards human betterment through respect and freedom of choice for all. Clearly the tremendous inequalities we now see between rich and poor are the result of a capitalist system that rewards a few. The differences we see between rich and poor represent inequalities in material access, but they also represent differences in environmental access. They are not differences in our innate abilities to care for each other, to appreciate beauty, and to participate in sustaining nature and human culture. While the rich chase after ever more ‘material’ freedom, options for true freedom for all – now and in the future – are destroyed. We can turn away from endlessly chasing after material things once our basic needs are met, and truly address what it means to be better humans. Deb advocates an inclusive freedom that extends all of the responsibilities and contradictions of what it means to be free to all people, including future generations. Deb advocates a major shift in understanding and attitudes, a transformation and assertion of true democracy with inclusive rights, as well as a new economy with new public infrastructure. Major changes are our only hope, given how far off course we really are. With this book, in my judgment, Debal Deb moves into the ranks of critical philosophical practitioners speaking from developing countries – Enrique Leff, José Lutzenberger, Manfred Max-Neef, Vandana Shiva, Victor Toledo and others – whose writings and lives are testaments of sanity, care, and vision. Richard Norgaard University of California, Berkeley.

Introduction

I

began writing this book in the autumn of 2001, when I was living at the International House in Berkeley. I used to sit in the I-House café every evening and watch, and sometimes play chess with a group of wonderful people of different ages, who became my great friends. Usually, after the chess game, we would indulge in discussions on worldly matters, ranging from antioxidants in foods to xenophobia in Western cultures. One of these friends, Bob, a doctorate in economics, was a great conversationist. One day, when I was rallying against the unsustainability of industrial development that is unmindful of the environmental resources, Bob was astonished. After a brief exchange of arguments, he gave me this punch: ‘So you want that people of your own country should not own cars and live in modern houses that provide all comforts? You don’t want children of your country to study in schools with computers? You don’t want your countrymen to be affluent? You want the Indian peasants to remain bound to their farms, submerged in poverty and deprived of life’s opportunities, huh?’ I had little idea then that exactly the same questions would be reiterated by the ministers of the communist party-led Government of West Bengal to legitimize forcible eviction of farmers from their lands in Nandigram for promoting petro-industry. I tried in vain to convince Bob that my idea of development was based on the urgent need for improvement of environmental, social and material well-being of all the people of all countries. I failed to make him see that I did not want a fraction of the population to wallow in islands of affluence, while the rest lived in poverty; that I did not want any people to be deprived of the joy of life, which was actually robbed by development as measured by GNP; and that I did 1

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not want the privilege of a few people to ride air-conditioned cars and live in palaces to preclude other people’s right to inherit a world rich in biological and cultural diversity, eat healthy square meals, breathe unpolluted air, enjoy the fruits of their own labour. Bob remained unconvinced and unhappy. It was not a point of winning an argument, it was a matter of communicating, sharing a viewpoint. Bob left me wondering how difficult it must be to talk about the negative connotations of development to people not so intelligent or amiable as he. Indeed, it’s even risky in the globalizing South – in West Bengal, for instance – where the traditional Left is promoting big industry as the revolutionary path toward progress. Where anyone questioning the legitimacy of development, or anyone opposing farmers’ eviction from their land is branded a ‘terrorist,’ and is likely to invite vengeance from the state. Bob represents the majority of people who see development as necessary for the poor to become rich. To the majority, in the US as well as in India, development is a moral obligation, an unquestionable social goal, to be achieved by rapid industrial growth. This mindset – which equates affluence with development, measures development in terms of GNP growth, and accepts development to be the destiny of civilization – is developmentality. Some believe that under-developed countries and pre-capitalist societies ought to be brought into the ‘mainstream’ of development in order to enable them to enjoy the fruits of progress. They believe, categorically, that development will enable all Indians and Nigerians and Bolivians to eat McDonalds (or Burger King) foods, drink Coke (or Pepsi), ride in air-conditioned Mercedes (or at least a Maruti), wear Nike, watch Rambo on home video and chat sex on the Internet. It is with these people that I venture to argue that developmentality has devastated the natural resource base of the world and with that, life’s opportunities for millions of fellow humans. No Bob, if that’s your idea of development, I don’t want my country people to fall victim to it. I want all countries to take a path of development that is sustainable, that is more socially responsible, and just. If development is not sustainable, it is not desirable. Will you accept a post-dated cheque drawn on a liquidated bank?1 We have different preferences. It’s a different story altogether whether our informed preferences matter at all to the people who matter in framing development policies. In this book, I will oppose development as Bob understands it. Yet it behoves me to state at the outset that I am not opposing development and modernity from either a religious or Deep Ecology point of view. I don’t pretend to argue that we should shun all scientific, technological and social achievements and go back to our cave-dwelling stage of simplicity, where humans did not apparently contravene nature. My opposition to development is not based on the argument that modern humans are opposing nature, or that technology is bad because it is

Introduction

3

unnatural. That is too simplistic and foolish. Orthopedic surgery is also unnatural, but we cannot afford to deny it to a person with a crushed femur, although in the dawn of civilization, people were fated to die of such mishaps. Death is natural, but it is also natural for all living beings to try to avoid death. Science was born to enable humans to live with less hardships and worries, but the arbiters of development have repeatedly abused science to bring death to humans and other life forms. My fundamental argument against the current trend of development is that it is unsustainable, and apt to lead to the unnatural death of our own species. I argue that a more prosperous civilization is possible without industrial growth, and that that possibility emerges from numerous vibrant pre-industrial social systems. I have prepared this book with a particular guild of readers in my mind. First of all, she (no sexism implied; sometimes I will refer to everyman and everywoman as ‘he’ as well) must be literate, and of course able to read English. I further assume that she is aware of the ongoing techno-industrial onslaught on biodiversity and the environment. I also assume she is familiar with such names as DDT, ozone hole and Chernobyl. She may even have some concern about global poverty and human rights violation. Finally, she is neither overwhelmed by, nor prejudiced against the mention of such proper nouns as Renaissance, Orientalism, Karl Marx, or globalization. I gloss over and try to connect all these things. It’s a long argument, so my reader must be patient. This book traces the origin of what we understand as economic development and the spread of the concept of development and its immanent politics; in short, a prognostication of developmentality, which I consider a sickness of human civilization. This issue of developmentality, which techno-industrial growth has engendered over the past two centuries, is of crucial importance to all concerned with the health of the biosphere and the fate of civilization. Thus, developmentality needs to be examined from natural science as well as social science perspectives. The issue also necessitates a clear understanding of the position of social-economic processes as primarily based on the biological imperatives of human (biological and cultural) evolution and the web of ecological relationships with non-human components of the biosphere. Like all organisms, ‘humans inevitably reconstruct their habitat’, but unlike other organisms, it remains within their power – to do so respectfully (Norton, 2003: 145). Like every organism, humans have drawn, and continue to draw resources from the biosphere to support their existence. In return, the metabolic process creates substances that enter into the biogeochemical cycles. The human metabolic products are used by other organisms. However, with the onset of the Industrial Revolution, humans began producing substances that could not be

4

Beyond Developmentality

incorporated into the biosphere. Some of these products of human economic metabolism are toxic to organisms and have a disruptive influence on the structure, organization and metabolic process of the biosphere that has evolved over 3.8 billion years. Thus, the human world seems to stand in opposition to the biosphere. This opposition simply means that in the long run, human species has a destiny analogical to that of the gigantic reptiles of the Cretaceous Era. Of course, the allusion to extinction of dinosaurs is an analogy. The history of the biosphere is replete with stories of extinction of millions of species. The first great extinction happened some 2.5 billion years ago when oxygen produced by photosynthetic cyanobacteria killed off all the organisms that had adapted to the early biosphere. Later, organisms that adapted to oxygen survived to evolve into our own familiar biosphere where almost no organism can survive without oxygen. (I say almost because there are some bacteria that survive in bizarre oxygen-less environments). The biosphere has witnessed many other catastrophic episodes of mass extinction. The most widely known is the extinction of dinosaurs, plausibly caused by a meteoritic impact 65 million years ago that killed half of all species then living. Far less familiar is a greater extinction episode that took place at the end of the Permian period 251 million years ago. A similar extinction phase has been set up by modern humans. Beginning with European colonial expansion, modern techno-industrial development has accelerated the species extinction rate several hundred-fold in recent years. The technological power has enabled humans to wipe out whole communities almost overnight by constructing immense dams, giant clearcuts, highways, and through industrial agriculture. The unprecedented scale of industrial activity is destroying the very support systems of all life. The biosphere has already shown signs of dysfunction and restructuring that may spell doom for humans. While the unique development of the brain has enabled humans to transcend biological evolution, it has also empowered them to destroy their own life-support system. One wonders if the disproportionate development of the brain entails doom for the most intelligent species on earth, just as the allometric growth of the antlers of the Irish elk led to its extinction. I have not indulged myself in describing the mechanisms, processes and tempo of species extinction, about which the popular classics of conservationist literature, like Edward Wilson’s The Diversity of Life (1992), David Quammen’s The Song of the Dodo (1997) and Extinction by Paul and Anne Ehrlich (1981) have said more than ample. I argue that the fundamental drive for man-made extinction episodes and the global environmental crisis is the craving for continuous economic growth and the expectation that development will beget happiness for all.

Introduction

5

I link the environmental damages to social injustices, if only because extinct species and lost environmental services preclude generational equity. This is one ground where the concerns of ecological and social sciences overlap. I venture to suggest possible means to harmonizing the goals and operations of social institutions (including science) toward ensuring social and environmental justice. A discussion on the subject of sustainable development, which must include the issue of inter-generational justice, is bound to invoke economic, ecological and political considerations. The diversity and complexity of the subject matter necessitates overlapping of issues, repetition of certain points in different contexts and allusion to metaphors from disparate disciplines. Therefore, the arrangement of the chapters and sections may not be the best to reflect my attempt to organize my argument. I have confined my treatment of scientific matters to conceptual level, but have inserted a few sections of Technical Discussion for the interested reader. These sections would clarify certain concepts dealt with in the text, but may be omitted by readers who are disinclined to mathematics. Chapter 1 delineates the origin and development of the doctrine of development. A huge amount of scholarly work has already described the history of the concept of development and how it became doctrinaire since the 19th century. My discussion is based primarily on Arndt (1981), Atkinson (1991), Barry (1999), Clark (1984), Coates (1998), Gillespie (2001), Halsall (1997), Hay (2002), Hofstadter (1959), Lutzenberger (1996), Merchant (1980) and White (1967). These works provide two major insights, which have been combined in my description of the ideological underpinnings of development in the modern sense. The first is that modern connotations of development emerged with the rise of capitalism in the 19th century. In particular, the Spencerian doctrine of development as a law of society emerged in the period of Industrial Revolution in Britain. Spencer also furnished his sociology with his law of the survival of the fittest in the capitalist marketplace, and fathered what later came to be known as Social Darwinism. However, one also gleans that the philosophical underpinnings of development – namely the human supremacy over nature – were much older, linked to Judeo-Christian cosmology. Furthermore, the idea of progress itself is older than the phenomenology of industrial progress. Following the Baconian principle of giving primacy to instrumental reason and scientific method to achieve progress, thinkers like Rousseau, Voltaire and Tocqueville maintained that progress results from human use of reason. I refer to Van Doren’s (1967) classic work on progressivist theories. Thus, the second insight is that man’s supremacy over natural world fitted snugly into Social Darwinism and Eurocentrism, and justified both colonization of the South and extermination of indigenous peoples in the colonies. I have refrained from going into a deep analysis of the complexity

6

Beyond Developmentality

and richness of the history and social dynamics of development. Instead, a summary treatment has been given to the complex interpenetration of ideas and ideologies, along with ample citations, for the benefit of the interested reader. In addition to collating and summarizing the different viewpoints and insights of different authors, I have added a perspective that is often missing in most historical analyses of the development doctrine. This I call the Marxian perspective, to distinguish from the commonly-held Marxist perspective, which is promulgated by official Marxist political theorists. The Marxist position with respect to development is generally supportive of technological-industrial growth, so as to deepen the social and economic divide between the exploiter and the exploited, until the working class revolts to demolish the capitalist world order and usher in communism. In this interpretation, industrial growth and development is a historical necessity. However, the Marxian repudiation of the process of industrial development that brought about alienation of the worker from both nature and humanity, and Marx’s vision of a responsible development of technology are often ignored. Thanks to recent Marxian scholarship, the political rift between the Marxian and the Marxist view of development has become clear. Paul Burkett’s Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective (1999) and John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology (2000) in particular are profoundly perceptive in describing Marx’s (and Engel’s) views on the impact of industrial development on nature that are often at odds with the standard Marxist view. I borrow this Marxian perspective in my description of how Enlightenment progressivism fostered developmentality in the 19th century. I also argue that Marx as well as Alfred Wallace, both Victorian radicals, subscribed to the Enlightenment doctrine, and the Eurocentric model of progress. Here again, my treatment of Marx and Wallace has been brief, but founded on recent scholarship. In my treatment of the concept of development, the doctrine of development is polymorphic, because the concept of development seems to have assumed different shades of meaning and significance across time and space. Thus, multiple doctrines of development appear to exist in some recent critical analyses of the concept’s archeology, as in Cowen and Shenton (1996), from whose book I borrow (with modification) the title of Chapter 1. I contend that following its origin in Spencerist sociology, the concept has been consolidated into a singular doctrine of material prosperity, ensconced in and reinforced by neo-classical economic theory, which informs policy planning for national development. My discussion of the process of acceptance, canonization and globalization of developmentality relies mostly on accounts of Douthwaite (1999), Escobar (1995) and Gillespie (2001).

Introduction

7

Chapter 2 describes the fallacies of basic assumptions underlying the myths of neo-classical economics. In this description, I have confined myself to citing commonplace, real life examples where the edifice of neo-classical economics falls apart. I describe how the scientifically untenable, false postulates continue to buttress the paradigm of development, and globalize developmentality. I have highlighted the limitations of neo-classical economics as depicted in Herman Daly’s Beyond Growth (1996) and various other works cited in the text. The doctrinal emphasis of material prosperity, measured by a single indicator, GNP per capita, has divided the world into two halves – the North and the South. This division of the world in the current economic and political discourse is grounded in political and historical context, just as the earlier value-laden EastWest division was, but has relatively more objective reference to the economic status of the countries. The new terms are still pivoted on the same connotations of development and under-development in terms of GNP. In Chapter 3, I describe how the hegemony of the Northern paradigm of economic development has charted the course of development for the South, resulting in intensified natural resource extraction and exhaustion. Intensive agriculture, mining and industrialization have reduced fertility and long-term productivity of the soil, eliminated numerous life forms, ravished the earth’s vital life-support systems, undermined public health and destroyed livelihoods of the poor. All these have threatened what Amartya Sen (1981) has called ‘entitlement’ to food, and therefore, food security of the country. Inequality in land distribution and access to natural resources, inherent in the South’s political and administrative machinery, sustains the lack of entitlement of the poor to food and livelihoods. Concomitantly, the entitlement of future generations to the natural capital and its potential uses is also endangered. The choice of the course and tempo of development is ultimately concerned with the mode of resource use. The whole sustainability movement is pivoted on the question of which mode of resource use tends to be sustainable, and how that mode is likely to be incorporated into our worldview and national policies. Agriculture and forestry constitute the paradigm for this discourse on resource use. The current discourse on the prevalent global resource use patterns has already polarized the issue by means of historical comparison, socio-economic contrast, and evaluation of ecological properties. On the one hand, the mainstream, conventionalized, profligate mode of resource use is portrayed as the progressive-scientific means of managing resources; on the other hand, an older mode of resource use – one that was, and in some parts of the world still is, practised – is posited as the primitive (implying unscientific) mode of resource management. This mode of traditional resource use is practised by numerous

8

Beyond Developmentality

indigenous societies. While values and perspectives widely differ as to which mode ought to be adopted as the ideal approach to sustainable resource use and management, there is no dispute regarding the opposing characteristics of the two modes, which I label here, by way of shorthand notation, ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ modes. I argue that a key to sustainability is adopting certain characteristics of the traditional mode of resource use. This is linked to adoption of certain institutions of traditional societies, which I believe are a significant agent of change in social perceptions, values and behaviour. I will pick up this point later in Chapter 7. Chapter 4 describes the fantasy world of consumerism, which is a process in which certain habits of consumption are intertwined with the pursuit of profit. The process is so deep-rooted that alternative modes of operation or social organization are simply not perceived or made permissible within the existing ideology and practice. Neo-liberal capitalism seems to intensify this radical inertia by creating and re-creating a fantasy world of development in which everyone aspires to live in perpetual happiness and limitless prosperity. Happiness in this world is equated with acquisition of commodities. The consumerist pursuit for material proxy for happiness is fuelled by, and reflected in, the misleading figures of development, measured in terms of increasing production of goods. The radical inertia of society tends to forestall questioning the validity of the assumption of economic growth leading to happiness. The continuing preoccupation with techno-urbanindustrial growth is maintained by, and in turn sustains, the fallacies of neoclassical economic premises (discussed in Chapter 2). The fallacious fixation with technological fixes prohibits serious contemplation over consequences of development. In addition, the multifaceted myth of industrial development as emancipation creates a fantasy world, where conspicuous production and consumption of garbage become indexes for happiness and prosperity. This fantasy world thus maintains the radical inertia and also creates a resistance to change. The belief in the fantasy world of economic growth and happiness propels the entire process of development towards disaster for the natural world and human economy in the long run. Developmentality has engendered a perverse resource use agenda that has decimated natural ecosystems, traditional production systems and associated human cultural diversity. The fencing-guardingpolicing approach of ‘scientific’ forestry fails to integrate a genuine ecological understanding of ecosystem complexity with a cognizance of social realities such as unequal power relations. In agricultural development, the situation may be likened to flying an airplane with a dysfunctional navigational mechanism. The atrocities of the Green Revolution on agroecosystems are systematically covered under the statistics of stupendous growth in cereal crop yield. The official

Introduction

9

attribution of this cereal output increase to ‘miracle seeds’ of the Green Revolution tends to belittle the roles of crop intensification, spread of irrigation, and replacement of most subsistence crops with cereals. Thus, the brouhaha around cereal output growth conceals the dark side of agricultural development – the loss of non-cereal crops and extinction of folk crop varieties. The loss of crop genetic diversity, in combination with declining soil fertility, ensures unsustainability of agriculture and imperilment of food security. More fundamentally, agronomic growth statistics conceal the fact that food production enhancement has failed to improve entitlement and freedom of the poor. Hypes of food output create a comfortable fantasy world in which consumers are assured of never-ending prosperity. This fantasy world also swallows the producers – the poor farmers – who abandon their traditional knowledge and skills, rely on proprietary agrochemicals and become avid consumers. Chapter 5 gives a brief historical account of the global understanding of the limits of industrial development. Here, I show how post-war social movements led the youth in affluent societies to search for alternative ideals of life and living – alternative to the hegemony of money, of here and now. An inchoate search for a sustainable society arose from the repugnance to affluence and the fear of imminent ecological collapse. I argue that the intellectual legacy of the Frankfurt School, combined with the doomsday prophesy of the Club of Rome goaded a small section of the Western youth to escape into Orientalism, and a smaller section into eco-activism to ensure environmental and social justice. This Northern ecological awareness, combined with what Martinez-Alier (1990) termed ‘the environmentalism of the poor’ has shaped a global environmental ethos. In Chapter 6, I discuss the various tenets of weak and strong sustainability concepts. Sustainable development does not rely on technological tinkering of environmental problems, as that only substitutes one type of pollution with another, one kind of resource with another, one form of exploitation with another, and creates newer problems in the process. Technological fixes serve to assure the public that something is being done to solve the problem, and lubricate the wheels of industry. This trend must be reversed by an ecological economy which obviates the sources of environmental problems altogether by abrogating the power of money. The ecological value of natural resources can be bequeathed to posterity by instituting a system in which no amount of money can buy the right to own and destroy natural resources. Sustainable development is possible if the economy is designed to foster qualitative growth, which must be based on zero rates of profit and interest. Although professional economists have remained at best suspicious of the notion of zero-growth economy, I have shown here that sustainable development is not only possible, as formal economic analyses suggest, but also

10

Beyond Developmentality

practicable under conducive political circumstances. Sustainable society, with inter-generational social and environmental justice, is a realisable possibility if society operates on principles of civic democracy to ensure inclusive freedom for all (by truncating individual freedoms to exploit other humans and nature). In this chapter, I also present findings from a plethora of localized models of sustainable agriculture in different countries to show that developmentality can be overcome in ecological agriculture, which can ensure local food security and autonomy. I argue that dismantling developmentality is a primary precondition for instituting social, political and environmental accountability of all social actors and thereby solving the environmental crisis. I intend to show that to achieve that goal, the role of ideology and political institutions is crucial. Because the global environmental issue is largely influenced and shaped by political institutions, a discussion of the environmental problem cannot evade politics, and cannot transcend value judgment. Particularly when it comes to the issue of environmental justice, a partisan approach is unavoidable. One must take sides. This book does not explicitly deal with political theories, but it does indicate the political dimension of social and environmental justice. In Chapter 7, I hail the confluence of ecology, politics and economics as heralding a significant change in what the Russian polymath Vladimir Vernadsky called the ‘noosphere’ – the world of thoughts and concepts. I indicate that the ongoing noospherical transformations increasingly bring the alternatives into clarity, visibility and practicability. Also, that the emergence of new ecological perspectives and of ecological economics constitute what Ed Wilson has called consilience – ‘jumping together’ – of different disciplines of thought. This has brought together diverse disciplines to explain different social, economic as well as ecological phenomena. The series of papers published in Ecological Economics has not only challenged the mainstream economic paradigm, but also sought to reinstate the tradition of political economy in the economic literature. The new interdisciplinary research seeks to replace homo oeconomicus with homo politicus as the central object of study. Increasing mass awareness of the environmental issues and the globalization of protest against the unipolar world power and corporatized world order weave the hopes of change. However, I doubt that any lasting change is possible through either international treaties or governmental mechanics unless there evolves a responsible society – a vibrant civil society, which Shutkin (2000) believes is the musculature of democracy. The civil society must adopt several institutions of traditional indigenous societies, including the physical space for social intercourse. The fundamental unit of civil society is the free individual, but this

Introduction

11

individual is socially responsible, unlike her counterpart in free-market democracy. The enlightened individual is an active participant in the democratic process of social development, opposes social and environmental injustices, repudiates consumerism, embraces simplicity, and opts for ‘small science’ and locally appropriate technology. This apparently tall order of the enlightened individual as an agent of change at the grassroots level exposes the difficulty of being optimistic about significant change in the noosphere. The details of the difficulty are depicted in Chapter 8. The juggernaut of the class and power interests of the élite, the globalized consumerism, the pervasive corruption in bureaucracy, the commercial co-optation of science and policy, the massive inertia of developmentality – all constitute debacles to change. This chapter is more subjective than the preceding ones, and draws as much on anecdotal evidence of policy dialectic as on academic publications. I have taken the liberty to give more space in this chapter than anywhere else to elaborate my point, which is that the matrix of dominant social norms and cultural values – the ideology – determines the policy option. ‘Hard scientific facts’ do not suffice to deter deleterious action – they have failed to prevent governmental decisions to raise the height of Aswan dam in Egypt and Narmada dam in India. It is the political power informed by the dominant ideology that matters. Here the influence of the ideological superstructure on economic infrastructure seems to override the reverse influence. Here I pose this pessimistic overtone not merely to counterpoise the optimistic undertone of the previous chapter, but as a note of acknowledgement of a complex social reality, which I took cognizance of pretty late in life. The Marxist preoccupation with the infrastructure has delayed this cognizance for most of us, as it has delayed our recognition of the Marxian appreciation of the power of ideology. It is both necessary and possible to break the power of ideology. It can be broken by individual intellectual challenges to institutions, beliefs and conventions. In the 9th and the final chapter I argue that the act of challenging the authority of ideology entails individual enlightenment and constitutes a social action. If the idea of change is a ‘meme’ sensu Dawkins (1989),2 the memetics of significant social change is likely to be more powerful than the frequencydependent transmission of the meme of conformity to convention. Severe opposition to non-conformity would construe a formidable handicap for survival of non-conformitarian individuals. And then, as the Handicap Principle of Amotz and Avishag Zahavi (1997) predicts, non-conformitarian behaviour itself is likely to spread in the population, until frequency-dependent memetics turns it into a ‘hip’ fashion, or even a common behaviour. This relates to the role of the individual as the primal agent of change, and takes us back to the previous chapter – and its latent optimism.

Beyond Developmentality

12

The purpose of this book is surely not to chart a definitive future course of global development. As Engels opined in a letter to novelist Anna Kautsky in 1885, ‘the author does not have to serve the reader on a platter the future historical resolution of the social conflicts which he describes’ (p. 368). Rather, my mission is to create a conceptual ground for change in developmentality. This work will carry out its mission if, to paraphrase Engels (1885: 369) once again, ‘by a faithful portrayal of the real conditions it dispels the dominant conventional illusions concerning them, shakes the optimism of the bourgeois world, and inevitably instills doubt as to the eternal validity of that which exists, without itself offering a direct solution of the problem involved’ (emphasis added). The problem here is very anthropocentric and selfish, one of securing our own survival on an endangered planet. The steps toward solving the problem are very intricate, involving many dimensions of social life. However, I have ventured to suggest that the key task for us to ensure our persistence in nature is to (re)create strong social bonds of mutual accountability, which the industrial and market arrangements have destroyed over the past two and a half centuries. I have posed many arguments for action to restore the communitarian ethos and establish a commitment to generational equity, which I believe would restore nature, reinstate our cultures, and save our civilization. Some of these arguments may appear impractical, notso-rigorous, or imperfect to some experts. But I feel emboldened by David Pearce (1998: 32): ‘How foolish we would be to put all our moral arguments into one basket, only for the moral of the story to be that we found the perfect argument, but too late to save the world.’ As Bhavabhuti, the 8th century Sanskrit poet expressed it, ‘time is infinite and this earth is vast, so hopefully someone, at some point of time, somewhere in the world, will find my words interesting – ‘even useful.’ This work, then, is primarily meant to inculcate in my readers an insidious desire to change the prevalent developmentality, in the hope that that desire would eventually become a powerful meme. I hope that my venture will provide a discursive space in which others can construct their own political-economic theories of significant change. The point is to change the circumstance.

Notes 1.

I owe this metaphor to Mahatma Gandhi, who employed it to describe the recommendation of the Cripps Mission regarding India’s dominion status.

2.

Meme is ‘a unit of cultural transmission or a unit of imitation’ that ‘propagate themselves … by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation’ (Dawkins 1989: 192). The originator of the meme concept, Richard Dawkins, is an aggressive proponent of human sociobiology, who popularized the

Introduction

13

metaphor of ‘the selfish gene’ and its far-flung political implications, which have often been deployed by the new right. Following the Sociobiology Study Group’s early exposure of the political overload of sociobiology, a series of critical work (notably Gould and Lewontin 1979; Lewontin et al. 1984; Kitcher 1985; Gould 1997) has pointed out the methodological fallacies and conceptual prejudices of what Philip Kitcher (1985) has called the Wilsonian ladder of sociobiological arguments. The genetic determinism of pop sociobiology, and the irresponsible statements some sociobiologists deliberately made in their writings, implied that sociobiology was intended to revive Social Darwinism. A champion of sociobiology declared that it was ‘necessary to save sociobiology from the sociobiologists’ (Ruse 1985: 86). Dawkins saw the point: ‘Now that Britain has a government of the new right, which has elevated meanness and selfishness to the status of ideology, my words seem to have acquired a kind of nastiness by association, which I regret’ (Dawkins 1989: 268). But his diatribe against the new right has not significantly undone the political abuse of biology, any more than has Edward Wilson’s assurance that his Sociobiology was not intended to lend support to racism, sexism or any social injustice. In an attempt to counterbalance, as it were, the overemphasis they laid on genes, both Wilson and Dawkins glozed over extra-genetic mechanisms of cultural evolution through workings of ‘culturgens’ and ‘memes’, respectively. The meme seems to be conceptually more elegant and operationally more useful to explain human cultural elements and phenomena than is the culturgen. The meme leaves more ample scope for the human brain to override the influence of genes. The immense potential of the meme to explain various socio-linguistic and cultural phenomena has been outlined by Susan Blackmore (1999). Nevertheless, the term’s ominous association with sociobiology has delimited its acceptance and deployment in social sciences. (I recall how the very mention of ‘meme’ in my presentation of an early draft of what is now Chapter 4 of this book elicited a heated response from the audience in Berkeley. Many suspected I was a sociobiologist seeking to smuggle genetic determinism to explain innovation in indigenous cultures!) Even many biologists I know find the concept of meme interesting, yet refrain from mentioning the term in their work for fear of acquiring a sort of nastiness by association. This is unfortunate. I am opposed to the adaptationist programme inherent in sociobiological speculations about human cultural matters (Deb 1992), yet find the meme concept to be a powerful explanatory tool, transcending any (genetic) deterministic proclivities (see Deb 1996).

C h a p t e r

1

The Doctrine of Development

T

he concept of development is a historical legacy. In the course of the evolution of its meaning, it has assumed a definitive, if amorphous, economic connotation in the current usage of the word: improvement of the economic status of the society, widening of the individual’s life opportunities, betterment of the quality of life. But this connotation is historically linked to, and rooted in, particular interpretations of the 19th century theories of biological evolution and social progress. The origin of the modern connotation of development may be traced to Ernst Haeckel’s description of the ontogenetic development of an organism (from the fertilized ovum to adulthood) as progressive, unidirectional and preordained process of physiological change. His study of embryonic development provided the ideological metaphors of social developmental hierarchy and later served to nourish racist and imperialist ideas associated with the notions of development and progress. Haeckel, who coined the word ‘ecology’, was to become – a century later – one of Nazi Germany’s major ideological figures for racism, nationalism and imperialism. Owing to its roots in biology, the concept carries a normative burden. No sane person is opposed to development in the sense of economic uplifting of the nation, betterment of the standard of life or improvement of the quality of life. Development is the goal of society, nation, and the material world. Everyone strives to attain the goal of betterment of life, easing of life’s hardships, increasing life’s opportunities, comfort and leisure; in short, everyone strives to develop. In fact, everybody, every society, every nation ought to develop. However, the normative aspect of the accepted notion of development obfuscates the difference between the perceived 15

Beyond Developmentality

16

goal and the practical means to achieve it. Indeed, we all want to increase our comfort and leisure, but how? It is sought by increasing production of goods and services; by increasing gross national product (GNP, now called GNI, gross national income); by means of growth in industry and agriculture. Societies that do not have high GNI, or a fast rate of growth of industry, agriculture and technology are less or under-developed, and must be brought into the mainstream of development. Thus, development is globally defined in terms of industrial and technological growth, the means which becomes the goal. Economic growth is assumed in what Harvey (1996) calls the ‘standard view’ of professional economists to construe improvement of the quality of life. By assuming equivalence of the means to the goal, the notion becomes doctrinaire in mainstream economics. The global perception of development and its social, political and ethical implications – both at national and global levels – derive from the prevailing, mainstream economic dimension of the concept of development. The economic dimension cannot be separated from the normative load of the concept, and its paradigmatic use in national and international economic practices. The faith in economic growth and material prosperity as destiny construes the ideology of development, which propels the global political economy and legitimizes the doctrine of development, a doctrine that is self-reflexive in that it is both the reference point and the goal of societal progress to which it refers. I intend to show here that this doctrine is a polymorphic paradigm, drawing theoretical support from various streams of social and intellectual movements at different historical periods, and creating its own ‘epistemic community’ as Haas (1992) calls it. The process of consensus building and multilateral action in international economic and environmental regulatory decisions, Haas showed, is ‘knowledge-based’ (that is, informed and advised by a community of authoritative experts who operate on the levels of uncertainty of ecological and economic models in terms of their outcome). Governments are increasingly dependent upon these experts who, ‘to the extent they are part of epistemic communities, are more important to the political solutions than is the content of the ideas per se,’ and ‘whose ideas and models of development are entirely self-reflexive’ (Watts 2001: 291). In the following sections, I intend to discuss the evolution of this doctrine as an epistemological entity, and then examine how the paradigm has influenced national economies and politics.

1.1

The Epistemology of Development

In the beginning of its usage in social sciences, the term ‘development’ was primarily understood in the naturalistic sense, as the unfolding of things over time. However, development accreted value and directionality in the 19th century social

The Doctrine of Development

17

and biological writings, which fed into each other. The directional sense borrowed support from contemporary biological literature, especially Haeckel’s study of embryonic development. The 19th century philosophical ideas of progress, combined with metaphors constructed from Haeckel’s ontological development, informed the theories of social evolution current before the Darwinian evolutionary theory was published. Conversely, the Darwinian view of the continuous process of evolution was in fact borrowed from the theories of social evolution of Thomas Hobbes and Herbert Spencer, but took a completely new meaning in the light of his seminal idea of non-directional, blind natural selection. In Darwinian evolution, there exists no perfect model, and evolutionary superiority cannot be attributed to any organism or individual in terms of strength or size. This fundamental feature of Darwinism was missed by social theorists of the 19th century, who reproduced current prejudices about social evolution with an aura of scientific authority. The misreading of Darwinian view of evolution and its misapplication to social evolution gave birth to Social Darwinism,1 whose proponents postulated the history of human civilization as a series of connected economic stages described as hunting-gathering, pastoral, agricultural and commercial or industrial. In this presentation of history, the contemporary Europe represented the highest form of social configuration, while the nonWestern, pre-capitalist societies represented the inferior rungs of the ladder of human civilization.2 This linear course of social evolution provided the purpose and directionality of history of all societies, who ought to strive to progress. An ideological outcome of this philosophy of social progress was that, in the Victorian ethnographic view, Native Americans, Africans and the aboriginal peoples of Asia, Australia and New Zealand represented the primitive stages of human evolutionary history,3 and Asian societies and cultures were viewed as cases of ‘arrested progress.’ The marked achievements of ancient Asian civilizations in abstract thinking – mathematics and philosophy – as well as in engineering skills, were halted, as it were, by numerous social institutions that proved to be stultifying for human freedom, dignity and ingenuity – the torches that enlightened the path of progress of European civilization. In the glow of Enlightenment, the general European attitude toward Asian societies and their traditions was one of contempt.4 The Victorian social evolutionary theory was epitomized in Spencer’s work Progress: Its Law and Cause, published in 1857 – two years before Darwin’s Origin of Species was published. Spencerian progress consisted of growth from germinal homogeneous forms to increasingly greater structural complexity. This law of growth and change, equivalent in the growth of plants

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and animals as well as for the development of civilizations, Spencer claimed, was universal. …this law of organic progress is the law of all progress. Whether it be in the development of the Earth, in the development of Life upon its surface, in the development of Society, of Government, of Manufactures, of Commerce, of Language, Literature, Science, Art, this same evolution of the simple into the complex, through a process of continuous differentiation, holds throughout. From the earliest traceable cosmical changes down to the latest results of civilization, we shall find that the transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous, is that in which Progress essentially consists.... that which the German physiologists have found to be the law of organic development, is the law of all development. (Spencer 1857, cited in Halsall 1997)

In the Spencerian view of social progress, society developed from the level of savagery – on which germinal political institutions took form in primitive chiefdoms and god-kings – to the fully developed European state, marked with separation of church and state. In this teleological view of progress of civilization, more developed societies vanquish less developed societies, and superior races, better adapted to adversities of nature, are impelled to eliminate, or overcome, the less adapted races.5 Following Spencer, sociological theories drew analogies from biological evolution to depict a progressive change of social organization from ‘infancy’ or primitiveness to more advanced stages, culminating in modern European civilization. Thus, ‘Darwin had provided a biological theory which became improperly joined to a pre-existing stream of ideas’ (Megarry 1995: 39), which flowed into the following century. Forged from an incongruous mix of Victorian progressivism and a misunderstood Darwinian theory of evolution, Social Darwinist theories vulgarized Darwinian metaphors of ‘natural selection’, ‘struggle for existence’ and ‘survival of the fittest’ to serve racist doctrines, colonial expansion, extermination of aboriginal ‘savages’, and imperialist war. War – ‘struggle between nations’ – was necessary for the evolution of peoples as a manifestation of ‘effort pour la vie’ (Bazaine-Hayter 1910). A strong army was thus necessary for the struggle for life of nations. Lieutenant Raymond Peyronnet argued in his Dix Leçons de Morale (1900: 58–59) that The biological sciences teach that the feeble must disappear before the strong; and extending these consequences from men to nations, one must admit that no sentiment of humanity or right would be powerful enough to prevent a strong State from taking possession of a weaker State. (cited in Clark 1984: 168)

Social Darwinism was also used to justify free-market competition as a state natural to man.6 It transformed moral and policy issues of helping the poor into ‘scientific’ issues: helping the poor was unnatural; letting them perish was nature’s

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way. Social Darwinists argued that a free-market system that would allow for an unconstrained operation of the law of survival of the fittest was more desirable than a system of state intervention into the market through income redistribution programmes to provide income supplements to the poor and dole to the unemployed. Social Darwinists believed that the operation of the harsh natural law of survival of the fittest (and elimination of the unfit) would in the long run benefit the human species and society. To the early proponents of free market, the poor were the unfit, and therefore their death was only natural. Thus, Rev. Joseph Townsend (1786) argued that poverty was a necessary condition of wealth, and that state intervention through the likes of Elizabethan poor laws that aimed to reduce poverty was undesirable, because it was unnatural. State interference would only ‘increase the number of unprofitable citizens, and sow the seeds of misery for the whole community; increasing the general distress, and causing more to die than if poverty had been left to find its proper channel’ (cited in Clark 1984: 40–41). Rev. Thomas Malthus subsequently copied pages from Townsend’s works, and reiterated this doctrine of the naturalness of poverty and hunger (see Section 3.2.2 for a detailed discussion). To Social Darwinists, an unbridled market allowed the poor to perish. Free market, where hunger was ‘the most natural motive to industry and labour’ (Townsend 1786: 23), operated on principles of natural selection, and therefore a market with no state intervention was likely to be more successful than any other systems driven by moral imperatives. Spencer’s application of Darwinian principles to social practices construed a natural defence of entrepreneurial capitalism. This kind of relation between nature and society was just what economic science needed to sustain its claim that natural man was economic man. Biology and economics, the blacSkbird and the cowbird. The rest, as they say, is history. (Schwartz 1986: 91)

Thus entrepreneurial competition on market was a reflection of the struggle for existence in the capitalist market, in which fitter individuals amassed more wealth and had ‘a greater store of economic virtues’. Laissez-faire capitalism facilitated the selection process that propelled the progress of civilization. Capitalist competition was thus ‘a law of nature which men can ignore only to their sorrow’ (Hofstadter 1959: 57). The Spencerist philosophy in business circles was more influential in the United States than in Europe, and as Hofstadter showed, captains of monopoly capitalism in America, like John D. Rockefeller and James J. Hill, believed that the growth of a large business is merely survival of the fittest and that ruthless capitalist entrepreneurship is merely the a law of nature in operation. Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan, American business leaders and famous Social Darwinists, also believed that

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monopolies represented the natural accumulation of economic power by those individuals fittest for wielding it. While the emergence of capitalism gave credence to Spencerian sociology, the idea of progress and the evolutionary ranking of societies came down from earlier centuries. The Industrial Revolution reinforced Europe’s technological and military superiority over the rest of the world. Spencerian sociology provided an ordering schema for the Eurocentric view of the East, which had already taken shape in earlier centuries. The European discovery of the New World had opened for Europe a unique window into its own past, and forged the identity of the non-Europe, the Other, contradistinguished from Europe’s own identity. The Other’s present embodied Europe’s own past, while Europe’s present heralded the Other’s future. The history of human civilization’s progress seemed to be captured in the differential stages of barbarity existing in the aboriginal societies of the Americas, Australia and New Zealand, where primitive societies remained isolated from the world of civilization, so as to demonstrate the rungs in the ladder of the historical progress of humanity. This view of evolution of human progress, as reflected in the continuum from the primitive ways of life in the non-European societies to the European techno-industrial civilization, was formalized in the writings of European scholars of the 19th century. Said (1978) takes late 18th century as the starting point of Orientalism, as symptomatic of the Eurocentric hubris: Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point, Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism is a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. (Said 1978: 3)

Orientalism thus encompassed three aspects of the East-West contact. First, modern European scholars acknowledged the great achievements of ancient India and China in literature, astronomy, chemistry and mathematics (including the symbol of zero and the decimal numerical system), which the Arab scholars later transmitted to Europe. However, scholars of Oriental studies refrained from calling on Europeans to adopt the Oriental culture, which the latter considered degenerate. Second, the East was a fabulous El Dorado where vast resources were awaiting commercial exploration and exploitation. Finally, on the ideological level, European trader-conquistadors and colonists sought to justify subjugation and annihilation of alien cultures in terms of European techno-military supremacy. It was on this last account that progress and development became meaningful to the European mind.

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The notion of the Orient was shaped by the Western views of the Other, which included Asia and part of Africa in the 18th century. Although some great European thinkers like Montaigne and Rousseau wrote about ‘noble savage’ societies7 where treachery, lying, greed, murder and rape were unknown, Europe saw the barbaric peoples of Africa and Australian islands as savages without qualification, in the pejorative sense of the word, stuck at the lowest level of civilization. The idea of the Orient as the abode of savages eventually broadened to encompass what in the post-war period came to be known as the Third World, including Central and South America. The positing of the geographic and cultural identity of the East, the discovery of its uniqueness and its conquest were all manifestations of a single Eurocentric approach, according to which the West, with its historical structure, polity, art and culture represents the only value opposite to Oriental ‘irregularity’ and ‘backwardness’. The existence of ‘savage’ cultures outside of Europe was an evidence of its advanced position in social evolution. Europe’s ethnographers and anthropologists depicted the ‘primitive’ customs of non-Western societies to reconstruct the infancy of humanity. Renaissance thinkers believed that primitive societies of the East were living through Europe’s past only to describe the evolutionary path to European modernity. This Spencerian progressivism laid out the Social Darwinian schema, which failed to grasp the prime significance of Darwin’s achievement in describing organic evolution as non-teleological – without the assumption of any predetermined goal, sequence, or outcome. While Social Darwinism was seldom taken up in any serious economic analyses (Arndt 1981: 460–61), the Spencerist social evolution, marked by ordered progress, was accepted by a more receptive audience than was the Darwinian theory of evolution (Kuennen 1994: 48.). The notion of goal-directed social evolution was prevalent in all European social theories of the 19th century. Marx and Engels, in their radical social and political theory, also interpreted social evolution in teleological terms: human societies move along a linear course of evolution, in a time series as it were, each stage evolving into a successive higher stage. From primitive, barbarian and savage cultures, human society evolved into feudal and capitalist stages, each of the latter stages denoting linear advancement from the former8. The Neo-evolutionism of the 1950s recapitulated this unilinear progression of social complexity from bands to tribes to chiefdoms to primitive states to modern states. In this uniformitarian and linear historical view of social evolution, non-industrial societies existing outside Europe were seen as ‘contemporary ancestors’, the historical stage the West had already lived out. Revived in the modernization theory of the 1960s, this linear progressivism projected selected Western social features and institutions onto the future of societies of the less ‘developed’ world. Non-literate

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societies of savages living outside Europe – hunter-gatherers, shifting cultivators and nomadic pastoralists – came to be understood as backward in the evolutionary sense. This 19th century perception of pre-industrial, non-agrarian societies as barbarian, has been shared by many modern social thinkers, such as E. Anderson Hoebel, who asseverated, ‘A society with a hunting culture is more primitive and less evolved than one with a hoe culture or simple pastoralism; and these in turn are more primitive than one with industrialization’ (Hoebel 1954: 292). As a corollary, these primitive societies must retrace the course of social development to become civilized, modern, Western so to speak. The European industrialized society is thus the future of the non-Western cultures. However, these primitive societies need not pass through ‘all the successive stages of technological sequence’ (Hoebel 1954: 292). Progressivism assures that borrowing of advanced technology from the advanced civilization may suffice for ‘primitive’ societies to make the transition: Borrowing may make great leaps possible. Eskimos are today serviced by airplanes and steamships. They moved from simple hunting savagery into a mechanical civilization within the span of a hundred years. (Hoebel 1954: 292)

This progressivist programme justified both the European colonial expansion and the extermination of the ‘backward’ peoples and cultures in countries down South. It equated the lack of industry with the lack of industriousness, and justified the progressive encroachment of industrial development upon the preindustrial. The same programme has continued in the post-war extension of the market economy on the entire global South, where the perceived lack of entrepreneurship is influenced by the perception that people in the South are backward or even lazy.

1.2

Enlightenment, Progress and Imperialism

The assumption that indigenous cultures outside Europe are inferior to the European one was inherent in the belief in the Social Darwinian schema of evolutionary progress of society. This assumption of inferiority and primitiveness of other cultures led to the corollary that those cultures and peoples who cannot adapt to the ways of the superior races must die out to fuel progress of civilization. As a typical example, Arthur Girault argued in 1895 that eradication of native peoples of the barbarian lands and their cultures was the necessary price for the evolutionary advancement of humanity; the disappearance of the inferior races after contact with the ‘fittest’ civilized races was inevitable, in

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accord with the principle of natural selection. While this operation of natural selection appeared cruel, it actually led to progress, because the surviving native peoples benefited from abandoning their primitive ways and assimilating the superior cultures of their conquerors. Girault’s book Principes de colonisation et de legislation coloniale (1895) became a standard text for French colonial legislation (Clark 1984: 163). The spread of European civilization implied that all savages ought to embrace modernity. Civilization, or eradication of the primitive, was perceived in the dominant European discourse at the height of European colonial expansion as an important agenda of, and justification for, colonization of the more natural – ‘less cultured’ – societies. European capitalism spread the market economy all over the globe at gunpoint. Development consisted of ‘the steady extension of the money economy on the vast world of subsistence or near subsistence’ (Escobar 1995: 78). As succinctly described by Marx and Engels, the rise of capitalism in Europe heralded the compulsion of all ‘uncivilised’ nations, ‘on the pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production’ (Marx and Engels 1888: 38): [The bourgeoisie] compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. … Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West (Marx and Engels 1888: 38).

Progress was construed as the expansion of European civilization, which epitomized human domination of nature. The Industrial Revolution facilitated progress and the spread of European civilization, which represented subjugation and appropriation of nature and the uncivilized (Coates 1998; Merchant, 1980;). Marx (1887: 649) stressed that ‘the capitalist mode of production presupposes the domination of man over nature’, and that Capital creates the bourgeois society, and the universal appropriation of nature… [Thus] for the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility. (Marx, 1857: 269)

The reduction of nature into its instrumental value for humans is a legacy of Aristotle, who taught in his Politics that everything in nature existed for humans. But Aristotle also taught that humans are a small part in a great chain of beings. After the Enlightenment, anthropocentrism took a prominent position, with its mission to make humans ‘masters and possessors of nature,’ as René Descartes (1637: 74) had expressed it earlier. In the Cartesian worldview, all non-human creatures were mere machines, devoid of powers of sensation, justifying all sorts of experiments so as to transform nature for the benefit of

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humans. Rodman (1974: 23) has described how in the late seventeenth century, physiologists tortured and vivisected live animals ‘with perfect indifference, and made fun of those who pitied the creatures as if they had felt pain.’ Renaissance anthropocentrism justified all kinds of human action on non-human nature for progress. Development of science and technology enabled humans to act more violently on nature. Lynn White, Jr. (1967) has traced the root of the anthropocentric developmentarian imperative of western Europe to the biblical worldview, which places humans, created in God’s own image, at the central place of the world and gives them a divinely ordained authority to rule the world.9 This Judeo-Christian ethic seems to have been encapsulated in Genesis as ordained by God: ‘Multiply, and reign over all the living things and rule the earth’ – until the Kingdom of God restores earth and humans to the earlier status before their fall from heaven. White has suggested that industrial and technological development in Europe was possible because Western Christianity had taught that nature and all the creatures existed only ‘to serve man’s purposes’ (White 1967: 1204) and that ‘it is God’s will that man exploits nature for his proper ends’ (White 1967: 1205). This view of the primacy and supremacy of humans over the rest of nature acquired its glorious expression in the Enlightenment ideology, in which subjugation of nature was necessary for the advancement of humanity.10 Machines and buildings were evidence of supremacy of human culture over wilderness. Agricultural landscapes were confirmation of human technological superiority over primal forces. In Western culture, and especially in social sciences, the Cartesian splitting of the world entailed hierarchical placement of mind over body, civilization over wilderness, European culture over all other cultures, the modern over the traditional, West over East. The European mind considered the second term of the dichotomy to be naturally inferior, and its domination by the first term to be development. Thus, the relationships between culture and nature, modern and traditional, man and woman, and Europe and the Other – were hierarchically counterposed. This view of the world in terms of counterposed entities, ordered in a hierarchical relationship, trained and prepared the Western mind to conceive the non-Western, the non-human and the nonmasculine11 as objects of natural subjugation – an ideology which continued to inspire and inform Western modernity, with profound political, environmental and ethical implications (Coates 1998; Merchant 1980; Oelschlaeger 1994; White 1967). The Western programme of subjugating the Other arose from its embedded dualistic worldview. This dualistic construction of the world has determined the course of development: ‘Development would consist of the

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progressive encroachment of the modern upon the traditional, the steady extension of the money economy on the vast world of subsistence or near subsistence’ (Escobar 1995: 77–78). Anthropocentrism inherent in Christian cosmology was retained in the Enlightenment ideology. Darwin’s revolutionary theory of evolutionary descent of the Homo sapiens from common ancestry gave a jolt to this anthropocentrism, and removed Man from his unique cosmological position. Nevertheless, Darwinism (and works of other biologists like Thomas Huxley and Ernst Haeckel) did not bring an end to anthropocentrism. Mayr describes this as an irony: ‘The study of man showed that, in spite of his descent, he is indeed unique among all organisms’ (Mayr 2000: 82). The unmatched intelligence, the faculty of true language with symbols, syntax and grammar and genuine ethical systems characterize humans as a unique species in the evolutionary history on earth. Finally, ‘through high intelligence, language and parental care, humans are the only creatures to have created a rich culture. And by these means, humanity has attained, for better or for worse, an unprecedented dominance over the entire globe’ (Mayr 2000: 82). Thus, human uniqueness and supremacy were established by comparative biology and anthropology. The discipline of anthropology, a daughter of imperialism, also indicated the uniqueness and supremacy of the European race and the evolutionary atavism, cultural backwardness and intellectual inferiority of nonEuropeans, the savages. Thus anthropocentrism commingled with Eurocentrism, whose conviction was based on a series of ethnographic accounts (mostly made by travellers) of savages who were almost invariably portrayed as immoral, heinously cruel and cannibalistic. In Europe’s imagination, Orientals were connoisseurs of sex,12 African, and American tribes were cannibals,13 South American forests were inhabited by fierce belligerent women.14 Each of these Western myths sweeps the Other outside the pale of culture, modernity and ‘civilization’. This has made warfare and annihilation of the Other justifiable and excusable, ‘while more sophisticated forms of dominance, such as enslavement and colonization, become an actual responsibility of the culture-bearers’ (Arens 1979: 141). It was what the English poet Rudyard Kipling called the ‘white man’s burden’ to civilize the savages in Asia, Africa, Australia and the New World. It remains to speculate whether any alternative mode of development would have been historically plausible within the Eurocentric framework of dualism. Escobar believes, ‘Had a nondualistic view of the underdeveloped economy been adopted (Braudelian, Schumpeterian or Marxist, not to mention one based on the non-Western tradition), the consequences would have been quite different, for development would have had to involve all sectors of social life’ (Escobar 1995: 78).

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The wilderness in Asia, Africa and Amazonia was testimony to the imagined savage state of those lands. In the Enlightenment ethic, untamed wilderness was viewed as evidence of the Fall: As such, its mere existence was an insult to Christianity, a challenge imposed by the Devil, that Christians had to eradicate. The wolf in particular, symbol of evil in the Middle Ages, soon became the symbol of wilderness as well. (Marangudakis 2001: 258)

Wildlife hunting in Asia and Africa symbolized the conquest of wilderness and the sporting rifle became an assertion of Western supremacy over the world. Despite the rise of the natural sciences and the Romantic views of Nature back home, Englishmen indulged in rapacious slaughter of wildlife in colonies abroad (MacKenzie 1988: 26–27, 98–99), where imperial hunting served as an ‘initiation ceremony’ for British men. Game hunting in colonies assumed a novel meaning: wild animals were not killed for food, but for the expression of valour of the civilized. The semantic transformation of wild mammals into ‘game’, and of killing into ‘sport’, reflects the semantic equivalence of the conquest of wildlife with the conquest of the savage world, where the sporting rifle was symbolic of the power of civilization, of Western technology. The triumphalist use of the sporting rifle often ended in extraordinary brutality, dubbed as virile sportsmanship. Examples abound. Beinart (1990: 164) mentions that during a royal visit to South Africa, six hundred heads of large game alone were shot in one day. Similar single-day shoots killed 4,206 birds in 1916, and 4,273 in 1938, to celebrate the viceregal visits of Lord Chelmsford and Lord Linlithgow, respectively, to Bharatpur, which is now a famous bird sanctuary in India (Gee 1965: 35). The language of the hunt was also used to describe contact with the native people in Africa: ‘stalking the African’ was also a fascinating sport of the White colonists (Beinart 1990: 165), just as ‘manhunting’ was in Tasmania. Such hunts were generally not considered to be particularly immoral or cruel, because the ‘game’ was considered not-so-human in the Social Darwinist schema: ‘The complex Social Darwinist hierarchy which some British hunters imposed on the people as well as [on] animals they encountered in Africa allowed them to classify, dehumanize and maintain social distance’ (Beinart 1990: 165). This ‘inferiorization’ and dehumanization of indigenous people outside Europe justified the particularly inhuman treatment of the natives by Europeans in every colony. Extermination of natives of all continents was historically and ethically necessary to establish the rule of superior White race. ‘The Whites’, wrote Frank L Baum, the author of The Wizard of Oz, ‘by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining

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Indians’ (Baum 1891). Armed with the Social Darwinian schema of the superiority of the White race, the European colonists had almost no compunction about using policies of incarceration and oppressive social control against native peoples, whom they judged to be ‘not fully human’ (Cobban 2006; Elder 1999; Stannard 1993). The history of the annihilation of Native Americans began with the arrival of Spanish forces in Hispaniola on Columbus’s second voyage in 1493. At Zucayo, the natives had provided the Conquistadors with fruits and fish, in return for which they ‘began to rip open the bellies and cut and kill those lambs – men, women, children and old folk, all of whom were seated; killing over 20,000 natives in this one incident’ (Stannard 1993: 71–75). The glory of European civilization and Christianity was subsequently eleveted even further higher up by the extermination of the Aztecs of Mexico by Cortez and of the Incas by Pizarro. Similar genocides were conducted in the following 350 years, in South America by the Spanish and the Portuguese, and in North America by the English and the French. Those sober virtuosi of Protestantism, the Puritans of New England, in 1703, by decrees of their assembly set a premium of £40 on every Indian scalp and every captured red-skin; in 1720 a premium of £100 on every scalp; in 1744. after Massachusetts-Bay had proclaimed a certain tribe as rebels, the following prices: for a male scalp of 12 years and upwards £100 (new currency), for a male prisoner £105, for women and children prisoners £50, for scalps of women and children £50… The British Parliament proclaimed bloodhounds and scalping as ‘means that God and Nature had given into its hand.’ (Marx 1887: 705)

In 1779, George Washington instructed his soldiers to lay waste to all the Iroquois settlements around so that ‘the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed.’ In 1814, Andrew Jackson, 14 years before he was to become American President, led the massacre of 800 Cree men, women and children. His men cut off the noses to count the dead, sliced off long strips of flesh from the enemy corpses to tan and turn into bridle reins and arranged for distribution of souvenirs from the corpses ‘to the ladies of Tennessee’ (Marx 1887: 124). This rapaciousness toward ‘savage’ peoples and ‘inferior races’ marks all White colonial campaigns. The rationale that non-Whites are disposable sub-human creatures was explicit in Senator Albert Beveridge’s legitimization of the massacre in the Philippines in 1898: It has been charged that our conduct of the war is cruel. Senators, it has been the reverse… Senators must remember that we are not dealing with Americans or Europeans. We are dealing with Orientals. (cited in Wallis 1992: 33–34).

The cruelty of European-origin colonists to the natives was ‘unmatched in entire history,’ wrote William Howitt in his 1838 treatise on Colonisation and

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Christianity: ‘The barbarities and desperate outrages of the so-called Christian race, throughout every region of the world, and upon every people they have been able to subdue, are not to be paralleled by those of any other race, however fierce, however untaught, and however reckless of mercy and of shame, in any age of the earth’ (cited in Marx 1887: 703–04). Annihilation of ‘inferior races’ like the Aboriginal Tasmanians (1803–47), the Yahi of northern California (1851–1910), and the Herero of Namibia (1905–6) was justified to establish a civilization based on justice (Elder 1999). ‘In many other cases over the past 350 years – whether in the Caribbean, the Americas, Africa (especially the Belgian Congo), East Asia, and Australasia – European-origin colonizers have similarly wiped out entire language groups or nations of indigenous peoples through some combination of intentional physical genocide, the grossly negligent treatment of groups of people either taken captive or otherwise rendered completely dependent, and the intentional pursuit of cultural genocide through means such as the capturing and forced resocialization of indigenous children, coercive evangelization campaigns, controls on language usage, and widespread rape campaigns that forced indigenous women to bear mixed-race children’ (Cobban 2006: 114). The ‘native’ populations that were subjugated and captured were dehumanized by extreme humiliation – a practice that is quite common in colonies and occupied territories. In Kenyan oilfields, in the 1950s, the British used to strip all Kikuyu men entering the pipeline system of all possessions including all clothes, and issued only a pair of yellow shorts and one or two blankets. In the detention camps, enforced public nudity and various other forms of sexual and non-sexual humiliation (like forcing the captives to carry around leaky defecation buckets on their heads) were a quite common means of dehumanization. ‘Many parallels existed there with some of the conditions reported in U.S. detention centers such as Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in recent years’ (Cobban 2006: 129). The European settlers’ incarceration of the ‘savages’ and the appropriation of their ‘wild’ lands were also economically justified because they lacked the intelligence to ‘develop’ their wild lands for agriculture and industry, or were cruel or wasteful in their use of natural wealth. The assumption of idiocy of the nonEuropean people is a legacy of Herbert Spencer (1895: 89-90), who believed, ‘The intellectual traits of the uncivilized… are traits recurring in the children of the civilized.’ Harvard Professor Louis Agassiz wrote in his 10 August 1863 letter to Lincoln’s Inquiry Commission: Blacks were ‘indolent, playful, sensuous, imitative, subservient, good natured, versatile, unsteady in their purpose, devoted, affectionate, in everything unlike other races, they may but be compared to children, grown in the stature of adults while retaining a childlike mind’ (Gould 1996: 48).

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Re-capitulationists of the 19th century believed that the adults of inferior human groups must be like children of superior groups. ‘Inferior’ races, classes and women are like white male children, and represent an ancestral stage in the evolution of white males (Gould 1996: 115). The American paleontologist E.D. Cope identified non-White races, women and southern European whites as lower human forms (Gould 1996: 115). American President Andrew Jackson only repeated this conviction: They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition. Established in the midst of another and a superior race, and without appreciating the causes of their inferiority or seeking to control them, they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere long disappear. (cited in Diamond 1992: 309)

European colonists had the right to invade and occupy lands that they deemed had remained ‘empty,’ ‘wastelands,’ or ‘unused,’ or at best ‘unproductive.’ The US President Theodore Roosevelt found natural justice in grabbing of the Native Americans’ homelands, for ‘this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages’ (cited in Diamond 1992: 309). The familiar practice of the developed North to blame the undeveloped South for the wasteful use of native forests and wildlife can be traced in the colonial history – of the Dark Continent, for instance. Indeed, the colonial ideology had ‘an extraordinary capacity to invert causation’ and hold the Natives responsible for many of the problems created by colonial incursions. The same ideology continues today in the US President’s high-handed rebuttal of the South for emitting greenhouse gases, although the American ecological incursions account for the largest share of global emissions of carbon and nitrogen oxides. It was a similar inversion which enabled imperial powers, having invaded and conquered much of the continent, to present Africans as essentially violent and themselves as peaceful. Thus African hunting methods in which snares and traps might be used were condemned as cruel and wasteful – like those of the unlanded poacher in Britain. (Beinart 1990: 167)

Invasion, conquest and appropriation of the habitats of the ‘natives’ of the entire Old as well as the New World were justified from the progressivist perspective because the indigenous peoples had neither the intelligence nor ability to transform wilderness into civilized habitats. Beginning in the early 17th century, the English employed the Lockean logic that rights to property should go to those who could ‘improve’ it, or produce the most from it in commerce to justify expropriation of land both from the village commons in England and from conquered peoples in the colonies. British imperialism used

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essentially two means of morally justifying the robbery of the land from indigenous people. Firstly, to portray the indigenous peoples as uncivilizable savages; and secondly, ‘to demonize the indigenous peoples as indolent, untrustworthy, murdering heathens, even cannibals – and hence enemies of pious civilized people like the British, who, incidentally paid bounties for the scalps of indigenous men, women and children to encourage people to shoot them at sight’ (Maser 1999: 209). The legal justification for usurping the land from indigenous people was as simple as the logic offered by the fabulous fowl of the Russian fable: ‘How can you own the sun?’ cried the duckling. ‘Does the sun belong to you?’ demanded the chick. ‘No’, answered the duckling. ‘Who does it belong to, then?’ ‘Nobody.’ ‘Then it’s mine, of course.’

The British felt justified in robbing land from the savages who decidedly had no title to it, and then create a legislature to legalize the robbery. The conquest, and subsequent conversion of the wild lands – ‘the haunt of wolves, bears and more savage men’ – into farms and ‘habitations of rational and civilized people’ marked the march of civilization and progress (Lopez 1978: 142). The civilizing mission justified the stealing of lands, massacre of the savage races and elimination of ‘primitive’ aboriginal cultures. It also authorized the state to force the barbarous people into the mainstream of civilized life in order to prosper. Imperialist thinkers believed that as harbingers of the light of civilization to the dark corners of the earth, ‘the British (or French or German) empire had a moral or divine mission that would ensure its survival’ (Brantlinger 1983: 141). The light of civilization was not the only benefit the savage natives would receive from the empire; the subject people would have the privilege of a guarantee of peace and participation in a system of law and order.15 Thus, the commercial motives of expansion of the Empire and the market were concealed under the cloak of the Social Darwinian schema of social evolution and the Enlightenment progressivist rationale. This Enlightenment progressivism, nourished by the faith in the ultimate triumph of Reason and emancipation of humanity from the darkness of traditions and superstitions, was prevalent throughout the 19th century intellectual milieu. Even revolutionary, anti-imperialist intellectuals acceded to a continual social progress as the goal of history, the destiny of mankind towards which ‘the whole creation moves.’ Alfred Russell Wallace, a leading scientist and socialist thinker of the Victorian era,16 was highly critical of the ‘plunder of the earth’ by imperialist

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Europe, and condemned the imperial mis-governments in colonies, yet had no doubt that ‘in the end, all should work out for good’ to ensure progress of civilization (Wallace 1998: 82). Marx avowed that British rule in India had imposed European despotism upon Asiatic despotism, resulting in the misery of an ‘infinitely more intensive kind than all Hindustan had to suffer before’ (Marx 1853: 14), and yet considered the British Empire as ‘the unconscious tool of history’ in eliciting a social revolution – to ‘fulfil mankind’s destiny’ – by extirpating the old Indian ‘undignified, stagnatory and vegetative’ society, ridden with despotism and superstition.17 Seen from this progressivist ideology, all non-European societies were atavistic, and the world outside Europe languishing in the dark, awaiting enlightenment by Europe, whose duty it was to colonize and introduce civilized governance in these savage countries. Under the colonial rule, the recalcitrant subjects only proved their savagery and atavistic proclivities whenever they tried to escape regulation and ordering by the state. Their very reluctance to becoming civilized justified the need to civilize them. In the early years of British rule in India, the people of forested districts (Jungle Mahals) in southwestern Bengal, who defied British governance, were often described in administrative documents as ‘savages’, and ‘extraordinarily primitive’. Medinipur district was described as a contested terrain: ‘While the west and the north were hundred years ago given up to savagery, the east and the south were civilized’ (Carstairs 1912: 188). The people living in the Jungle Mahal were, in the words of the chief ethnologist, ‘the most unimprovable’ people, who often ‘relapse into their condition as savages’ (Dalton 1865: 4). This region thus appeared as an anomaly to the empire, and was placed, with the creation of the South West Frontier Agency in 1833, in a special administrative category of regions, to be governed by paternalistic individuals working directly with a local people, in hilly and jungle areas that were described in British official records as ‘wild, imperfectly civilized, and occasionally disturbed’ (Sivaramakrishnan 1999: 38). Following a number of indigenous people’s uprisings against British sovereignty – the Chuar rebellion (1799–1800), Bhumij revolt (1832–33), the Santal insurrection (1855–57), the Munda revolt (1899–1900), the Bhil uprising (1921–22), the Kacha Naga revolt (1882), and so on – the savage image of the forest tribes seemed to have been reinforced in the administrative perception, as reflected in the following description of a ‘zone of anomaly’: Here Bengal, Behar and Chotanagpur meet. Thrust in between them like a wedge is this debatable ground, a tangled mass of hill and jungle peopled by uncouth aboriginal races, standing like the furthest outpost of barbarism to face the highest civilization that Hindu and Musulman successively planted at its gates. Its

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The aboriginal natives in the colonies who chose to remain outside the pale of civilization, in spite of the state’s prohibition of the ‘primitive’ means of livelihood, were perceived to be ‘unimprovably savage’. When they refused to accept the White rule, they deserved extermination, to protect civilization. After the massacre of the Lakota people in North America on 30 December 1891, L. Frank Baum wrote that it was better to ‘wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth’ (Stannard 1993: 126–27). India’s tribes who persistently remained hunter-gatherers or nomadic pastoralists were demarcated, under the Criminal Tribes Act of 1916, as incorrigible ‘criminal tribes’ (Deb and Malhotra 1993). Thus, all these tribes, such as the Lodha of Bengal and the Chenchu of the State of Hyderabad, were intractable ‘criminals’ with inborn anti-social/anti-state/anti-civilization proclivities. Colonial legislators, inspired by the positivist criminology and racism of Cesare Lombroso, legitimized the colonial urge to establish – and expand – the reign of the empire.18 Legislative sanctions against hunter-gatherers, shifting cultivators and nomadic pastoralist were used to reassert the Western concern for civilizing the colony and protect its civilized subjects from the incorrigible criminal savages by effective governance, based on the scientific principles of (Social) Darwinism, phrenology and racial anthropology. Punishing offenders by legislation was also required to discipline the disorderly and the backward. Back home in England, criminal laws were reformed with a view to discipline the reckless subjects. Discipline was needed to ensure the rule of civilized law, which was specifically designed to protect private property. The definition of crime and the scope of punishment considerably expanded at this period, making elaborate descriptions of property crimes during the first two-thirds of the [19th] century. [O]utwardly innocent preparations and takings, which the law had previously ignored, could now, if accompanied by a prohibited state of mind, turn out to be criminal… Such criminalizing of intentions was not only an expression of capitalist interests in more thoroughly protecting property rights, it was also a form of “character building”, for it demanded greater ‘farsightedness,’ that is, more internalizing of the consequential mentality, throughout the population. (Wiener 1996: 149)

The savage whose traditional occupation of life challenged the state’s authority, and left a window open for escape from the invincible and irresistible territory of the empire, could only be civilized by coercion. Coercion by the paternalistic state, like force-feeding a detesting sick child, was intended for the healthy development of the savage. From the progressivist perspective, the fact

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that binding the savage down to the civilized life of settled agriculture generated revenue and a labour force for the state appears incidental, yet proves the benefits of development.

1.3

Technology, Nature and Development

The benefits of development, in the progressivist view, stem from the indisputable benefits from the generalized acquisition and implementation of knowledge on the part of European civilization. The European Renaissance saw the great power of knowledge – of natural philosophy – to wreak unprecedented change in society. Science enabled humanity to harness the forces of nature and manipulate the natural world. Francis Bacon’s programme of understanding nature was inseparable from manipulation of nature. In contrast to Greek treatment of nature as unknowable, Bacon presented nature as eminently knowable and female, and the task of science was to exercise the right kind of male domination over her: ‘Nature betrays her secrets more fully when in the grip and under pressure of art than when in enjoyment of her natural liberty’ (Bacon 1964: 99). The idea of nature as female was not of Bacon; what was new in his Novum Organum was that he held nature as the object of knowledge. His vision was that sensory observation and testing through experiment will yield knowledge about nature, and that knowledge will empower man to manipulate and transform her and thereby ‘improve his lot’ (Bacon 1964: 93). Knowledge itself was the domination of nature. To acquire knowledge meant not merely to contemplate nature’s wisdom, but to understand her ‘secrets’ that should be extracted, utilized, put to human use. This Baconian programme of knowledge-empowerment shaped the Enlightenment rationalism and consolidated the utilitarian approach to nature. However, the reliance on Reason and science, characteristic of Renaissance, had in fact begun long ago, with the practice of alchemy by Western Greek NeoPlatonists, who did not worship nature but probed into her secrets. As Marangudakis (2001) has argued, rationalism and the ‘psychological predisposition toward changing and manipulating matter’ began in Western tradition long before the Baconian programme, ‘around the sixth century, remaining a central feature of the West from that point on’ (Marangudakis 2001: 247). Reason as a means to approaching God was a peculiarity of Western theology. For Thomas Aquinas and other Scholastics, both God and nature are bound to reason, and must be inferred from our rational knowledge of empirical facts (Marangudakis 2001: 250). In contrast, Judaism, Islam and Greek Christianity accepted that God could not be grasped by reason, and had ‘turned to mysticism and contemplation as more proper means to approach God’ (Marangudakis 2001: 245). So did most Oriental traditions: Taoism, post-Vedantic

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Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism. In the Western Christian tradition, human reason was instrumental to understand nature, which was the manifestation of God’s reason. Thus, rationalism and utilitarianism had already been established in the West ‘long before Descartes, Kepler, and Newton’ (Marangudakis 2001: 255). We only have to remember that Bacon, Newton and Harvey were part-time scientists, part-time alchemists, to realize that Pantheistic alchemy was in principle as aggressive towards nature as atheist Enlightenment, sharing with it the basic principle that truth will be revealed by the manipulation, the ‘testing’ of nature. (Marangudakis 2001: 257)

The testing of nature, the rational investigation into and application of natural laws, kindled the grand hope that Enlightenment would liberate humanity from the darkness of superstition and subjection to the forces of nature. The advances in scientific knowledge assured humanity of its supremacy over nature. The emancipatory agenda of Enlightenment was sought in the political sphere by the overthrow of the traditional seats of authority, and in the ethical sphere by articulating inalienable human rights, which, by practical implication, was accorded primacy over the existence of all other life forms. Subjugation of nature in the service of humanity was perceived as the key necessity to emancipate humanity. In the Enlightenment ideology, application of Reason to the natural world meant application of technology to intensify exploitation of nature. By subjecting the material world to quantification and classification, philosophers and scientists of the day paved the way for techno-industrial civilization. This fostered a mechanistic worldview, projecting humans as the agents of probing and change, while matter remained passive. Reason epitomized the scientific method, and required that nature be viewed objectively so as to produce a knowledge base that humans could use in order to understand it better, thus facilitating its exploitation for achieving progress. The triumph of classical mechanics and the discovery of mechanical systems in physics led to the belief that the whole world is composed of, and reducible to, small atomistic units of matter that follow linear rules. This reductionism, characteristic of mechanistic thinking, was closely linked to the rise of individualism, which is so characteristic of modern history. Reductionism considered natural events to be reducible to movements of atomistic particles, and social reality to the activities of atomistic individuals.s Mechanistic thinking has thus determined the frame of arguments in all scientific discourse, even outside the realm of classical mechanics. As Jaeger (1994: 154) writes, ‘The fact that the so-called laws of motion in this realm expresses our knowledge of gravitation is forgotten, and the dynamics of systems where no comparable knowledge is at hand are self-confidently described on grounds of ad hoc measurements or even simple guesses.’

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In the Enlightenment ideology, the real and legitimate goal of the sciences was to make human life ‘peaceful, happy, prosperous and secure’ (Bacon 1964: 72). Development of society, consisting in a continual increase in material comfort and leisure, to allow for spiritual growth, was to be achieved via employment of instrumental reason, as scientific thinking. Advancement of science was a fundamental prerequisite to achieving growth in wealth and productive culture. Since technological advancements fuelled industrial growth, the latter was equated with the progress of civilization. Of course, modern science has, since the Age of Enlightenment, evoked a general awe and negative feeling, primarily because of the baneful social results of misuse and misapplication of science and technology. The speed of scientific progress often bewildered and terrified society. The general perception of science as an immensely powerful enterprise, with terribly destructive potential, is best reflected in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its popular misreadings (Gould 1994). Nevertheless, champions of progress always sang praises of science and blamed human folly for the misuse of the immense power that it had bestowed upon humans. Wallace was sceptical of human moral progress, which he feared could not keep pace with the progress of science: The more we realize the vast possibilities of human welfare which science has given us, the more we must recognize our total failure to make any adequate use of them… Instead of devoting the highest powers of our greatest men to remedy these evils, we see the governments of the most advanced nations arming their people to the teeth, and expending much of their wealth and all the resources of their science, in preparation for the destruction of life, of property, and of happiness. (Wallace 1898: 379)

Gould (1998: 812) cites the invention of the guillotine, that was used to decapitate Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, France’s greatest scientist during the French Revolution as ‘a tale of technological “progress” gone ethically and socially awry.’ Over the two centuries following the French Revolution, both the number and poignancy of such tales has increased enormously. As Gould writes, As an example of the misuse of science and technology for destructive and immoral ends (usually quite contrary to the inventor’s genuine intent as well), the guillotine hardly merits a glance compared with such efficient agents of wartime destruction as gunpowder, napalm, or atomic weaponry – not to mention the truly unintended and purely consequential impacts of technology on global environments, human and social problems, and biodiversity. (Gould 1998: 812)

Industrial growth fostered the growth of technology and usurped the fruits of scientific research to employ them to produce goods at lower costs, create markets for new commodities and enhance profits. The imperialist rivalries that capitalism

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bred and nourished called for an increasing use of science to develop labourexclusive techniques for more intensive exhaustion of the natural capital and a draconic arms technology for more extensive mass killing and destruction in warfare. Industrial capitalism soon converted the liberatory aim of science into one to enhance capitalist production, which has degraded both nature and humans. Marx noted in his 1862 notebook that in the capitalist mode of production, ‘the forces of nature and science… confront the labourers as powers of capital’ (Marx 1862: 391, emphasis in original). Technological advancement and increasing specialization of physical sciences were essential for increasing the efficiency of production techniques, which ensured growth in profit. The profession of engineering emerged in the 19th century in response to capitalism’s need for technical professionals, to harness technology to the service of capitalism. The industrial application of mechanics, chemistry, and much later, the physics of electricity led to the emergence of mechanical engineering, chemical engineering and electrical engineering, respectively. Noble (1977: 34) showed that the engineer’s technical work was ‘little more than the scientific extension of capitalist enterprise’ and that ‘it was through his effort that science was transformed into capital.’ This process has continued into the recent decades, with the successive emergence of electronics, cybernetics and genetic engineering. Despite industry’s usurpation and misuse, science was viewed in the 19th century as a body of emancipatory knowledge and an objective, dispassionate search for Truth. The spectacular success of science in bringing about changes in life and the world generated a great social prestige and academic veneer for natural sciences. To share in this glow of veneer, all disciplines of knowledge sought to become sanctified in the name of science. In particular, the deterministic character of Newtonian physics, the reigning queen of natural sciences, ‘was the literature of industrialization’ (Prugh et al. 1999: 15). Economic theory also strove to cast itself as a scientific enterprise by assuming an objective, dispassionate standpoint with regard to the study of its subject matter. Neo-classical economics was born in the late 19th century with an aspiration to become a value-free, deterministic science, modelled upon Newtonian physics (Prugh et al. 1999: 15). In its attempt to describe deterministic laws of economic activity, it defined people as ‘rational and egoistic agents who merely try to satisfy their wants’ (Prugh et al. 1999: 14). Achieving the scientific status distinguished neo-classical economics from ‘speculative philosophy,’ custom and religion, which had previously been the main sources of knowledge used by political authorities. While classical economics was allied to moral philosophy, neo-classical economics was ‘regarded as a “practical science” suited to the realpolitik of statecraft and political decision making’ (Barry 1999: 139). Anti-capitalist (including Marxist) as well as capitalist

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political economic theories have always sought to share the character of being ‘scientific.’ Marxism, as ‘one of the foremost articulations of the Enlightenment progressivism’ (Hay 2002: 260), vouchsafed the power of science and technology to increase productive forces of society as heralding the potential of emancipation of the working class. Although Marx’s vision of ‘humanized nature’ was a radical departure from the Enlightenment view of nature (Sheasby 1997: 39; also see Section 3), the Communist Manifesto hailed the industrial revolution in Europe for unleashing ‘colossal productive forces’ through technological application: The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground. What earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour? (Marx and Engels 1888: 38–39)

The allusion to ‘clearing of whole continents for cultivation’ creating massive production forces seems to indicate that in Marx’s thinking, wild lands were considered unproductive unless brought into cultivation – a thinking that prevailed in the British colonial land use policy. It is likely that Marx and Engels celebrated the use of more lands for agricultural production because it promised to defer the Malthusian spectre of famine (Foster 2000: 139). At any rate, classical Marxism envisaged development of society by full employment of technology to harness nature’s forces as necessary for a complete unleashing of productive forces that would emancipate humanity from material and spiritual poverty. While calling for subverting the dominant ideology, Marx himself did not overcome the dominant progressivist ideology. As the above citation illustrates, Marxism perpetuated ‘a belief in economic growth and mastery of nature as progress, allowing the emancipation of people at the expense of dominated nature’ (Hayward 1994: 43). In the dream of human emancipation from natural and socio-economic constraints, ‘the preservation of wilderness was not Marx and Engels’ primary concern’ (Hayward 1994: 43). Nor was it anybody else’s at the time. Even the early works dealing with the adverse impacts of human activities on natural resources and wild species accepted the necessity of industrial development for the sake of progress. As a prime example, the first description of the ecological phenomena is found in Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1853). Lyell gave detailed examples of how

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the activities of modern Man had reduced the species diversity and had led to ‘cause changes in the atmosphere.’ Man is, in truth, continually thriving to diminish the natural diversity of stations of animals and plants, in every country, and to reduce them all to a small number fitted for species of economic use. (Lyell 1853: 682)

Lyell complained that forest clearance by order of the British Parliament, to destroy the havens for outlaws and wolves, had eroded the species diversity (Lyell 1853: 721), and that removal of blocks of limestone from beaches for manufacturing cement was accelerating the destruction of coastlines, an activity ‘which may bring the destruction of the city of Harwick’ (Lyell 1853: 320). Nevertheless, he acceded that the draining of marshlands and felling of forests were useful for humans. Wool (2001: 393) surmises that in spite of Lyell’s commendable understanding of the ecological impacts from human activities, […] Lyell had a clear conscience about these harmful effects: Man was destined to rule the world and its inhabitants, and everything that is good for Man must be the will of God.

Development for Marx was not ‘the will of God,’ but a continual process of social dialectic, in which historical contradictions between a mode of production and its social organization were resolved in a new system of production, which in turn posed new contradictions. To Marx, development was directional, and implied that society advanced towards a higher level of organization, although it was not necessarily beneficial to the majority of humankind until it would lead to the full blossoming of human progress in the age of world Communism. Marx considered capitalism to be more progressive than feudalism because it had liberated the rural poor from bonded labour and traditional forms of inequalities, although it also bound them in wage labour and created a new form of servitude.20 The progress ‘consisted in the change of form of this servitude, in the transformation of feudal exploitation into capitalist exploitation’ (Marx 1887: 669). For Adam Smith, the economic development of a nation was propelled by market rules, which he described as the ‘Invisible Hand,’ which propelled the progress of society. The general idea of progress characterized the Enlightenment Zeitgeist, which defined the goal of civilization in terms of overcoming the state of nature. For Hobbes, civilization meant victory and redemption of humans from primitive nature through culture in the form of government. Culture and nature were poised in a state of constant conflict, which encompassed conflict of interests of groups and individuals. The writings of Hobbes, Mandeville, Adam Smith, Marx, Malthus and Darwin emphasized the conflict of individual and group interests

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and competition. Conversely, Condorcet, Locke and Rousseau held a more conciliatory view in which society is the result of a contract amongst diverse interests to coexist, each striving to maximize its reach. The common ground of both groups of the Enlightenment thinkers was that society’s progress is propelled by incommensurable individual and group interests. The end result of these conflicts and contracts among the diverse interests was that the world was progressing towards a higher rationality – an ever increasing application of reason to social affairs – and ever better state of being. Radical Enlightenment thinkers – from Marx to Kropotkin – argued that the enlightenment process, by evoking ever higher rationality, will eventually enable the conflict-ridden society to evolve into a mutualistic one (Atkinson 1991: 209), where a better understanding of the human predicament and of the relationship between humankind and nature will make freedom and social justice prevail. Since higher reason is represented by the advancement of science, application of reason implied employment of science to solve the problems of society, overcome the limits of productivity, and improve the material conditions of living. In other words, application of science and technology to the productive forces of society would help develop productivity of the national economy and improve human living conditions. The terms ‘progress’ and ‘development’ thus often assumed the same meaning and significance in 19th century social thinking. Classical progressivists, who believed in a teleologically pre-ordained historical progress of human societies as well as the organic evolution of species, applied the term to both biological world and the human society. Marx, a critical progressivist, believed that development of societies was a law of history, brought about by ‘unconscious forces of history.’ According to his historical materialism, the process of social evolution – from a lower to a higher social order, or from less efficient to more efficient forms of economy – was historically necessary and inevitable; however, the tempo of this evolution was likely to be hastened by conscious revolutionary acts of the working class, which would serve to increasingly unfold the possibilities of emancipation of humanity from all fetters of natural and social limitations. In contrast, as Arndt (1981) shows, champions of Euro-imperialism conceived development as a process that is not spontaneous, but an activity that requires to be galvanized by the government. Economic development was achievable by extracting the colonial resources at a higher pace. The term ‘development’ was first used in this sense back in 1854 by Mayes in his Essay on the Manufactures More Immediately Required for the Economic Development of the Resources of the Colony. He proposed development of the colonies by civilized nations for the benefit of both the ruler and the ruled, and for the prosperity of the empire.

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Development, to Mayes, constituted efficient extraction of natural resources from the colonies for manufacturing and use of commodities to benefit the economy of the empire, which would concomitantly enhance the well-being of the colonized people as well. The economic ‘resources of the Empire,’ Lord Milner had demanded, ought to ‘be developed to the utmost’ (quoted in Lugard 1921: 489) – a demand that was acceded by the passage of the British Colonial Development Act of 1929. In contrast to Marxian usage of the term in the sense of general social progress, the imperialist economic sense of development heralded an increasing intensification of resource extraction in the colonies for the prosperity of the Empire – that is, for the material prosperity of the ruling elite. Thus, the term in Marx’s sense ‘derives from the intransitive verb, in [Mayes’ and] Milner’s sense from the transitive verb’ (Arndt 1981: 460). The practices of development, in this ‘transitive’ sense, constituted part of what Scott (1996) calls ‘colonial governmentality,’ that systematically dismantled the old conditions of life in the colonies and created new conditions so as to supplant the old with ‘new forms of life’ (Scott 1996: 193) – new modes of living, new needs, aspirations and goals of life, and above all, a new worldview. However, development for the sake of betterment of the natives of the colonies was not a priority on the colonial agenda; rather, it was pointless from the investor’s point of view. The natives were considered unable to develop, in spite of the external benevolent investment by the colonizer, and incapable of science and technology (Adas 1989), which constituted the basis for industrial growth. The natives’ lack of scientific and technological skill was deduced on the grounds that there was presumably not much evidence of their capability in terms of technological innovation and use. In the case of Asia, the body of evidence of the scientific achievements of ancient India, China and Arabia was interpreted to be inferior to modern European techno-military supremacy. In any case, the past achievements of these societies, compared to their current ignominious state of ‘stunted development’ demonstrated the obvious historical downfall of their scientific and intellectual capabilities. The modern natives could become civilized only through European governance and education.21 The fact of Western technomilitary supremacy was easily translated into the doctrine of European racial and cultural superiority, and fed back into economic models of development. In these models, the Western capitalist economic growth serves as both the reference frame and the goal. Thus economic development came to be coterminous with social progress, and this notion persists in the current mainstream economic discourse as well. Modernity is in fact characterized by the vision of development as unlimited economic growth through application of science and technology, leading to greater and greater wealth.

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During the late phase of European colonial rule – rocked by frequent independence movements in the colonies, and the economic crisis that emerged soon after the World War II – the notion of development was useful as a strategy to reinvigorate the empire and restructure the relations between colonies. The British Development Act of the 1940s was thus the first materialization of the notion of development in response to challenges to the imperial power (Cooper 1991). Soon after the World War II, poverty in two-thirds of the world became a new green pasture for the development doctrine. Economists interpreted the flow of capital as investment and accumulation of capital as the means to ‘eradicating poverty’ and bringing prosperity to the developing nations. By defining prosperity in terms of luxury consumption and wasteful expenditure, the development institutions constructed a new concept of poverty to facilitate global deployment of the development doctrine, as an ideological instrument to maintain the Western imperialist hegemony.

1.4

Development and the Western Hegemony

The concept of development was constructed and continues to be used in political economy based on an implicit standard of Western economic growth, measured by the yardstick of industrialization and urbanization. In conformity with the norms and aspirations of the capitalist market, the Western model of industrial growth and life-style is posited by classical and neo-classical economists as the prime achievement of social evolution. Modernity consists in embracing industrial development and the growth of market. In this Western view of modernity, the chariot of social progress toward the ultimate goal of human emancipation is thus propelled by the natural law of development, defined by an increased influx of capital, escalating production of raw materials and growing industrialization. This definition of development has, in the past two centuries, underpinned the programmes of colonial exploitation for the empire’s prosperity, and has delineated the goal of economic development of nations after independence from colonial rule. The notion of development took its modern emblematic form from the US President Harry Truman’s call for ‘a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas’ (cited in Esteva 1992: 9). Henceforth, the American model of industrial development was perceived to be necessary to develop the ‘underdeveloped’ economies, which are characterized by backwardness, poverty, low productivity and lack of adequate capital to infuse industrialization. Paraphrasing Escobar (1995), the hegemony of this view of development

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precludes any other view of development possible in the discursive space within the economic as well as policy domain of the global South. [D]evelopment economies contributed to a view of reality in which the only things that counted were increased savings, growth rates, foreign capital, developing industrial capacity, and so on. This excluded the possibility of articulating a view of social change as a project that could be conceived of not only in economic terms but as a whole life project, in which the material aspects would be not the goal and the limit but a space of possibilities for broader individual and collective endeavors, culturally defined. (Escobar 1995: 83)

The notion of underdevelopment has subsequently included hunger, malnutrition and illiteracy as facets of poverty. This notion externalizes the social and political issue of equitable distribution of, and entitlement to, food; it ignores the traditional food and nutritional security measures and conversely, the severe health and distributional problems associated with overconsumption; it assumes that food and health security are to be achieved through homogenization of foods and food cultures; finally, it presumes that pre-literate societies were and are all malnourished and unhappy, awaiting literacy campaigns and external food aid in order to become ‘developed’. Development in the transitive sense (Arndt 1981: 460) is now universally accepted as a normative goal in all national policies. The word engenders a perception as well as a perspective. It is pitted in the assumption of the existence of its opposite – underdevelopment – which in the policy world becomes an object, a factual reality. The comparative value of the words is hidden under the assumption of a unilinear history of homogenous social progress. ‘No one seems to doubt that the concept does not allude to real phenomena’ (Esteva 1992: 15). The notion of development therefore implies that all the diversity of underdeveloped cultures and traditions must be homogenized and improved through the application of the Western model of industrial growth and Western way of life. After the Second World War, this Western way of life has come to be identified and represented by the American way of life in an economically liberal international system (Addo, 1996). The American technocratic euphoria has, since the 1960s, established the belief that the USA can be and is the model of worldwide cultural as well as economic change. Many social theorists have considered the American experience of rapid technological development as an implementation of Utopia, and some thinkers, like Raymond Aron and Jean-François Revel, have called for Americanization of the world for developing like America (Gurevich 1990: 41). Industrial growth, which has led to an unprecedented level of material well-being in a section of the developed North22 has set the paradigmatic global economic target of achieving the Western standard of life. Although a five-fold increase in global economy in the past half-century has widened the

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gulf of income disparity (UNDP 1994; 2001), national governments and international development agencies continue to set the goals of further escalating industrial development to eradicate poverty. With the increasing material expectations of the expanding populations in all countries, rich and poor, sustained industrial growth is prescribed by the mainstream economics as the remedy to raise the living standard of the poor. The paradigmatic assumption of development economics is that more development will mean a bigger GNP, and even a tiny proportion of a big national pie should suffice to satisfy the material needs of a greater number of poor people than would an equal proportion of a small one. Kuznets (1955) hypothesized that a larger share of basic consumption goods provided through the marketplace would result in more equal money incomes, and would eventually lead to democracy and social welfare systems. Thus, ‘progress toward the social democratic frameworks of modern Europe and North America’, to Kuznets, was ‘a pragmatic possibility as well as an ideal’ (Galbraith 2002: 12). This ‘big pie’ logic sets the priority of economic concerns, and situates industrial growth above ecological integrity. One of the catch phrases repeatedly articulated by most leaders of the South in international environmental negotiations is that care and concern for the environment is a luxury for a poor nation until it achieves the standard of living at par with the developed West. Many consider environmental degradation to be the price for economic prosperity, which must be achieved by all nations, before they can afford to stop to take a look at the environment. In the late 1940s, the World Bank correlated the problem of global poverty with countries’ GNPs, and espoused that economic development, as measured by GNP, was the only answer to eradicate poverty of the South (Rahnema, 1992: 216). Identification of poverty as a global phenomenon encompassed whole nations and countries, characterized by their low estimates of GNP in comparison with countries dominating the world economy. The homogenized measure of GNP per capita submerged the social and political dimensions of individual poverty. Soon, and ever after, poverty eradication became a priority for international development agencies and a necessity for all governments of the entire South. Fostering and enhancing Industrial growth to generate employment and raise income levels received the primary emphasis in most developing country programmes, assisted by international aid agencies. These development programmes paid little attention to environmental health and sustainability. When the environmental concern was voiced in the ecology movements of the 1960s, ‘economy over ecology’ was the slogan belched out as the official bureaucratic and industrial response. Poverty eradication was a justifying reason for a continuous economic growth, which was also upheld by the political Left who considered that concerns for environmental protection and biodiversity conservation were

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‘bourgeois’ concerns, aimed at depriving the poor of the opportunity to achieve economic prosperity. Since the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, the Left has always seen techno-industrial development as having the potential to liberate the proletariat from capitalist exploitation and bring forth progressive social changes. Although many Left theorists have acknowledged the capacity of technology to reinforce the hegemony of the ruling classes over those less empowered, the Left have generally remained favourably disposed toward technology and industrial development. Therefore, global environmental concerns like nuclear plants, global warming, big river dams and callous use and disposal of toxic chemicals have seldom espoused any significant opposition from the Left, who tend to consider these as unavoidable by-products of industrial development, which is historically necessary for social progress. Along with the doctrine of development – and its accompanying beliefs in technological fixes, inexhaustible resources and the possibility of perpetual economic growth – the new construct of poverty and its measurement in terms of GNP was accepted by all Southern governments. Over the decades, since the 1950s, financial aids from international development agencies built up the global perception of the need for development to eradicate poverty. To most people in the South as well as in the North, it is perfectly legitimate that the poor countries will strive to emulate the standards of living of the richest countries (Jaeger 1994: 255). The World Bank’s mission of giving financial aid to the underdeveloped world is predicated on the idea of ‘allowing Southern countries to leap-frog to the economic position of Northern countries by giving them Northern-style projects in Southern settings’ (Gillespie 2001: 3). This idea comprises what Marx called the ‘ruling idea,’23 which the underdog also embraces. Poverty alleviation has been the most convenient handle to run the development treadmill. Indeed, ‘the discourse of the dominant shapes and structures the discourse of the dominated’ (Keesing 1994: 41), and the discourse of poverty alleviation/ elimination has won ground in all countries. Poverty alleviation has consistently provided the greatest legitimacy of all development agenda, while the prime motive for governments to accept development has been the international financial aid for development. As a Worldwatch Institute report has observed, ‘Like generals planning for the lost war, many [countries in the South] are industrializing along the lines followed by the West in the fifties and sixties – and paying the environmental price’ (Flavin and Young 1993: 199). Following the universal acceptance of the paradigm of development-as-destiny, the South has now created a new discursive space to identify poverty as the root cause of environmental degradation, and bargains for developmental aid from the North for poverty alleviation in order to protect the environment. Thus a global consensus on the need and urge for a rapid quantitative

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economic growth along the Northern model of techno-industrial development – a worldview and attitude that I would call developmentality – has become allpervasive. While the political Left in the South often oppose financial aid from the World Bank and IMF for national development, they seldom question the legitimacy of the necessity of quantitative economic growth per se. The political Left as well as Socialist regimes of the Second World have displayed the same urge for economic growth, same enthusiastic developmentality, and similar legacies of environmental destruction. ‘Bar the profit motive, every feature of the capitalist agriculture, from the loss of ecological diversity through monoculture to technophilia and chemical dependency, has characterized agriculture in the former Soviet Union and eastern European bloc’ (Coates 1998: 151) – as well as in China. The mammoth Soviet irrigation project that drained out the Amu Darya and Sir Darya rivers and killed the Aral Sea (see Section 4.2.2.1), and the massive chemicalization of Chinese agriculture that poisons over 10,000 people every year by pesticides in foods, are testimony to developmentality. No matter what Marx’s own view of nature was, the Marxist/Socialist state practice has generally destroyed nature. As Coates has pointed out, ‘In the proletariat’s struggle to catch up with the bourgeoisie’s living standards, the desirability of increased production and consumption is largely unquestioned’ (Coates 1998: 151). In this ambience of nearly universal acceptance of the need for development – up the course set by the rich countries of the West – environmental regulations have appeared to be inimical to economic prosperity of the South. Until the 1970s, most people in the poor countries perceived international environmental protocols as the North’s attempts to impose rules of Northern domination of the South, through increasing the latter’s dependence on the North – a perception generally shared by policy makers of India (Rajan 1997: 64, 205). All countries are set on the course of economic development; all have accepted that development must be achieved at the cost of the environment, social justice and traditional values. This paradigm of development is entrenched in the current dominant economic discourse, in which ‘market forces’ are held as natural laws that individuals, social groups and nations must learn to accept and adapt to. Since the market is driven by economic rationality – a characteristic of human nature – economic and social inequality (in view of this ideology) is simply the result of the dispassionate law of the market, a process of natural selection which sorts and ranks people according to their innate abilities. Thus, widening differences in wealth within a society are not unjust, because in a laissez-faire market, power and wealth would flow naturally to the most capable people, and only the individuals who are lazy by nature are poor (Nozick 1974). In Victorian economic thought, inequality itself was the motive force for economic growth and social progress. Increasing

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concentrations of wealth resulting from capital accumulations in fewer and fewer rich people propelled growth in economy, and hence justified the unequal class structure and the growing disparity in distribution of wealth and social benefits of growth. As the working class enjoyed the benefit of the rising living standard, this system seemed to work satisfactorily until the First World War. Later developments in economic theory have reset the objective of growth as reducing inequality, and left some space for welfare economics. It appeared that the spirits of Malthus and Spencer had died out in modern economic thought. And then, after sixty years, the very same idea was born again. Let the rich rule – so wrote the supply-side economists who came to power behind Ronald Reagan in America and Margaret Thatcher in Britain. Tax cuts would improve the incentives of the wealthy to ‘work, save, and invest.’ High interest rates would reward saving and quash inflation. And a fetish of entrepreneur spread through political and business culture… (Galbraith 2002: 13–14)

Echoing Social Darwinists of the 19th century, modern proponents of the open market and globalization argue that as minimal government intervention as possible is best for the economy, so that efforts to rectify the unfortunate results of the market forces with forced redistribution are said to be naively foolish at best and harmful at worst. This neo-Malthusian thought resurfaced in the New Right ideology of the 1980s. Social Darwinist thought thus continues to lurk as much in the discourse of neo-classical economics as in pop socio-biology (Barry 1999: 180–81; Lewontin et al. 1984; Ross 1994: 246–47, 259–60; Schwartz 1986: 84, 313–15). The application of Darwinian natural selection to society and economy – in the tradition of what Steve Gould (1997) called ‘Darwinian fundamentalism’ – establishes the spurious scientific explanation, and justification, for all that exists in the world. In the resurgent Social Darwinian thinking, social and economic inequalities spawned by capitalism tend to be justified by showing that capitalist market competition is a form of natural selection of the most industrious and enterprising individuals who will improve the national economy. Liberal economic thinkers who repudiate social Darwinist thinking demand that all societies have the right and potential to develop, and hence pre-industrial societies ought to be brought into the mainstream of development. Thus, the need for industrial development is vouchsafed by all mainstream economists, regardless of their political commitments or opposition to the New Right ideology. The universal acceptance of the development paradigm engenders acceptance of ‘economic rationality’, which construes an inherent human proclivity of maximizing selfish interests at the cost of society. Expansion of this rationality tends to insidiously turn all natural wealth into natural capital. Depletion of natural wealth is an inevitable consequence of the autonomous, all-powerful market, which is

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determined and fuelled by the individual zeal for maximizing personal economic benefits. Free play of economic rationality leads to commodification and destruction of the natural world. This rationality is invoked in the discourse of resource economics (Harvey 1996), by mounting a utilitarian argument for biodiversity conservation – an argument that discounts everything that is not amenable to pricing. The widespread acceptance of the developmental discourse – what Barry (1999: 142) calls the universal ‘grammar of power’ – has steamrolled a uniform rule and norm of development the world over. It also sustains ‘governmentality’ in the Foucauldian sense in colonial and post-colonial Third World that shapes the public attitude towards social progress, individual happiness and quality of life. The paradigm of development thus both engenders and is reinforced by the standard view of the mainstream economics profession. The capitalist hegemony subsumes a powerful array of discourses on the environment, social development and justice: Environmental economics, environmental engineering, environmental law, planning and policy analysis, as well as a wide range of scientific endeavors are ranged broadly in support of it. Such discourses are perfectly acceptable to the dominant forms of political-economic power precisely because there is no challenge implied within them to the hegemony of capital accumulation. (Harvey 1996: 376)

The challenges to the ‘standard view’ include the exposition of its limitations, which constitute the problematique of the development ideology, ensconced in the mainstream economic theory. In the following section I discuss the salient fallacies of the economic theory. I do not intend to discuss these methodological fallacies and operational inadequacies in detail, because firstly, I do not pretend to be competent enough in that venture, and secondly, several authors have dealt with them in sufficient detail (e.g. Bliese 2001; Costanza 1997a; Costanza et al. 1998; Daly 1996; 1999; Douthwaite 2000; Gillespie 2001; Hay 2002; Redclift 2000 among others). The point of my treatment of the problematique here is to show how it underpins the failure of the mainstream economy to protect the environment and deliver social justice. Environmental degradation is thus an inevitable result of development. The fallacies of development economics and their ecological implications are what I briefly discuss in the following section.

Notes 1. Social ‘Darwinism’ is in fact much older than Darwinism. Some of its main arguments were born a quarter of a century before Darwinian evolutionary theory was published – in works of Rev. Joseph Townsend and Rev. Thomas Malthus. However, Social Darwinism ought to be appropriately called Spencerism, because its modern form was Spencer’s brainchild, born before Darwinism. At any rate, it acquired a new vigour

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2. Of course, this construction of the human social evolution is the prevalent textbook version of progress in human civilization, and lingers in many recent treatments of human social history. In mass media as well as ethnic polity, hunter-gatherers, for example, are still described as ‘primitive’ people. 3. These aboriginal peoples represented the early steps of human evolution in the Darwinian schema. Darwin’s own writings reveal profoundly racist implications. In the sixth chapter of The Descent of Man, Darwin expressed his belief that the Negro and the Australian Aborigines were more evolutionarily primitive, or atavistic than the Caucasian man; he also avowed that evolution would eventually increase the gap between the Caucasian man and the lower apes through the extinction of such ‘evolutionary intermediates’ as gorillas and Negroes. In his own words, The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the Negro or Australian and the Gorilla. (Darwin 1871: 201) 4. The contempt toward Oriental traditions has been manifested in many European scholars’ treatment of the uniqueness of Oriental cultures. Hegel described in his Phenomenology of Spirit that the Indian religious tradition had drowned consciousness in dreams which were considered as reality. He viewed various theologies, cosmogonies and myths of India as results of wanton imagination of the amorphous Indian tradition, which fettered and subjugated consciousness. He believed that Indian art forms were merely supplementary expression of Indian mythology, and that Indian poetry was murked by elements of fantasy, which ‘distorted, extended and dismembered the sensual’ (Gurevich 1990: 17–18). His intellectual heir Karl Marx, the most radical Victorian, covertly reiterated the Victorian contempt of Asia in his description of ‘Oriental despotism’, which the European pattern of development sought to replace. Of especial significance is his description of the Indian society: … [W]e must not forget that these idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath the traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies. We must not forget that … these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man to be the sovereign of circumstances, that

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they transformed a self-developing social state into never-changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalising worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Hanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala [sic], the cow. (Marx 1853: 18; emphasis added) Marx subsequently argued that British rule brought a social revolution fortunate for the Indian people – so as to fulfil the historical destiny of human emancipation: England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan, was actuated only by the vilest of interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution. (Marx 1853: 18) My point here is not to show that this depiction of the Indian society as one crushed under Oriental despotism, tradition and superstition, is untrue, or that Marx’s contempt for this society was misplaced. The caste hierarchy including untouchability, the custom of suttee (widow-burning) and the virtual abolition of science and analytical thought from the scholastic world in medieval India – all confirm Marx’s observation and justify his repugnance. However, this account does not capture the entire complexity of the Indian social dialectic: it overlooks the fact that various subaltern religious cults broke out of the Brahmanical tradition, and even constituted a militant force of resistance to state authority (e.g. Sikhism against the Mughal empire); the fact that nature worship and animistic rites were not universal in the Indian society; or that humans as the supreme end of creation was a prominent notion in Hindu mythology (e.g. the Avatar genealogy traces an evolutionary course from fish and various tetrapods to man the hunter, man the cultivator, and finally, the Buddha – the supremely wise and kind man), or that the humanist goal of domination over natural forces was not alien to the economic life of the common Indian, whose aspiration to overcome the natural and social constraints was also symbolized in some religious philosophies in terms of conscious intellectual subjugation of man’s inner nature to transcend the bondage of natural and social laws, to achieve Moksha or Nirvana. My point here is to show that Marx’s notion of ‘man, the sovereign of nature’ was directly opposed to the Asiatic worldview in which humans are a much more advanced life form than others, yet a part of nature. His view of humankind’s relation to nature, and that of progress as humanity’s destiny faithfully reflected the Enlightenment progressivism. Moreover, in his linear social development model, European culture was accepted to be superior to the Asiatic as well as other cultures, whose destruction through European conquest was necessary for the dawning of what Wallace (see endnote 14) called ‘the future reign of true civilization and the well-being of the human race,’ a characteristically Enlightenment vision. 5. Spencer also stressed that human moral progress was also law-governed, that progress… is not an accident, but a necessity… so surely must the things we call evil and immorality will disappear; so surely must man become perfect (Spencer 1882: 80).

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Beyond Developmentality This typified the 19th-century optimism regarding the perfecting of man and society, characterizing the social credo of Victorian liberalism. However, in his later writings Spencer turned away from the concept of progress of human morality, which he considered too anthropocentric. His description of evolutionary progress essentially comprised the ‘law’ of accelerating movement from the simple to the complex, from homogeneity to heterogeneity. In sociology, this progress referred to an evolutionary development toward an ideal ‘social state’ (Kon 1989: 51).

6. Paul Lilienfeld (1829–1903) in Russia, Michele Angelo Vaccaro (1854–1937) in Italy and Walter Bagehot (1826–1877) in Britain were the most prominent sociologists who employed Darwinian concepts of ‘struggle’, ‘fitness’ and ‘survival.’ However, not all spokesmen of Social Darwinism described social processes in biological terms. Some of them (e.g. Ludwig Gumplowitz) were even opposed to biological analogies. However, they all embraced a particular view of social evolution, in which ‘struggle for existence’ took prominence. In retrospect, ruthless competition and conflict seems to have portrayed the social processes better than cooperation in the 19th century, as ‘class antagonisms and conflicts between capitalist states had become unusually sharp in that century’ (Hofman and Kovalev 1989: 82). 7. In Montaigne’s and Rousseau’s writings, savage societies knew no trade or occupation, but only leisure. They were simple in material culture, pure in thinking, brave at heart, peaceful in predisposition, and just in social behaviour. They spend the day hunting, gathering and dancing, and go to war only ritually to demonstrate their courage. ‘Among them you hear no words for treachery, lying, cheating, avarice, envy, backbiting or forgiveness’ (Montaigne 1580: 10). They had no sense of guilt, which is a product of modern social norms. Rousseau (1755) found primal liberty and bliss among the primitive pre-literate people in the state of nature. His notion of the Noble Savage trickled down to the early 20th century ethnographic literature: in Margaret Mead’s description, Samoa was an idyllic place of innocence, simplicity and straightforwardness, where people practised promiscuity with no sense of guilt. 8. Marx refrained from applying his stadial development schema to non-European societies, and never thought of feudalism being a useful concept in connection with Indian or Chinese history. He distinguished the Asiatic mode of production from the European feudalism, although that concept is indeed inadequate to act as a model for Indian society in the pre-British period. 9. The relevant passage from the Bible reads: Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our own image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth’ (Genesis 1: 26). And then God ordained man to ‘Be fruitful, multiply, and fill the Earth, and subjugate it.’ 10. The Bible also taught that the ideal of humanity was equality. ‘The ideal of equality appears in the Jewish Bible as the idea that all human beings are created in the image of God’ (Putnam 1981: 44). However, this ideal was in fact both neglected and negated over centuries in Western culture in its treatment of the Natives outside Europe. Slave trade is just one manifestation of this negation. Jaeger (1994: 173) reminds that Enlightenment revoked the biblical ideal of equality of all humans:

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In the context of the Enlightenment, mechanistic thinking actually became the heir of the utopian social ideal which the biblical tradition had made possible, but which it had subsequently neglected. Any critique of mechanistic thinking has to respect the effort of the Enlightenment to take seriously the historical task set by the ideal of human equality. 11. For an analysis of the metaphorical treatment of Reason as male and Nature as female in Western thought, see Lloyd (1984). l2.

The stories of the Arabian Nights, erotic sculptures of Khajuraho and Konark temples, Kamasutra and its Chinese and Japanese equivalents represented to the West an Oriental voyeuristic obsession with sex and sexuality, which the Victorian elite saw as both lewd and attractive. The myth of the Oriental obsession with sex is still rephrased in the Western conservationist repudiations of Eastern ‘superstitions’ leading to biodiversity erosion. A whole range of Western wildlife literature concerned with the decimation of the Asian rhinoceros have over the past few decades indicted Chinese medicine, which, supposedly, recommends the use of the rhino horn as a great aphrodisiac. However, the exorbitant price of the rhino horn in Southeast Asian market is not because it is aphrodisiac, but because Chinese medicine says it is antipyretic – a property that has recently been clinically proved (But et al. 1991). Of course, illegal trade in rhino horns is pushing the rhinos toward extinction, but its aphrodisiac property, a Western myth, is not the cause.

13. Until recently, myths of anthropophagous tribes persisted in European literature and films, although there are few data to suspect that cannibalism ever existed anywhere, except in ritual forms of eating bits of flesh of the deceased. In many ‘ethnographic’ descriptions, cannibals were also accused of knowing no incest taboo – another distinguished marker of their uncivilized state. In Freud’s imagination of the infancy of human civilization, sons used to kill and devour their fathers to take over the females. In subsequent state of remorse and fear from their own sons, they established taboos on incest and cannibalism, and that was ‘the beginning of many things – of social organization, of moral restrictions and of religion’ (Freud 1950: 142). Professional anthropological research has laid these myths to rest (Arens 1979). 14. Female power was mysterious, awesome and evil because it opposed the natural order of things, male dominance and patriarchy. Hence signs of female power were unpardonable in civilized Europe – witches were burned alive. Fierce goddesses like Kali, the Hindu goddess, were interpreted as embodiments of fierce female sexuality, which was non-permissible in the Victorian culture, and therefore an object of men’s suppressed desire. The imagination of women warriors was an inverse imagery of ‘Frailty, thy name is Woman’, and seems to arise from the need of positing the Other in opposition to Europe’s strongly patriarchal culture, in which women were seen as naturally weak, submissive and passive. 15. In his unique parody of the European mission of civilizing the world with the rule of law and order, Rabindranath Tagore wrote: What if the subjects die from too less of food and too much of law and order? We shall then go elsewhere to colonize other societies, for it’s our mission to civilize the world. (Translation mine, see Deb 2004b)

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16. Alfred Russell Wallace, the co-discoverer of Darwinian evolution by means of natural selection, vehemently opposed this vulgarization of evolutionary theory in the social sciences that sought to legitimize capitalist hegemony. He was a devout socialist, wrote on women’s rights, and criticized the natural and social costs of colonial extractive economies, which he witnessed in the East Indies. Toward the end of his life, he was convinced that contemporary development of capitalism would lead to the extinction of humanity, which could only be saved by the overthrow of capitalism. It will be an intriguing study to analyze why few of his extensive writings (twenty-one books and over four hundred articles) are currently available in print, and why he fell into oblivion – barring the lasting recognition of his pioneering work on biogeography. 17. Wallace deplored the devastating consequences of despoliation of natural resources and conquest of nations ‘in order to secure slaves and tribute and great estates, by means of which the ruling classes could live in boundless luxury’ (Wallace 1998: 81). He identified the profit motive of merchants and capitalists behind the ‘perpetual frontier wars and continual extensions of the Empire.’ Nevertheless, he indulged in speculation that European conquest might be ultimately beneficial to humanity: It is quite possible that both the conquests of Mexico and Peru by the Spaniards, and our conquest of South Africa, may have been real steps in advance, essential to human progress, and helping on the future reign of true civilization and the well-being of the human race. But if so, we have been, and are, unconscious agents, in hastening the great ‘far-off, divine event To which the whole creation moves.’ We deserve no credit for it. Our aims have been, for the most part, sordid and selfish; and if, in the end, all should work out for good, as no doubt it will, much of our conduct will yet deserve, and will certainly receive, the severest condemnation (Wallace 1998: 82; emphasis added). It is worthy of note here that Wallace’s allusion to European empires as ‘unconscious agents’ of human progress reiterates Marx’s (1853: 18) analysis of the historical role of British rule in India (see note 4). 18. Cesare Lombroso’s theory of atavism held that criminals are atavistic individuals, born with anatomical signs of atavism. Steve Gould (1996: 124) summarizes his theory as follows: Criminals are evolutionary throwbacks in our midst. Germs of an ancestral past lie dormant in our heredity. In some unfortunate individuals, the past comes to life again. These people are innately driven to act as a normal ape or savage would, but such behavior is deemed criminal in our civilized society. Fortunately, we may identify born criminals because they bear anatomical signs of their apishness. Their atavism is both physical and mental, but the physical signs, or stigmata as Lombroso called them, are decisive. Lombrosian stigmata included: large jaws, pre-eminence of the face over the cranium, low and narrow forehead, large ears, absence of baldness, greater visual acuity and even absence of blushing (Gould 1996: 125). Lombroso’s theory held a great influence on the European positivist criminology, and ‘provoked numerous “reforms” and was, until World War I, the subject of an international conference held every four

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years for judges, jurists, and government officials as well as for scientists’ (Gould 1996: 136). Lombrosian criminology became a police tool to judge criminal proclivities of individuals and tribes. The theories of phrenology and racial hierarchy fed into each other, and legitimized European colonization of the inferior races. 19. While mechanistic thinking pivoted on classical mechanics has organized an integrated research tradition in physical sciences, mechanistic thinking often tends to suggest that no integrative research tradition is needed for the study of phenomena outside the realm of mechanics (Jaeger 1994: 154). 20. Marx was extremely perceptive in his assessment of the plight of the wage-labourer in capitalism. In his words, …the historical movement which changes the producers into wage-workers, appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds… But, on the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. (Marx 1887: 669) The relevance of this observation to the relationship between capitalism and freedom is discussed in Section 7.3.4. 21. British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill held that India’s demand for independence was premature, and that continuance of British rule was necessary for Indians to achieve adequate development and competence to govern themselves. 22. Indeed, the richer section of the American population is the one that is represented in models and images of the West. In spite of Chaplinesque representation of the American poor, the poor and the homeless in the US do not seem to count as Americans in the global image of America. The income disparity between the rich and the poor within the US society is as wide as the global divide between the rich and poor extremes of the wealth distribution. 23. The Gramscian concept of hegemony was presaged in Marx: The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force… The individuals composing the ruling class… regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age; thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. (Marx 1844: 67) This seems to have been subsequently corroborated by numerous social studies dealing with how an idea of the dominant class or community eventually forms the dominant discourse. Consider the following description of how American economists created a global hegemony of their growth model: Between 1935 and 1970, [American economists] acquired enormous prestige and power because, or so it seemed, they could manipulate demands through minor adjustments in fiscal and monetary policy so as to minimize unemployment, avoid slumps and assure perpetual economic growth. They infiltrated the corridors of power and the groves of the academe, provded expert advice at home and abroad, trained6 legions of acolytes from around the world, wrote columns for popular magazines – they grasped every chance to spread the gospel. (McNeill 2000: 335)

C h a p t e r

2

Myths and Misconceptions

I

n spite of all the ideological prescriptions and endeavours by all national and international development agencies, the failure of the ‘developing’ countries to show signs of real material and human development begs serious, mundane explanation. Questions regarding the quality of human life, the environment and intra- and inter-generational equity reveal that edematous swellings on selected privileged strata of society have so far been depicted as signs of improved economic health. In particular, the growth of GNP and the concomitant steady decline of the environmental and human health in most ‘developing’ countries indicate that classical and neo-classical parameters and indices of development do not adequately portray reality, and that some of the fundamental assumptions in the discipline of economics are fallacious. Nevertheless, as Paul Sweezy (1972: 57) recognized, the resistance to the abandonment of old paradigms and the adoption of new ones is indeed ‘more stubborn in social sciences than in the natural sciences’. The fundamental weakness of the standard economic discourse is that it keeps too many real life factors as ‘externalities’ that lie ‘outside the self-imposed limits of orthodox economics, which is therefore condemned to increasing irrelevance and impotence’ (Sweezy 1972: 59). In what follows, we shall briefly dwell on the various flaws in the founding concepts of the mainstream economics, and subsequently, the recent corrective endeavours undertaken by a handful of ecologically oriented interdisciplinary researchers.

2.1

Fallacies in Assumptions

The assumption of naturalness of the market force and individual pursuit of selfinterest, as mentioned above, engenders an important epistemological position 55

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and a set of methodology in the economic understanding of the value and use of natural resources. It can be shown that a multitude of axiomatic premises in classical and neo-classical economic theory are consequent upon, and reinforce the processes of environmental degradation. It is worth mentioning a few of them in order to give an overall idea of the limitation of the mainstream economic approach to social development.

2.1.1

Economic Rationality

The most fundamental of such assumptions is ‘economic rationality’, referred to as the pursuit of self-interest. Wholly continuous with the views of Adam Smith, neo-classical economics describes a rational economic person who acts always so as to maximize her self-interest, maximize satisfaction of her wants and pursues her short-term self-interest as a rule (Blaug 1992: 230–32; Marshall 1962: 78–81). This depiction of rationality subsumes the classical as well as neo-classical description of rational behaviour as the maximization of utility of a variety of goods, given limited resources. The ‘rational’ economic man, homo oeconomicus, is thus primarily ‘a consumer maximising utility’ (Söderbaum 1999: 164), and is solely concerned with his own short-sighted individual interests. This assumption is clearly entrenched in the individual-centred view of modernity, which precludes any scope for consideration of cooperative behaviours. Economic theory denies the possibility of the cultural embeddedness and social evolution of a rationality that involves the individual’s ability of envisaging consequences of her own and others’ actions and her faculty of ethical judgment based on shared social responsibilities and values. Social norms dictating cooperative behaviours are at best considered an external factor. The world of homo oeconomicus revolves around the free market rationality of individual selfinterest. Clearly, all human behaviour cannot be explained using this concept of the short-sighted homo oeconomicus. Real people, unlike homo oeconomicus, are influenced by many factors that are themselves non-economic in nature. The primary problematic with economic rationality is that (a) it precludes any possibility of group as well as individual behaviours enhancing group interests, and that (b) it recognizes only the short-term benefits as perceived by individuals rather than any real long-term benefits. The short term is given priority, because according to the Keynesian dictum, in the long term we are all dead. The possibility of the individual’s weighting of long-term benefits, which may entail forgoing an immediate gain, seems to be denied. In the long run, sacrifice of the common good for individual interests seems inevitable in this view of rationality, because each

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individual in her/his bid to maximize short-term self-interest is oblivious of the longer term benefits to them as a group accrued from collective restraint on overuse of resources. The neo-classical premise that pursuit of self-interest is the motive force for the operation of the Invisible Hand of the market, on which the capitalist economy hinges, has gathered an evolutionary justification from the discipline of sociobiology. From the mid-1970s onwards, sociobiology sought to provide evolutionary explanations of group cohesive behaviour arising from assemblages of ‘selfish’ individuals intent on maximizing their interest of propagating and perpetuating their genes. Altruistic behaviours in animals were explained to be ultimately selfish in terms of maximizing the individual’s genetic interest: one tends to sacrifice one’s interest to protect her close kins (‘kin altruism’) who share a greater proportion of the same genes than others. Individuals may want to show altruism towards non-kins too, in the hope that they will also be aided in return (‘reciprocal altruism’). In proto-human social systems, where cooperative behaviours among individuals were better insurance for survival than non-cooperative behaviours, the genes of altruistic individuals are likely to have been better selected than those who did not behave altruistically. Sociobiology presumes that a complex genetic calculation is always in operation in individuals’ brains, as dictated by genes – ‘the whisperings within.’ Accordingly, all apparently altruistic behaviours turn out to be ultimately selfish. Selfishness, in terms of promoting the chances of perpetuating one’s own genes, is the prime mover of evolution. Game theoretic models have been employed to show that cooperation between selfish individuals could possibly evolve to protect selfish interests, if cooperation ensured that.1 Socio-biological theorization about genetic ‘selfishness’ seems to buttress the neo-classical theorization of rationality. Game theory is often invoked in economics to explain why individual rational concerns prevail over community concerns. Game theoretic analyses purported to show the pre-eminence of individual selfish interest as the drive to improving social and economic development thus seem to confirm the ‘rational’ premises on which the analyses are based.2 Any individual restraint to minimize consumption of resources for the sake of long-term community use of the resource base is counter-adaptive for economic survival and counter-productive to society. What appears to be in the best interest of the individual may not be in the best interest of the society or the environment, and vice versa.3 Nevertheless, individual rational drives to satisfy wants and maximize profits incidentally improve collective social welfare. In cases where the individual interest conflicts with the group interest or the wellbeing of the environment, economic rationality dictates that the individual

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interest prevails, to the tragic demise of the commons, as in Hardin’s portrayal of economic rationality. In his famous essay, Garrett Hardin (1968) envisioned a common pasture exploited by a group of rational (and by this definition) selfish graziers. While the pasture’s carrying capacity is limited, everybody will want to maximize his economic gain by increasing the size of his herd of cattle, which would exceed the pasture’s carrying capacity. Thus the short-term benefit would accrue to the individual adding the extra cattle, while the cost of the extra grazing will be collectively shared. The inevitable consequence is doom of the commons. Hardin’s view of the commons has been challenged by many authors who argue that in Hardin’s example, resource was open-access, not a commons. A tragedy of course is not what happens with a commons (Burke 2001; Deitz et al. 2003; Feeny et al. 1990; Oström et al. 1999; Ruttan and Borgerhoff-Mulder 1999; Uphoff and Langholz 1999). In most traditional indigenous societies, villagers develop a complex community system of managing the commons. Thus, hunting in patches of forests, protected as sacred groves, is customarily prohibited by numerous indigenous societies of hunter-gatherers. Traditional indigenous fishers ritually observe periodic fishing bans at specific times of the year. However, the invasion of the market and inroads of ‘rationality’ into traditional societies have universally resulted in breakdown of these community ethics of managing the commons. Increased efficiency of fish catch through the use of mechanized crafts and gear thus enhances the individual fisher’s profit for the season, but proportionately dwindles the catch size and long-term profits for everyone in the fisher community. Modern nation states assert their authority by usurping the commons as a rule and dismantling the traditional management regimes. As Bliese (2001: 237) remarks in the context of traditional community values in America, ‘Our capitalist system is hostile to traditional governance in general.’ Community arrangements for fisheries have been thrown out by the courts in capitalist societies as violations of anti-trust laws or even of individual proprietary rights (Anderson and Leal 1991: 124). The disappearance of such community control over individual behaviours in ‘developing’ societies, with intensification of resource harvest and modernization of values, has resulted in frequent crashes in prey populations (Berkes 1999; Deb and Ghosh 1999; Gadgil and Guha 1995). The tragedy therefore consists not in the commons, but in their disappearance. Hardin’s prediction of doom for the commons is flawed from another perspective. In principle, actions of homo oeconomicus are based on informed choice. However, in the Hardin’s scenario of the community pasture, individuals are not aware of the consequence of their behaviours, nor are they aware of the benefits of collective restraint over the use of the commons. Thus, Hardin’s presentation of

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the case of the commons constitutes a false dilemma – that of pursuing individual gains and maintaining the commons for collective benefits. This dilemma disappears when individual perceptions are taken into consideration: Of course, when community resource users are not aware of collective costs, ruin can still result. However, the reason is the lack of awareness, not the dilemma of the commons. The failure to recognize this role of perception in common resource use is likely to result in incorrect predictions and misguided policy recommendations. (Burke 2001: 450)

Indeed, almost every episode of traditional societies destroying the commons is a consequence of the loss of control over the commons and/or the lack of awareness about the collective costs and benefits of alternative management regimes. In this context, the ad-hoc use of the term ‘rationality’ itself appears self-contradictory. If individual pursuit of individual gains leads to the demise of a community resource and the end of long-term gains to the individual as well, community members are myopic and ignorant of the consequences of their ‘rational’ actions. If rationality prevents individuals from envisaging consequences of their actions and learning from past experiences of such consequences, the term is an oxymoron. Limitations of the classical and neo-classical economic assumption of the ‘naturalness’ of myopic ‘rationality’ are evident in a number of real life actions of people. Contrary to the economic expectation that cheap goods will always be preferred over expensive commodities, people often choose expensive things, for apparently irrational reasons, like fashion or personal idiosyncrasies. The common preference for a paperback edition of an expensive book is in conformity with economic rationality, but some bibliophiles believe only hardcover editions present the real worth of books. A cup of tea of the same brand would cost ten times more in an uppity cafeteria than at a roadside stall, yet many people would prefer drinking it in that café. Instances of such ‘conspicuous consumption’ (Veblen 1899) are only too commonplace in all societies. Such luxury consumptions may also be explained with reference to Zahavi’s (1997) ‘handicap principle.’ Traits that pose an economic handicap to the individual may nevertheless be displayed if that accrues higher social prestige or genetic fitness. Economic rationality may still be able to explain the incurrence of the handicap if prestige has an economic advantage – just as Zahavi’s argue that a display of a morphological trait with obvious handicap to survival (like the peacock’s tail) is preferred in sexual selection if the trait is linked to greater genetic fitness. However, prestige is often a product of run-away evolution of a cultural trait, hardly linked to any direct evolutionary advantage for survival (Boyd and Richerson 1985).

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Apart from conspicuous consumption, there are many occasions and examples of individual as well as group actions that are often grounded on ethical, ideological or religious values, which transcend any economic calculations. Schumacher (1974: 37) identified that economic rationality construed ‘the maximum use of freedom from [social] responsibility.’ and there is no place in economics of actions that do not ensure maximum benefit to the individual as producer, seller or buyer: If a buyer refused a good bargain because he suspected that the cheapness of the goods in question stemmed from exploitation or other despicable practices (except theft), he would be open to the criticism of behaving ‘uneconomically’, which is viewed as nothing less than a fall from grace, Economists and others are wont to treat such eccentric behaviour with derision if not indignation. (Schumacher 1974: 37)

How often I relate this description to my economist friends’ derision when they watch me refuse to buy any product manufactured by Union Carbide Company, and go for an uncharismatic local product! My individual, miniscule protest against the company responsible for the Bhopal genocide is to them a mere eccentricity. Many (not all!) shopkeepers also find me eccentric when I try to explain why I think Eveready™ products ought to be boycotted in the country. Some shopkeepers are eccentric too, however, and a few of them have even stopped selling products of Union Carbide, Dow Chemicals and Monsanto Company. These shopkeepers are of course ‘irrational’. Taking the extreme examples of the ‘extremists’, accentuated nationalistic sentiments of the Kamikaze pilots of the Second World War or the fundamentalist religious sentiments of the suicide squads of Al-Qaeda are impossible to have any rational basis in economic terms, except in view of the achievement of satisfaction of the individual’s desires, and unless such desires are construed to circumscribe one’s wants.4 Such irrational behaviours are more satisfactorily explained by religious and moral obligations, rights, cultural prejudices and needs for social approval. The behaviours of individuals characterize them as homo politicus, rather than homo oeconomicus: Guided by reason, the individual seeks to justify his own behaviour on the grounds of general principles. Human beings do not care solely about their private interests in respect of their own individual preferences, but they also want to get the approval from their fellow citizens for what they say and for what they do… Guided by reason, the human beings seeks agreement on justice and the common good with his surrounding community and, hence, tries to act and behave in a way such that he receives approval. (Faber et al. 2002: 329)

If maximizing satisfaction of one’s needs is rational, ‘needs’ are often impossible to define within the paradigm of economic rationality. The market defines

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needs as ‘lacks’ to be satisfied by material resources (Illich 1990: 181). Developmentality, consolidated by the institution of private property and desire for material gains, constructs the individual’s need to have more. There is no objective limit to one’s needs. Rather, they are constantly shaped by one’s pursuit of pleasure or happiness. However, as Scitovsky (1976) has shown, happiness is not directly proportional to material well-being. Material well-being is relevant to happiness only when it is relatively better than that of everybody else (Bell 1998; Schwartz 1986). ‘For many people what matters is not how much they have but how much more they have than others’ (Schwartz 1986: 165). This race to have more is interminable. Homo oeconomicus, the insatiable consumer, is like the Red Queen in Alice through the Looking Glass, who must perpetually run as fast as she can only to keep to the same place, because the world runs along with her. If she stops, she will fall behind. Clearly, this Red Queen race is explained only with recourse to extra-economic irrational social drives. I shall deal with this point later with reference to consumerism. However, such fundamental methodological questions as to whether economic rationality is a complete description of human action, or even empirically correct to hold in most real life situations, have failed to have much impact on policy decisions advocated by practising economists (Cowen and Shenton 1996; Scitovsky 1976, Schwartz 1986). As Vriend (1996) has shown, any other views of rationality have not been of much practical significance when it comes to economic policy prescriptions. The premise of development economics continues to be that economic rationality is natural: every individual everywhere naturally pursues her self-interest, which is the motive power for development, provided there is adequate institutional and infrastructural support. Development economists therefore prescribe policy directives for injections of capital infrastructure.

2.1.2

Technological Fixes

Neo-classical economic theory, upon which all development policies are built, ignores ecological limits and entropic constraints to economic growth. What Harvey (1996) calls the ‘standard view’ of the mainstream (neo-classical) economics is pivoted on the paramount faith in the infinite capability of technology to overcome all social and environmental problems. This faith is summarized by Mark Sagoff (1995) as follows: Technology enhances the productivity of labour: computerized power looms produce enormously larger number of bales of yarn than handlooms. Technological progress also enhances the productivity of natural resources. Thus, the energy requirement for each unit of household lighting ‘has decreased manifold since the time of candles and oil lamps’ (Sagoff 1995: 611).

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Even the reserves of natural resources themselves are functions of technology. ‘The more advanced the technology, the more reserves become known and recoverable’ (Lee 1989: 116), as has happened with the discovery of new petroleum reserves in recent decades through application of computer analyses to seismic vibrations. This discovery has fuelled the confidence of oil companies, that the possibility of running out of oil is extremely unlikely: ‘Not in your lifetime nor your grandchildren’s’, proclaims a Mobil Corporation advertisement that appeared in the May 8, 1995 issue of Newsweek. The standard view further maintains that as technology advances, new resources are discovered as substitutes for scarce resources. Petroleum has substituted whale oil; optical glass fibres and satellites have replaced copper cables; aluminium has substituted tin. Thus, technology, the handmaiden to industry, is designed and destined to remove all constraints to economic development – constraints that are imposed by nature. (The assumption of unlimited substitutability will be discussed in point 2.1.4.) Economists state that technological advancement would ensure infinite resource availability. Such complacent statements are made whenever the prices of commodities fall, which economists hold as evidence against scarcity of resources. However, they altogether ignore the cost of waste (including pollution) while calculating the throughput of the economy. Thus, Sagoff (1995: 612) asserts: ‘If we ignore pollution problems, fossil fuels could subsidize the global economy for quite a while.’ The point that pollution cannot be ignored because it constitutes the ‘relevant constraint’ to growth (Daly 1995b: 623) is that which mainstream economics, focusing on growth, have systematically ignored to the detriment of the environment and consequently, the economy. This faith in technological fixes is characteristic of the theory of capitalist development, which holds that we need not worry about the long-term environmental problems: the future will take care of itself by virtue of the continuing progress of science and technology. This faith in technological fixes is connected to the faith in the wisdom of the market: any future environmental problems that may be caused by present economic practices will be solved by technological advancements in dynamic interaction with the market (Simons and Kahn 1984). Even in the face of high accident-proneness of atomic reactors and obvious inadequacy of safety measures in radioactive waste disposal everywhere in the world, there are techno-enthusiasts and development radicals who say that safety precautions in the atomic industry are excessive, because progress in technology will set everything right should any accident happen. Technological fixes allow no general environmental obstacles to stand in the way of development. This doctrinaire position is founded on the axiom of infinite substitutability

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of natural resources and infinite potential of technology to create everything that is necessary. The tenability of this axiom of substitutability will be examined shortly.

2.1.3 The Value of Natural Resources In conventional economic theory, a commodity is valuable to the extent that it contributes to the goal of individual welfare, as assessed on the basis of his willingness to pay. In conformity with the economic rationality axiom, conventional economic value is based on the goal of individual utility maximization. If the goal of valuation is considered to involve long-term sustainability, a proper economic valuation of natural resources must include their social, aesthetic and ecological values, in addition to their market value based on their immediate utility (Costanza and Folke 1997). However, other goals, and thus other values are often incompatible with the view of economic rationality, and in conflict with conventionally measured economic value. Neo-classical economics is bereft of consideration for life, nature and social values. McNeill (2000: 336) believes that this severe omission is due to the dominance of Anglo-American economists preoccupied with industrial growth: ‘If Judeo-Christian monotheism took nature out of religion, Anglo-American economists (after about 1880) took nature out of economics.’ Chris Maser also believes this exclusion of nature from economics as characteristically Western in origin: We in Western industrialized society seem to find little or no intrinsic value in Nature unless it is demonstrably ‘good for something’ or can be converted into something for which we can find a material value. In this sense it seems to have become a largely accepted norm that a piece of land must be producing something we desire almost all of the time or we deem it unproductive. (Maser 1999: 289)

The premise that resources are ‘good for something,’ that is, they have a use value, leads to two related results. One is that a resource is assumed to be a ‘fixed asset,’ which means that an increase in production does not affect the availability of the resource. So the intrinsic value and even the direct use value of most natural resources (like oxygen or water) is ignored in the analysis of economic relationships. The concept of the renewable resource as an appellate to biotic resources like forests and fish populations consists in that the stock of species populations can always replenish themselves, and therefore can be culled or harvested with a possibility of regeneration of the species populations. While such economic modelling has been helpful to influence resource-harvesting policy (especially in the whaling industry), the rate of harvest often exceeds that of

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Technical Discussion 1

replenishment, chiefly because the estimation of the growth rate of a resource item is oversimplified. For example, the rate of forest ‘renewal’ is based on an average estimate of maturation of selected timber species, without giving any importance to the complex effect of the vegetation community on the growth of a tree species. Because of the complex ecological relationships between species and a multitude of environmental factors, it is almost impossible to determine the ‘safe’ rate of harvest that would allow regeneration of a resource population. Even when the harvest rate does not exceed the rate of natural regeneration, key populations may be driven to extinction, depending on several intrinsic parameters of growth (see Technical Discussion 1).

Resource, Population and Critical Harvest Level Consider a fish population characterized by the logistic growth model: dN/dt = r N (1 – N/K)

(eqn. 2.1)

where r > 0 is the intrinsic per capita growth rate, and K >0 is the environmental carrying capacity for the population. Now assume that a band of fishers harvest a constant fraction (h) of the fish population at every generation of the fish population. The equation (2.1) then becomes dN/dt = r N (1 – N/K) – hN

(eqn. 2.2)

Under this condition, the non-trivial equilibrium of the fish population will be: N* = K (r – h)/r

(eqn. 2.3)

N* will be feasible (that is, will be a positive number) as long as h < r. Now assume that there is always a proportion (q) of the fish population that is not harvested. Thus, fishers can harvest only (N – qN) of the fish. The growth equation then becomes: dN/dt = r N (1 – N/K) – hN (1 – q)

(eqn. 2.4)

The equilibrium population of the fish under this condition will be: N* = [r – h(1 – q)]K/r

(eqn. 2.5)

An interesting result is that the value of N* is now determined by both h and q. In general, N* will have a positive value as long as h < r, but for some value of h > r, N* may also be feasible, depending on the value of q > 0. For a little more detailed model, consider a fish population living in a seasonal environment consisting of a breeding and a non-breeding season. Prior to continued...

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continued... the onset of the breeding season, the population has Nt individuals. If the juveniles survive with a probability PJ, adults survive with a probability PA and each adult produces an average of b offspring, then the population growth profile may be depicted as a modified Pulliam (1996: 46) equation: dNt/dt = PA Nt + b PJ Nt (1 – Nt/K)

(eqn. 2.6)

where K is the natural upper limit (asymptote) of the juvenile numbers. Now if this population is harvested at a constant rate H independent of the resource stock, the equation will become: dN/dt = PA N + bPJ N (1 – N/K) – H

(eqn. 2.7)5

The term b Nt (1 – Nt / K) captures the density-dependent (logistic) growth (see Technical Discussion 5) of the juvenile numbers maturing to adulthood. The population reaches equilibrium at N* = (PA + b PJ) K + [(PA + b PJ)2 K2 – 4 b PJ KH]1/2 /2 b PJ

(eqn. 2.8)

The Nt* dwindles with increasing H, until at a certain critical value of H, it disappears. Figure 1 depicts the dynamics with K = 500, b = 10, PA = 0.8 and PJ = 0.2. It shows that regardless of the initial population size N0 > 0, the population can plummet to extinction at a certain critical harvest level, given by Hcrit = K (1 – Pj/b) Figure 1. Population extinction caused by a constant harvest rate Hcrit = 490. 1800

Equilibrium Popn. Size (N*)

1600 1400 1200 1000 800 600 400 200 0 0

100

200

300

400

500

600

Quantity of Harvest (H)

Furthermore, the loss of the multitude of non-target species, which may be destroyed in the process of harvest of a target species, is not counted in the resource accounting. The ecological significance of the species mix is traded for

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the economic value of a target species, which in reality depends on the ecology of the entire ecosystem. Another outcome of the attempt to determine the value of the resources in terms of their utility is the resultant conclusion that more resources mean greater welfare. More resources yield more utility, and therefore the rich, who have greater access to resources, have greater access to welfare. This outcome of neoclassical economic models is, however, inevitable, because it hinges on a circular logic: valuation of the resource is determined by the valuation of its utility or welfare function. This ‘dependence of the valuation of means on the valuation of ends’ ignores the interdependence of resources and welfare (Sen 1992: 80). More importantly, it ignores the intrinsic value of resources independent of their utility, and conversely, discounts a range of utilities of resources that are not yet valued. Consequently, ‘[T]he congruence of resource valuation with welfare valuation can be, in fact, replaced by a similar congruence with whatever is taken to be the end, the promotion of which is the reason for valuing the resources’ (Sen 1992: 80). Economics can only assign values to things for which there is utility, or a market. The value of a commodity or service is recognized only if it has a price or an exchange value (what an average individual is willing to pay for the commodity or service). Because environmental commodities are available at zero price from nature (oxygen, sunlight, water), and because there exist no market proxies for pricing most of the services of nature, their value goes unrecognized. In this worldview, the estimation of the cost of production involves neither the cost of natural elements – ‘Nature’s free gift’ – nor the cost of environmental degradation in the process. Unless a natural resource requires manufacturing, it is never counted in the economics of production (Marx 1894: 745). The oxygen in the air is considered Nature’s free gift, unless oxygen itself is manufactured in the factory.6 Thus, price is determined by calculating the cost of all raw materials, machinery and labour, for which the manufacturer pays. Similarly, the by-products or wastes that are freely released into the environment in the process may be harmful to the environment or public health, for which no compensation is paid. The cost of pollution from the economic activity is never a part of the prices paid by producers or consumers, and hence is considered to be an externality in the calculus of production cost, but in fact borne by the society. This was shown by Pigou’s (1952: 183) analysis of the situation where […] one person A, in the course of rendering some service, for which payment is made, to a second person B, incidentally also renders services or disservices to other persons, …of such a sort that payment cannot be extracted from the benefited parties or compensation enforced on behalf of the injured parties.

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Such ‘incidental uncharged disservices’ are paid by the society – the public in general – […] when the owner of a site in a residential quarter of a city builds a factory there and so destroys a great part of the amenities of the neighbouring sites; or, in a less degree, when he uses his site in such a way as to spoil the lighting of the houses opposite; or when he invests resources in buildings in a crowded centre which, by contracting the air space and the playing-room of the neighbourhood, tend to injure the health and efficiency of the families living there. (Pigou 1952: 185–86).

The irreversibility of environmental damage creates an additional source of value, which is not adequately addressed in any valuation of a natural resource. Damage to, or depletion of, natural resources is considered in neo-classical economics to be unimportant ‘externality’ in the dominant economic worldview, because it assumes that human economic activities are grossly independent of the natural resources. The standard view usually assumes that a good can be either free or have a finite price. Components of the environment may constitute the natural capital, but are virtually inconsequential to the growth of the economy, as long as human knowledge and ingenuity, resulting in technological progress, discover new resources: […] the ‘environment’ therefore poses no significant constraints on the economy. In effect, conventional economic theory sees humans as free to act as if economic production/consumption were somehow exempt from thermodynamic and other critical natural laws. It is this ecologically empty vision that drives the current global development paradigm and has generated the sustainability conundrum. (Rees 2000: 142)

From the ecological perspective, most environmental goods (nitrogen-fixing bacteria, the ozone layer, pollinating insects, and so on) have a positive infinite price – no sum of money, however large it may be, should be permitted to purchase the right to destroy these goods. Once an element of the environment is destroyed, the option of getting its multitudinal services for an indefinitely long time is also obviated. The true value of an environmental element includes the current value of its uses, and its future optional value, which is always indefinite, and may well be unlimited. Clearly, the guesstimate of option value is likely to be influenced by the extent of the researcher’s knowledge of the potential uses of the entity, as well as the society’s current knowledge base. Without the discovery of the physiological function of the gastric secretion of the Australian gastric brooding frog, its potential medical utility in treatment of gastric ulcers would not have been fathomed. More fundamentally, ‘economists cannot value what the environment is worth, merely its value in

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monetary terms’ (Redclift 1993: 14), and the monetary value itself is the primary problematic. The value of plants like the taxus yew (Taxus buccata), kuchila (Strychnos nux-vomica) and sarpagandha (Rauwolfia serpentina) cannot be captured by the market value of taxol, strychnine and reserpine, respectively derived from them, any more than the value of a mountain can be estimated from the sum of the market value of its constituent blocks of stones. The real worth of the environmental elements – the goods, services and opportunities that are beyond economic measurement – is never captured in such valuation exercises. Intuitively, the magnitude of the estimated social cost of environmental degradation is directly proportional to the depth of the economist’s understanding of the damage. Equally important, the ability to comprehend an environmental damage is governed by the capability of available technology to detect the damage. The discovery of ozone holes was possible with the available level of technology, especially space technology, which was previously unavailable for use by society. The immense environmental cost of production and consumption of cooling machines using chloro-fluoro-carbons (CFC) was never recognized, nor even acknowledged, until its effect on the ozone layer of the atmosphere was known. After the ozone hole was discovered above Antarctica, the social cost of CFC reached a stratospheric height. When appropriate assessment of all relevant environmental services are calculated, the costs of substituting the ozone layer, or even a single ecosystem, may lead to infinite costs. This shows the limits and weaknesses of attempts to value essential ecosystem services in monetary units. As Hohmeyer et al. (1996) noted, if irreversible thresholds are passed for vital ecosystem services, their value may become infinity. Estimating the cost of all ecological services of components of biodiversity is something which economists are only just beginning to think of trying. The only available means to estimate this cost is with recourse to opportunity cost, i.e., the cost of replacement of a commodity. Thus the cost of replacement of the ozone layer or a forest ecosystem is imagined to consist of the value of currently imaginable alternatives that could possibly substitute the currently estimated value of the services of these resources. However, valuation of replacement of a life-support system is a precarious exercise. As Columbia University economist Geoffrey Heal points out, if all oil were to vanish, for example, the cost of the alternative fuel might be $50 a barrel, but that is unlikely to determine the price of oil (quoted in Iguaçu 2001: 48). Because the costs of environmental activities – the externalities – are never included in the prices, they distort the market by encouraging activities that are costly to society (Bliese 2001; Pretty et al. 2000).

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2.1.4 The Myth of Substitutability Since the Industrial Revolution, the axiom of infinite substitutability of natural resources is reinforced by continuous technological inventions. Substitution of a resource by a new one has indeed occurred several times in technological history. When the rate of consumption of whale oil exceeded that of the reproduction of whales, crude petroleum oil was discovered, which led to the demise of whale oil trade and use. Further examples include the substitution of fuel wood by coal, oil and natural gas and that of cotton, wool and silk by a family of synthetic fibres. The prevalent economic contention is that the limited supply of a resource ‘will only occasion the development of new technologies that convert what are now useless materials into tomorrow’s resources’ (Scherer 2002: 339). A consequence of this belief in infinite substitutability of materials for production is the rejection of all constraints on growth, even thermodynamic ones. Such substitutability argument is held to be a characteristic of technological advancement that propels economic growth. However, it is certainly false in the case of natural resources with important ecological functions never to be captured by the economic value. The assumption of equal substitutability of both biodiversity and artefacts like television sets and automobiles is inherent in the casual developmentarian statements such as: ‘What with the loss of nature and traditional knowledge systems, primitive people have become civilized – they now can see TVs and ride cars.’ But this assumption of equivalence between modern artefacts and biodiversity begs the question, ‘How many TV sets or automobiles must the future generations consider equivalent to the lost species?’ Nobel economist Robert Solow once claimed, ‘the world can, in effect, get along without natural resources’ (McNeill 2000: 336). McNeill points out that this statement is expressive of the ‘essentially canonical views’ of economists. Prugh et al. (1999: 16) add that ‘Solow have since moderated his views on this subject, but many other mainstream economists have not.’ The deterministic assumption that organic soil nutrients are substitutable with soluble inorganic salts has proved wrong: continuous use of inorganic nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus fertilizers is known to reduce yields of different crops, while plots receiving nutrients through organic materials tend to sustain farm productivity for a prolonged period (Nambiar 1994). Soil organisms that are eliminated in conventional chemical farms seem to be indispensable for maintaining soil health, which is always better in organic farms (Mäder et al. 2002). Reduction in diversity of soil biota under intensive agriculture may profoundly alter the biological regulation of decomposition and nutrient availability in the

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soil (Matson et al. 1997: 506). Substitution of these functions with synthetic fertilizers and mechanical tillage has proved to be unsustainable. Chemical inputs cannot match the sustainability of organic farm because 60 percent more nitrogen leaches into groundwater in high-intensity chemical farms than in organic farms based on manures (Drinkwater et al. 1998; Tilman 1998). It is puerile to believe in the efficiency of chemical and mechanical management that would substitute the intricate ecological functions of organisms that have co-evolved over millions of years. The meat of the dodo (Raphus cacullatus), the ‘living fleshpot’ of Mauritius, has certainly been substituted by that of chicken, turkey and other birds on the dinner tables of Mauritian homes, but the different other functions of the extinct species have not yet been retrieved. A realization of the hidden, and irretrievable value of the dodo dawned in the late 1970s when it was discovered that calvaria (Sideroxylon majus), a Mauritian tree, was endangered as a result of the bird’s extinction: its seeds failed to germinate because they were not passing through the dodo’s gut. Similarly, the germination and dispersal of seeds of Trewia nudiflora in Nepal and northern Bengal forests crucially depend on the rhinoceros eating them (Dinerstein and Wemmer 1988). The ecological functions of earthworms driven extinct from an agricultural land or that of crabs from a mangrove ecosystem can hardly be substituted by any human device or even any other species. The ecosystem services of biodiversity such as productivity is lost with biodiversity loss, and increases with species diversity in ecosystems. Empirical evidence of this function of biodiversity has been provided by Dave Tilman’s studies on Minnesota grasslands (Tilman 1999; Tilan et al. 2006). Similarly, the non-substitutability of the Australian gastric brooding frog is a case in point: The careful Australian frog mummy Kept all of her young in her tummy: While her foods got digested, The froglets were vested In a coating of protein so gummy.

The potential for developing a great remedy for gastric ulcer has been lost after the extinction of the frog in the 1980s (McClintock 2000).

2.1.5 Rates of Profit and Discounting Calculation of a commodity’s worth with an annual rate of depreciation is endemic in valuation exercises. The assumption here is that concomitant to a steady inflation rate, the real value of the commodity will fall in succeeding years.

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Technical Discussion 2

This assumption has an inherent empirical problem with respect to natural resource accounting. Primarily, depreciation is imputed and deducted for wear and tear on reproducible (human-made) capital, but no analogous depreciation is calculated for natural capital. While there are discrepancies and arbitrariness in assigning different rates of discount for different resource stocks, it is the rates of discount (or conversely, normal interest) that in the current economic arrangement fuels quantitative growth (See Technical Discussion 2). The discount rate is

Positive Rate of Discount and Quantitative Growth Suppose an oil well is expected to yield a quantity Q of oil every year, and r is the rent per unit of oil. Thus, with an annual income of Qr, the well’s value after n years may be calculated as Qrn. However, in a world where positive rates of interest (or discount) prevail, the market price of the well will always be less than this price, because the stream of future income from the exhaustible resource will be discounted at a positive rate of interest. With an annual discount rate of d, it is assumed that the well will produce a stream of income for n years. If the well yields an annual income of Qr, then its price at the end of the first year of exhaustion is calculated as: P1 = Q r (1 + d)–1 At the end of the second year, the discounted price of the well will be calculated as the sum of the rent from the first year and that from the second year: P2 = P1 + P1 (1 + d)–1 = Q r (1 + d)–1 + Q r (1 + d)–2

After the final exhaustion, when there will be no more oil left, the value of the well will be zero. At the beginning of this final exhaustion in the n-th year, the price of the well will be far less than Qrn: Pn = Q r (1 + d)–1 [1 + (1 + d)–1 + (1 + d)–2 + …. + (1 + d)– (n – 1)] (eqn. 2.9) The positive rate of discount d lessens the value of a resource stock with time, so that the present value of the resource dwindles to zero in the long run. The difference ∂ between the undiscounted and the discounted value over i = 1, 2, …, n years is given by ∂ = Q r n – Q r(1+ d)

–i

(eqn. 2.10)

The magnitude of ∂ increases with discount rate, which determines how fast an exhaustible resource is depleted. A higher discount rate, and therefore a greater value of ∂, is a clear incentive to deplete the resource stock, and to accelerate the exhaustion process by increasing capital investment and applying improved technology.

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one at which the present value of the value in increasingly distant future shrinks. This shrinkage of value is essentially a negligence of the value and utility of natural resources in the future, and accelerates extraction of natural resources and reduction of the productive capacity of the economy. Hardin asserts that […] economics, the handmaiden of business, is daily concerned with ‘discounting the future’, a mathematical operation that; under high rates of interest, has the effect of making the future beyond a very few years essentially disappear from rational calculation. (Hardin 1987: 599)

The standard view of economic growth assumes that if resources become scarce or exhausted, more economic resources will be available in the future, and therefore, future costs matter less than present ones. Thus, the practice of discounting the future is a standard operating procedure in cost-benefit analyses (CBA) to sustain positive rates of profit. Although economic valuation is unable to capture more than an unknown fraction of the total costs and benefits of a project, economists routinely employ CBA, which is a key methodology to give a monetary value to various social and environmental goods and services, and even to human life. CBA is a cogent means of channelling ‘an emergent awareness of the possible environmental and cultural costs of development into an economic conduit, where all factors must compete on a monetary basis’ (Petrucci 2002: 106). The principal tool by which CBA essentially dissipates the actual worth and sense of importance of the environment is discounting. Discounting makes sense when individual or business firms decide whether or not to make an investment or lend money, with a time horizon of 10 to 15 years. However, it becomes patently inappropriate and absurd when applied in environmental matters that affect the entire society and have time horizons of a century or more. Any positive discount rate is bound to undermine the value of the future. Just as a small investment at compound interest rates will enormously expand over a century, any positive discount rate, conversely, will result in a drastic reduction of a catastrophe into an insignificant factor after a long time. Thus, environmental problems for future generations as well as the issue of inter-generational equity appear insignificant in the cost-benefit analyses involving discounting. This was apparent to many early economists like Frank Ramsey (1928), whose contention was that discounting is ethically indefensible and ‘arises from the weakness of the imagination.’ Economists are generally aware that a decision to use a positive discount rate, however small, implies that the future does not matter. The practice of discounting the future allows business to ignore the current environmental risks, while at the same time postponing them to a future which is distant enough to be all but ignored by economic agents. The future cost to society is driven to infinitesimal

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remoteness, so that environmental risks are not reflected in the accounting framework on which the world economy relies. Petrucci (2002) gives a simple illustration of how spurious CBA’s practice of discounting is: If we take a discount rate of five percent, then the cost to society of a $100,000,000 cleanup in 250 years’ time (at today’s value) is just $270. At an eight percent discount rate, the cost drops to just nine cents! Through discounting, then, future environmental problems of immense size can be made simply to fade away. (Petrucci 2002: 106)

Thus, in the context of estimating long-term environmental damages, ‘use of a social discount rate greater than zero leads ultimately to a disenfranchising of future generations’ (Rabl 1996: 138). Recent academic exercises in costing the environmental damages from global warming give an indication of the absurd meaning of discounting in environmental economics. Climate scientists, geologists and ecologists contend that a global mean rise of temperature by just 2° to 3° Celsius will bring about a cascade of catastrophes the earth has not experienced since the last glaciation: melting of polar ice sheets, rising sea levels, salinization of freshwater supplies, heat waves over some parts of the earth round the year, destruction of mangroves, frequent storms, more floods in river plains, desertification in some parts of the earth, threats to food security for all nations, air and water pollution, loss of species, destabilization of life-support systems in islands and coastal areas, inundation of millions of coastal villages, outbreak of diseases, death and migration of millions of environmental refugees (IPCC 2001; McCarty 2001; NRC 2001; also see Union of Concerned Scientists website ). Despite all these, economic costing shows global warming to have almost imperceptible effect on the economy. A number of influential economists estimated that greenhouse damages from a global warming by 2.5° C, when calculated with 3 percent discount rates, amounted to merely 1–2 percent of the gross global product (references cited in Bliese 2002). Obviously, these profoundly ignorant economists believe that even after a rise of temperature by 2° C or 3° C, life will be going on as it is and enough economic activities worth discounting will continue.7 Even if one ignores the absurd assumptions and omissions in these exercises by the boastful ignoramus (especially see the critique by Meyer and Cooper 1995), the costing of damages remains spurious, because countless ecosystems and human lives and livelihoods are dissipated as having negligible value. Elimination of the discounting procedure itself would improve the damaging estimation. To illustrate, Tol (1999) calculated the damages over a time horizon of a century for greenhouse gases with five different (arbitrarily chosen) discount

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rates. For carbon-dioxide, the damages with zero discount rate turned out to be five times higher than the damages estimated at 3 percent discount rate, and about 15 times greater than that when calculated at 5 percent discount rate. Reviewing such estimates, Bliese (2001: 169) concludes: ‘These different results obviously have major public policy implications for public policy. The greater the estimate of greenhouse damages, the more important it is to take actions now to prevent them.’ The decision to use positive discount rates in calculating these damages not only means that future generations do not count in today’s policymaking. It also has a profound impact on the way natural resources, and the environment in general, is treated: When confronted with long-term environmental issues, it simply writes off future generations as irrelevant. It does the same with questions of sustainability, making it ‘profitable’ to exploit to extermination resources that would otherwise be naturally renewable. So can current interest rates, which are the other side of the same coin. (Bliese 2001: 243)

High discount rates make it ‘rational’ for private owners to exhaust resources as fast as they can for maximizing profit. It is rational to exterminate the resource stock and then invest in another resource with a high rate of return rather than harvest the same resource at a sustainable rate. Thus, timber companies tend to deplete the country’s forests, commercial fishers are bent on exhausting the fishing grounds, and the whaling industry strives to exterminate whales as fast as they can to earn the highest possible return for the capital invested. The operation of discounting is undertaken on the basis of two related doxastic premises. First, it is assumed that growth will continue in the distant future, and therefore future generations will become richer than we are. This leads to the further assumption that posterity will take care of the problems better than we currently do, and thus justifies the current policy inaction. However, these assumptions are baseless on two grounds. On the empirical ground, continuous economic growth, even if likely for some time, is not coterminous with continuous growth in welfare of society. It follows that society in the future may be worse off than it is today with regard to equity and environmental justice. On the ethical ground, we cannot have any right to harm future people simply because we assume that they will be rich. The second premise of discounting operation is that materials in use today will be substituted with others in the future. All natural resources are eventually substitutable, and hence subject to discounting. Thus, when a cheaper or better substitute is available, the resource item will become redundant and hence its worth will depreciate. Alternatively, with advancements in knowledge, more resource or resource stock will be discovered for exploitation, and therefore the

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supply of the resource for the same end use is likely to substantially exceed its known supply with time. In both cases, the worth of everything will decrease with time. This premise is apt to falter when a resource becomes increasingly rare as a result of its extraction and use, and therefore both its relative and actual market values could rise in the future, even at the current value. It is common knowledge that the price of a rare commodity soars higher than when it is abundant: its scarcity value transcends accounting of depreciation. The market values of the levorotatory sacred chank (Xancus pyrum), the shaligram stone (the ammonite fossil, worshipped by Hindus in India), the rhinoceros horn and the swiftlet nest soup in Singapore, are escalating because of the increasing rarity of specimens, rather than an increase in their utility. The axiom of substitutability is discussed below.

2.1.6 Linkages between Positive Rates of Profit and Growth Profit is the difference between the financial outputs and inputs in an economic activity. In the standard accounting framework of economic growth, the outputs are only those that are visible – the quantifiable goods and services that have prices on market. Emissions and effluents – materials that are produced and released into the environment are economically invisible and never accounted. Similarly, the input vector includes the multitude of the uncosted services and non-use values of the resource employed as ‘raw material’ and also the invisible contribution of human labour in terms of workers’ health and creative energy that are unpaid (See Technical Discussion 3). Institutional arrangements make it possible that investment of any sum of money can generate profit, and this ‘positive rate of profit is a stronghold of money as an external goal of economic activities’ (Jaeger 1994: 212). Positive rates of profit provide the perpetual incentive to investment for making further profit, and fuel the desire to make money for its own sake. Firms tend to maintain positive rates of profit through a combination of technological innovation, organizational management and marketing skill, to keep the production cost, especially wages, low while maintaining the output prices relatively high. All firms aspire and strive to maintain at least a normal rate of above-zero profit.9 Continued profits ensure continued flow of income, while continued losses lead to a firm’s bankruptcy, a fate which every firm tries to evade. The rates of profit depend on the productivity of labour, which generally tends to rise with the scale of production. However, organizational structure and technological level can influence labour productivity and may delimit the scale effect on the rates of profit of individual firms. Rates of profit are also determined

Beyond Developmentality

Technical Discussion 3

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Positive Rates of Profit and Economic Growth Profit is the difference between the value of the outputs (Ot) and that of the inputs (It) during a period t of economic activity. Defining the value of the invested capital as Ct, the rate of profit may be defined as r = (Ot – It) / Ct

(eqn. 2.11)

The input vector A includes the value of all types of human labour in terms of wage. Under conditions of positive profits, a positive fraction of the profit is used for net investment, and thus leads to economic growth, which is always positive: [(Ot+1 – It+1 – (Ot – It)]/ (Ot – It) > 0

Both I and O are economically visible, but there are economically invisible parts of them as well. A component is economically invisible as long as it is not represented in money terms. The ‘uncostable’ goods and services of natural resources, which are sacrificed in the process of production, constitute the invisible input. Thus, if the total price of paper (O) produced in a paper mill exceeds the aggregate price of pulpwood and wages for labour (I), the mill makes a profit. However, in this calculation, only the market value of trees as pulpwood is included in the input vector, while all other services of trees remain uncosted (see Sec. 2.1.3). Furthermore, the wages of labour fluctuate, and are influenced by the current level of unemployment, the prevailing rates of interest, social security arrangements for workers, etc. However, the market-determined wage at any given period is not commensurate with the creative energy, health and time sacrificed by the worker for the task assigned to her.8 To cite a simple example, compare the wages of a paper mill worker spending eight hours a day in a hot and humid room with his medical expenses to get round from common cold, flu or rheumatism; or that of a child working in a maquiladora sweat shop in Mexico City with the value of his lost capabilities; or that of a uranium miner at Jadugoda with the value of his lifetime shortened by exposure to radiation. The unpriced utility and services of the natural resources employed as the raw material of production and the unpaid expenditure of a part of the worker’s life constitute the economically invisible part of the input vector. On the output side, the utility value of emissions and effluents in the process of production of the commodity in question remains economically invisible. In most industrial production, the by-products are toxic to life. While health risks and damages of toxic products cannot be valued, the value of instituting alternative technology to abate such effects, or remedial measures may be a good ad hoc approximation to the invisible cost of toxic by-products or fallouts. If these invisible outputs and inputs were considered, it is almost certain that the profit would turn out to be negative. Nevertheless, as long as the accounting exercise is unable to calculate the extra-monetary terms (externalities), it appears that economic production is profitable.

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by the prevailing rates of interest. No one will borrow money to invest in a business that is not likely to return a profit reasonably higher than the interest. ‘Rates of interest set a lower limit to the rates of profit’ (Jaeger 1994: 212). Conversely, rates of profit also exert influence on the rate of interest: If rates of profit remains persistently higher than the prevailing interest rate, there will be an excess demand for credit, which will eventually raise the interest rates. If the profit rate becomes lower than the prevailing normal rate of interest, the demand for credit will drop; entrepreneurs will reduce industrial investments and increase the supply of credit, until supply and demand for credit match again. Credit entails a commitment of the borrower to repay a comparable amount of money at a future date. However, there is no prima facie reason why this sum should be greater than the credited amount. One takes credit with the expectation that this credit will enable him in future to earn enough to repay the loan, although such an expectation is unwarranted. Even if the borrower loses, he is obliged to repay the credit with an interest. Positive interest rates make it profitable for creditors to lend money. No wonder usury is a lucrative occupation. As long as the normal rates of profit in a business are higher than the interest rates, there will always be a demand for credit. Creditors provide credits because they are motivated by the prospect of making profit from the rates of compound interest. The supply of credit is thus determined by positive interest rates. Positive rates of profit constitute a significant incentive to increasing production of commodities, goods and services. Economic growth, identified with growth of capital and goods, is always associated with environmental impacts of production and consumption of these goods and services. Because environmental and social costs do not appear on the accounting structure of production, the normal rates of profit appear to be unaffected by the production process. Because efforts at abatement or remediation of these impacts entail reduction in the normal rates of profit, firms tend to avoid such efforts. ‘Under these conditions, money becomes an external goal of action pursued by billions of people in an institutional setting which systematically disregards the environmental impacts of economic growth’ (Jaeger 1994:: 199–200). Positive normal rates of profit and compound interest are not only the motive force behind the accumulation of capital, they make GNP growth look like the overall goal of the world economy.

2.1.7 The Presumption of GNP as Prosperity The expansion of human capabilities as the basic objective of development was never completely forgotten or denied in the development discourse, but the principal concentration has always been on increasing gross national product per

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head. Gross National Product per capita or Gross National Income per capita (respectively, GNP or GNI divided by the total population) is assumed to measure the ‘average standard of living’, and indicate the degree of human freedom and control over nature. Incomes and commodities are used in the economic literature as the material basis of well-being. Based on this assumption, or rather belief in GNP as prosperity, economists authorize and endorse structural reforms by the Southern governments as necessary measures, because earlier policies ‘evidently failed to generate adequate growth of [national] income and of per capita income’ (Bhagwati and Srinivasan 1993: 2). However, GNP as the prosperity indicator has proven misleading in comparison between countries. According to World Bank estimates, Saudi Arabia is not a ‘high-income’ country: ‘at a GNP per capita of $7510 a substantial gap had already opened up between it and the lowest high income country, Ireland, with a GNP per capita of $12,210, roughly on par with Israel’ (Calvert and Calvert 1999: 9). Regardless of the Bank’s acknowledgement, the statistic distorts the measure of social well-being and conceals the inequality of incomes between and within countries and regions. What incomes and commodities can achieve crucially depends on the diversity of personal as well as social situations. Sen (1999: 70–71) has identified five distinct sources of variation between real incomes and the well-being and freedom they yield: (a) personal (e.g. sickness or physical handicap), (b) environmental (e.g. hotter or colder climates, malaria- or pollution-free environment), (c) social climate (e.g. corruption, violence), (d) inter-societal (e.g. being relatively poor in a rich country may prevent some functionings even if the income is in absolute terms much higher than in poorer countries), and (e) within-family income distribution (different freedoms and opportunities for different members of the family). Thus, the same income level may prove inadequate for two persons in different circumstances. Conversely, the same level of well-being and happiness may be achieved with two different income levels in two situations. Thus, richness – in terms of high real income – is a limited guide to well-being and the quality of life. GNP or GNI is counted by adding the total exchange value of goods and services in a country, and excludes all the unpaid customary, domestic, and scholastic work.10 It also excludes products and services that have no current exchange value or price. The GNP calculus is particularly spurious when environmental matters are considered. As Hueting (1980) showed, the country’s expenditure incurred to clean up industrial pollution would inflate the GNP, thereby showing a false rise in the citizens’ standard of living. Similarly, a country where most personal transportation is by bicycle or draught animals is clearly worse off, in GNP terms, than a country with a large auto industry and attendant defensive expenditures. It is thus an academic issue whether the

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higher environmental damage ‘causes’ higher GNP or the other way around. They can be shown to be mutually reinforcing. In calculation of GNP, the output of an activity is recorded regardless of the actors involved. However, this calculation is reversed, and becomes spurious, when it comes to environmental cost: in the case of costing of pollution prevention or cleanup, the economic significance of the activity is determined by who does it. If a household or government incurs expenditures to prevent environmental degradation (e.g. putting a smoke filter to automobile exhaust), the outlays are recorded as income and increase in GNP, whereas if the same expenditure is made by an entrepreneur, the outlays will be counted as intermediate costs and decrease in GNP. This procedure leads to the bizarre result that both the production process that pollutes the environment and the subsequent endeavours to remove or minimize the adverse effects from an economic activity are counted as productive work. Furthermore, medical and social costs incurred by citizens affected by industrial pollutants add to GNP. Coleman (1994: 74) cites the case of American asbestos industry as a stark example: Asbestos contributed positively to the GNP for many years as it was sold as a building material. Then it was revealed that asbestos dust caused a dangerous lung disease, asbestosis. Asbestosis victims required medical care, the cost of which also contributed positively to the GNP. The victims then sued the asbestos manufacturers for damages. The legal costs again added to the GNP. Today, asbestos continues to positively affect the GNP through the ‘productive work’ of construction crews around the nation that are busy removing asbestos from schools and other public buildings.

This ridiculous estimate of GNP as the measure of a healthy society, or of development, seems to indicate that a calamity like a flood or an earthquake could count as a happy incident for the economy, as it would entail relief expenditure and thus enhance the GNP. Clearly, this bizarre index does not stand as a measure of prosperity. When environmental and social costs of industrial growth are subtracted from the GNP to calculate an ‘Adjusted National Product’ (Leipert 1989: 139), the escalating rise in economic development of most Western countries indicate zero, or even negative, growth in real social welfare (Hay 2002: 212). Another shortcoming of the GNP stems from the fact that service sector wages in industrial countries are apt to increase pari passu with industrial wage rise, which invariably distorts GNP and national income figures. The reason is the following: With the increase in industrial productivity, the general standard of living (in terms of the availability of, and demand for, consumer goods) also increases, which leads to increases in industrial as well as service sector wages, although the

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productivity of the service sector does not increase. Consequently, the price of the service of the service sector’s employees increases disproportionately, compared to the wages of industrial labour. The overall cost of production soon exceeds the wages. Thus, the service-sector output is over-valued in estimation of GNP. Essentially, industrial productivity increases are yielding rapidly diminishing returns while at the same time making the relationship between wages and raw materials costs increasingly distorted. The incentive to shed labour and use more energy and materials is strengthening at an accelerating rate. (Douthwaite 2001: 169–70)

This has a direct environmental implication: labour-intensive production tends to become less important in economic growth than energy- and materialintensive production. Thus, a rise in manufacture and sale of automobiles is considered to imply greater improvement of GNP than a similar rise in the sale of bicycles. For this same reason, labour-intensive ‘organic’ agriculture, which is more productive, receives little support and subsidies from the state, while chemical agriculture receives all of them. Furthermore, GNP does not count the level of education, social consciousness and cultural levels of the population, quality and opportunities of entertainment available to the population, nutritional status, accessibility to health facilities and security of life to individuals, and many more such parameters of social development, plus the physico-chemical and aesthetic quality of the environment, and yet is used as an index for the standard of living! The puerility of GNP measure has been subject to severe criticism over the past few decades. Jose Lutzenberger (1996: 20) is particularly acerbic: ‘GNP as a measure of progress is the most stupid, the most absurd and the most pernicious index that could ever have been thought of by a discipline that calls itself scientific.’ While most economists agree that GNP is a bad measure of development, many tend to argue that it is a good indicator of social progress – reduction in inequality (measured by Gini coefficient) and increase in social welfare. Kuznets (1955) claimed that when Gini coefficient is plotted against GNP of all countries, it looks like an inverted U: in pre-industrial societies income inequality was low; during early industrialization income inequality increases over time, and then after some critical level of high industrial growth, inequality starts to decline over time. However, the Kuznets vision has receded in recent years. With unions in disorder and welfare states in disrepute, the ‘Kuznets hypothesis’ now serves mainly as a whipping boy of development researchers, to be raised, sometimes at length, but usually to be dismissed as disconfirmed by modern data, generally by economists who see no contradiction between inequality and development. (Galbraith 2000: 12)

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Recent data tend to show that inequality does not decrease with GNP. Indeed, inequality is itself the outcome of development through concentration of capital, which cannot allow functional democracy. Thus, if GNP growth indicates greater concentration of capital, social equality and welfare is expected to decrease, rather than increase.

2.1.8 The Belief in the Omnipotence of the Market Ever since Adam Smith spoke of the Invisible Hand that regulates the distribution of wealth in society, the assumption that the market is capable of correcting inequity and adjusting any problems in resource distribution has taken deep roots in the standard view. Based on the assumption that everybody is ‘rational’, and that everybody as buyer and seller has equal rights and opportunities, economic theories postulate that laissez-faire market is guaranteed to ensure freedom and prosperity to everybody. The liberatory potential of the market is assumed to be fully realized when it is free from all religious, political, legal and social constraints. There has always been an immanent critique of this ideology of market determinism. However, in the 1980s (the Thatcher-Reagan era) all this critique was brushed aside in the rise of the New Right predicated on a free market frenzy, which reinvoked the old Social Darwinist argument that free market competition was a ‘law of nature,’ that regulation of the market resulted in rent seeking, that public enterprises always were less efficient than private ones, and that ‘government failures’ outweighed market failures. While some of these presumptions appeared to get somewhat toned down in recent microeconomic theory, the WTO has strengthened the neo-classical argument for free trade in international trade policies. In the free market/ free trade ideology, the market is assumed to operate on honest trade contracts between fully informed individuals, and therefore the market is an effective arbiter of justice. ‘Market justice’ is driven by the impartial ‘law’ of supply and demand, which states that the forces of supply and demand push the price of a commodity toward the level at which the quantity supplied and the quantity demanded are equal, a result termed ‘market clearing’. This simplistic view of the world is far from reality in market economics, however. Both creation of and access to market have historically been assisted – rather than hindered – by the state. Active state intervention by tariff structures and military invasions has protected and expanded the market for the North’s capital. Furthermore, all existing markets are marked by the incomplete nature of contracts (overstatement of the worth of commodities in advertisements, cheating by traders, exploitation of workers, etc.) and the traders’ limited information about the trades being offered and accepted by other traders. Stiglitz and coworkers wrote of the ‘abrogation of the law of

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supply and demand’ owing to asymmetric information and various other social factors (Arnott et al. 2003; Hoff and Stiglitz 2001). Recent development in microeconomic theory provides models of markets – including markets of labour and goods of variable quality – ‘in which market clearing does not occur, even in a competitive equilibrium’ (Bowles and Hammerstein 2003: 157). However, economic models seldom acknowledge the extra-market forces like the political will and rational community action, which can override market. Indeed, market forces have never occasioned withdrawal of any toxic chemicals; any and all prohibitions on the manufacture and use of toxic chemicals in all countries have been enforced by state legislation; and it is the force of international treaties – not the law of supply and demand – that has banned the nerve gas, stopped nuclear proliferation and regulated whaling. The simplistic description of the impartial market forces regardless of political arrangements contradicts reality only too often. A foremost example is that the existence of private property rights, the foundation of capitalist economy, is itself a result of political-legal arrangement, and is protected by political-legal arrangements to ensure free operation of the market. Taxes to control profligate extraction of resources are another example of extra-market instrument to facilitate market functioning. Imperfections of market result from its inherent contradictions, that include the fact that market forces determine the rise of monopoly, which is considered to be a market imperfection. Beginning with Marx, many have pointed out that market forces result in violations of human rights and freedom. This will be discussed in more detail in Section 7.3. Arthur Young argued in the late 18th century that on an annual rental an individual will turn a garden into a desert, but on a long-term lease can turn a desert into a garden (cited in Harvey 1996: 384). Modern proponents of free market environmentalism uphold that only private ownership could save the commons from their Hardinian tragedy. They advocate market-based mechanisms to capture ‘full costs’ of the environmental harm done by industry. Pollution taxes, tax on land conversion, and tradable emission permits to factories are shown as a market-based solution to air and water pollution from industry. A number of recent studies have shown that tax rates are often ineffective disincentives to deforestation and mining programmes. Furthermore, emission permits are by definition allowances to cause pollution, and tradable permits serve to transfer the cost of pollution on to others who can afford to pay. A related assumption of the economic theory relevant to resource use and conservation is that the market reflects the true value of everything, and therefore the interplay of market forces will eventually ensure balanced land use and optimal resource utilization and conservation. However, this does not happen in reality because as discussed above, the methodology of economic valuation of the

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ecological functions of natural assets is still in its infancy. Because indirect use values and global non-use values of natural assets are difficult to ascertain, shortterm private profit from exhaustive land use takes precedence as more ‘rational’ than conserving the land for long-term intangible benefits to the community. Therefore, the cost of deforestation is severely undervalued, while benefits from alternative land uses (like mining or farming) are overestimated. In the private ownership, profit maximizing context, land conversion appears to be more profitable than conservation, and therefore, ‘it will pay to ‘mine’ the resource to extinction’ (Pearce 1998: 23). The logging firm makes profit by clearing a forest, while the costs of the loss of its services is borne by society, and never reflected in the market price of lumber and paper. Higher (affordable) price of timber is likely to accelerate deforestation, not conservation. Furthermore, the market tends to deplete the commons, by abrogating community rights to commons in favour of private property rights. The absence of formal ownership rights to the commons leads to zero or negligible rents, which distorts the valuation of the services and benefits of the commons. When declining fish population leads to higher prices, investing in more trawlers would bring more profit. That is economically rational for the individual fisher, but would simply accelerate the collapse of fishery. Under the prevalent market conditions, ‘those who convert the land do not have to compensate those who suffer the local consequences of that conversion’ (Pearce, 1998: 183). Because the entire edifice of neo-classical economics is epistemologically predisposed towards a utilitarian view of the resources, it fails to recognize the value of natural resources beyond their market value. Thus, markets fail to allocate environmental services efficiently. Because market forces make everything – including world’s environmental assets – dispensable, market forces cannot be expected to conserve those assets. The adverse implications of free market environmentalism will be discussed in more detail in Section 8.2.2.

2.1.9 The False Linkage of Commodities with Happiness Development is supposed to ensure greater prosperity for everyone. Prosperity is supposed to be a result of greater accumulation of wealth or higher income. Thus, the standard economic tradition assumes that higher income and better material conditions of living would beget happiness. Happiness is defined in terms of the quantity of primary goods that money can buy and would satisfy a person’s needs and promote her ends. The programme of progress has been to deliver humanity from slavery to life’s needs, to yield the comforts of civilization. However, development defines needs as wants beyond necessities. Development eventually employs technology to acquire more than what the primary necessities govern. The paradox of development is that

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the horizon of need perpetually recedes with techno-industrial progress. The difference between ‘need’ and ‘want’ is never transcended. The perception of want is governed by the desire to attain material well-being relative to all others. People want more than they need. The race for wealth accumulation is thus a perpetual race. There seems to be no direct relationship between increasing wealth – in terms of bigger commodity bundles – and happiness. Sociological studies tend to show that improvement in economic prosperity is always relative. For example, in Argyle’s (1987) study, the largest number of people who reported personal happiness was from Cuba, Egypt and the USA, despite enormous difference between per capita GNP and resource consumption. Argyle concluded that the link between income and personal happiness is relative to one’s class position. This is akin to Sen’s (1999: 71) fourth source of variation discussed above: in rich countries, relatively poorer people may find it difficult to conform to the respectable standard of living, although their incomes ‘in absolute terms may be much higher than the level of income at which members of poorer communities can function with great ease and success’ (Sen 1999: 71). Such differences in relational perspectives not only relate to intersocietal differences in well-beings, but also contribute to differential levels of satisfaction in persons functioning in the same society. The improvement in material well-being is perceived only with reference to one’s relative position on the economic ladder. As long as there are more people on the higher rungs of the ladder, the modern economic person is not satisfied with her own position, no matter how far high up it is. She is never satisfied with what she has, and strives to have more. This seems to explain why affluence in a society may not necessarily make people happy and satisfied. There is a pronounced trend towards greater rates of depression and suicide in the market democracies. Increasingly, empirical studies show that in spite of the phenomenal growth of GNP and per capita consumption rate in the US, the proportions of Americans who report themselves to be ‘very happy’ has declined from a score of 7.5 in 1940 to 7.2 in 1990, while GNP per capita has increased from $6,000 to $20,000 during the same period (Lane 2000). Consumers’ unhappiness grows in all market economies, because wants remain unsatisfied, even when necessities are fulfilled. Empirical studies find that regardless of income, people believe they would be happier only if they earned twice as much (Farley et al. 2002: 261). In the affluent society where everyone has a station car, the lure to buy a Mercedes is irresistible. And once one buys a Mercedes, everyone else strives to buy one. In a poor village, those who can afford to own a bicycle want a scooter, even if that entails recurring expenditure on fuel and maintenance. And as soon as one of them buys a scooter, everybody else begins to consider a bicycle is not enough, and wants to get a motorbike. Barry Schwartz gives an excellent analogy:

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It’s like being in a football stadium, watching the crucial play. A spectator several rows in front stands up to get a better view. A chain reaction follows. Soon everyone is standing, just to be able to see as well as before. Everyone is standing rather than sitting, but no one’s position has improved. And if someone, unilaterally and resolutely, refuses to stand, he might just as well not be at the game at all. Again, when goods people pursue are positional, they can’t help but be in the race. To choose not to run is to lose. Non-participation is not an option. (Schwartz 1986: 253).

The more the economy grows, the greater the demand for luxury goods; the more rapid the depletion of the living systems that are the source of all real wealth, and the more intense the unequal competition between rich and poor for what remains – a competition the poor invariably lose. It should be clear at this point that the idea of sustainable development hinges on the denial of economic growth in terms of material production and consumption as a necessary condition for an acceptable livelihood and equitable living conditions for people. The consideration of acceptable livelihood of the poor in essence addresses a significant part of the ‘quality of life’ issue in the sustainability discourse. Whether the prevalent pattern of development could ensure an improved quality of life – a happy life – for the poor is a moot point. Douthwaite (2001) illustrates this point: […] I asked whether people living around 1700 would have preferred to live in the society and economy of the 1900s and decided that perhaps they would, but for non-materialistic reasons. I do not have to ask the same question about the late twentieth century; an experiment was actually carried out. A group of 274 people living almost exactly as their ancestors had done in the 1820s was brought to Britain and invited to stay. (Douthwaite 2001: 170)

Douthwaite goes on to cite Bosquet’s (1977) study, which remains pertinent to the notion of ‘acceptable livelihood’, to describe how the Trsitan da Cunha islanders were transported to England when the island was ravaged by a volcanic eruption. After two years of life in modern England, when the danger from the volcano was over, the islanders decided to resettle in Tristan da Cunha, in spite of the fact that Their sheep, which had been left on the island, were all dead, the stock of seed potatoes was almost totally destroyed; the potato fields themselves had been overrun by pests. … Lava covered the beach and there were no trace of the crayfish packing plant. (Douthwaite 2001: 170)

Nevertheless, all of them – with the exception of six women who had married Englishmen – wanted to return to their island. Why? ‘If life were as free in England as it is in Tristan,’ one of the islanders said after his return, ‘I wouldn’t mind living [there]. But I’m not used to working for a boss. I work when I feel like it.’

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So some things are more important than the level of production and consumption, than economic growth. As Bosquet concluded: ‘For anyone who believes in the absolute value of progress, the lesson of Tristan da Cunha is a terrible one.’ ( Douthwaite 2001: 171)

2.2

Revisions and Reconciliation

A large number of professional economists have recognized the limitations of some of the standard assumptions of neo-classical economics. Stiglitz’s analysis of asymmetric information and the influence of various social institutions on the operation of the market is a pre-eminent critique of the neo-classical theory (Arnott et al. 2003). Attempts to revise a number of neo-classical assumptions have constituted the new institutional economics (NEI). For instance, NEI replaces the neo-classical notion of rationality with ‘bounded rationality’ idea, which allows for the sacrifice of short-term profits for long-term interests of the individual. Also, attempts have been made over recent decades to incorporate environmental costs into the balance sheet of accounting. A number of countries have instituted various market mechanisms and policy instruments to mitigate environmental damages – for example, by imposing taxes on certain economic activities and issuing pollution permits to industry. Such attempts, however, seem to reinforce the standard view that all environmental goods and services have market prices, and that benefits from industrial activities outweigh the costs. The need for industrial growth itself remains unchallenged in professional economics, just as the notion of people as utility-seeking, profit-maximizing robots remains unaltered in the established traditions of economics. Nevertheless, remarkable advances have been made in recent years in redefining development indices, which include various aspects of human welfare beyond economic prosperity. UNDP has devised a new index of human development as an improvement on GNI, and several professional economists have devised clever means to valuate different ecological services of biodiversity, and also to estimate the environmental and health costs of various economic activities. A summary of these alternative techniques of quantifying development is as follows:

2.2.1 Fine-tuning the GNP Index Many have proposed alternative indices of development involving improved social welfare, including ‘adjusted’ GNP, to replace conventional GNP estimation (Hay 2002: 211–12). However, none of these has ever been adopted by any

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national institutions as an official index of development, and most are limited by disputable assumptions about various parameters of development. The World Bank (2000) has explicitly accepted Sen’s (1999) capability approach, and has included the ‘voices of the poor’ in its idea of poverty. In its major policy document World Development Report 2000-2001, the Bank has included income, health, education, vulnerability, powerlessness, and human development in its depiction of poverty. While the Bank’s perspective on development remains unaltered, the incorporation of these elements into its policy directive reflects an important conceptual expansion of the Bank’s idea of development parameters. One of the most influential attempts in recent years at improving the basic assumptions of development economics includes the development of more reliable indices of ‘quality of life’. The latest of such indices is the ‘human development index’ (HDI), first used in the UNDP’s 1994 Human Development Report. HDI takes account of GDP per capita (measured in purchasing power parity dollars), life expectancy at birth, a measure of educational attainment (derived from adult literacy rate data and school attendance) and public health. However, the inherent weakness of the principle of measuring the well-being of a population by a very small number of key indicators becomes apparent when within-country differences are overshadowed by differences between countries. For example, the average life expectancy in Mexico in 1992 was 70, which conceals the fact that ‘the life expectancy for the poorest 10 percent was 20 years less than for the richest 10 percent’ (Calvert and Calvert 1999: 11). In Human Development Report 2000, a refined measure of the HDI has tried to capture the rate of environmental degradation and human living conditions from the overall economic activities. The HDI is an index of relative performance, and attempts to give a composite measure of development with an eye to basic needs of people. Nevertheless, it fails to indicate national performance in terms of the mode of use and abuse of natural resources, and the degree of qualitative growth in terms of inter-generational social equity (see later). Common (1995) developed an environmentally adjusted economic performance indicator (EAEPI), using GDP per capita, longevity and environmental impact measured from data of net greenhouse gas emission, and given by I = YL/G, where Y is GDP per capita, L is longevity, and G is an index to net greenhouse gas emission, expressed as equivalent metric tons of carbon per capita. Thus, I measures the lifetime per capita income per unit of environmental impact. Common gives two reasons for using G as a measure of environmental

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impact: first, an increasing enhanced greenhouse effect is a major threat to our existence, and second, because greenhouse gases are produced largely by the combustion of fossil fuels and land use changes like deforestation, G may serve as a ‘good proxy for the overall environmental impact of economic activity’ (Common 1995: 83). However, the measures of Y and G are not definitive. As Common (1995: 85) states, The index I = YL/G is not to be seen as a definitive indicator for environmentally adjusted economic performance. No such thing exists, nor can it. Neither economic performance nor environmental impact can be properly measured by a single number. Both are multifaceted and there is no uniquely correct way of aggregating across these factors.

However, this index retains the arithmetic of per capita GDP (Y). Even if some corrected index of national income (NI) is in principle able to capture the real standard of living of a population, the measure of NI per capita – obtained by dividing the estimated NI by total population size – ignores the skewed distribution of wealth, unequal opportunities and access to goods and services, and unequal purchasing powers of different segments of the population. The mean GNP per capita or GNI per capita or even a corrected NI per capita clearly distorts the actual distribution of wealth or income because the estimate takes the very large incomes of a few mega-opulent families and treats them as if the incomes were uniformly spread over land. The simple arithmetic average ignores the wide variance of income across the population. Without reference to the variance, which is often larger than the average for income distribution in most capitalist countries, comparison of such averages is thus statistically spurious. Yet this spurious statistic is held in mainstream economics as the yardstick for development. Both the concept of GDP/GNP and the averaging procedure are misleading. As Chesneaux (1989: 64) has illustrated, The unemployed worker in the slums of Caracas discovers with amazement that he enjoys a standard of living defined in terms of GDP which is worthy of envy. No less flabbergasted, the fisherman in Samoa who lives quite at ease in relative self-sufficiency, learns that, in terms of GNP, he is one of the poorest inhabitants of the planet.

This clearly demonstrates the ‘absurdity of international comparison of indices when lifestyles are very different and in fact non-comparable’ (Latouche 1992: 343). It also shows the limitation of national accounting statistics. Nevertheless, such critiques seem to have had no impact whatsoever on the dominant economic paradigm that moulds all national economic policies. The standard economic procedure is also wont to ignore the possible improvements on the statistics to yield greater clarity and insight into the real distribution of wealth and incomes.

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As Lewontin and Levins (2001) have pointed out, unless resource-weighted averages of wealth or income are considered, simple arithmetic mean of resource indicator is meaningless. They have shown that while person-weighted density gives a more appropriate picture of uneven population distribution, area-weighted estimation of landholding per capita would give more accurate information. The person-weighted [population] density is always larger, and often many times larger than the area-weighted density, with consequences that are inconvenient for a national government or the World Bank. On the other hand, if, as ecologists, we ask the question, ‘what is the average pressure of human activity experienced by a patch of land?’ then the area-weighted measure would be quite appropriate, although it would still leave out the information that some pieces of land are much more highly exploited than others. (Lewontin and Levins 2001: 113)

Technical Discussion 4

Similarly, the arithmetic mean GNI per capita, calculated as the total national income (TNI) divided by the total population, does not capture unequal income distribution in a country. An income-weighted harmonic mean of GNI per capita would reflect the unequal income distribution in a country more accurately than standard GNI per capita estimates (see Technical Discussion 4). However, no econometric exercise has ever attempted to depict the national growth of wealth or income in terms of the harmonic mean of GNI.

Calculating Resource-Weighted Mean Income For a simple example, let’s consider a population of four individuals (N = 4) divided into two income groups. One group (n1) has one person earning a1 = 3 dollars a day, while the other group (n2) is comprised of three persons, whose total daily income is a2 = $1; that is, each person of the second group earns $0.33 a day. For this population, the simple mean daily income per capita is (a1 + a2)/N = ($3 + $1)/ 4 = $1.

However, the weighted mean income per capita will be M = d1 d2 /[d1 w1 + d2 w2]

(eqn. 2.11)

th

where di is per capita income for the i group (ai/ni) and wi is the weightage for each income group, measured by 1 – (ni/N), and w1 + w2 = 1. Thus calculated, M measures the harmonic mean of income. Substituting the definition of di , eqn. 2.11 may be rewritten as M = N a1 a2/[a1 n22 + a2 n12]

(eqn. 2.12) continued...

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continued... Using this operational formula, the weighted average daily income per capita works out to be $0.43, which is far less than the simple arithmetic mean. The weighted income tends to decline with greater proportions of people earning less. If a population of 100 consists of n1 people earning $1/ n1 per capita and n2 people earning $99/n2 per capita, then the simple mean remains ($1+$99)/100 = $1 per capita. However, the weighted mean income for the population would decrease with increasing n1 (Figure 2). For r >2 income groups in a population (where N = n1 + n2 + … + nr), the harmonic mean income will be: r

M=N/

∑ (n / d ) 1

(eqn. 2.13)

i

i =1

for all di > 0. We can, at least in principle,j calculate all the r averages of a statistic d over a given population N(= n1 + n2 + … + nr) simply by having each individual form his or her own group. Of course in practice this is hardly feasible and therefore we have to form groups, assuming that all people from any particular group i have the same ‘average’ value for di. Figure 2. Weighted mean income per capita (M) for a population with a fraction n1 whose total income is $1 (see text). 1

0.8

0.6 M 0.4

0.2

0 0

20

40

60

80

100

n1

2.2.2 Counting natural capital In the standard calculation of GNP or GNI, the environmental and social costs of production (as well as services) are not considered, and therefore GNI estimates always remain incomplete. A rational approach to assessing the actuality

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of development must involve estimating the environmental costs of development, as a means to assessing environmental damages caused by different economic activities. For instance, Pearce and colleagues (Pearce et al. 1989) have outlined an approach to internalizing the ‘externality’ of environmental cost that is borne by society. They propose to calculate the environmental costs of an economic activity in terms of the range of sickness it creates leading to lost working hours or the cost of health services, and thus find an economic price of pollution. This price may be used in environmental policy, for example through imposing a tax on the polluting industry or firm. The same technique may be used to estimate the economic benefits of environmental goods and services, which can then be viewed as ‘natural capital’. In the broadest sense, natural capital consists of all the elements of biodiversity that are utilizable, in comparison to an immensely larger proportion of biodiversity that is of no prima facie economic utility. Thus, the natural capital is endangered by the extraction of usable resources because it has instrumental value. This consideration of natural resources as natural capital has led to proposals for ‘prudent use’ or ‘wise use’ of the resources, based on principles of capitalist management. However, prudent use of natural capital does not necessarily lead to the preservation of key elements of biodiversity (populations, species, ecosystems or landscapes) that have no current value. The managerial perspective fails to recognize that the environmental crisis lies in the fact that natural world itself, not just natural capital, is disappearing. A fundamental point in the conversion of nature into natural capital is that nature not only becomes a source of raw material but of value in itself. Biodiversity suddenly becomes a ‘reservoir of value that research and knowledge, along with biotechnology, can release for capital and communities’ (Escobar 1995: 203). The instrumental value of biodiversity makes it imperative for local communities to become stewards of natural capital: ‘wise use’ of the capital therefore becomes a logical necessity. Non-use value of nature is of course discussed in conservationist text, but becomes irrelevant to conservationist programmes and policies. The capitalization of nature extends beyond what Escobar (Escobar 1995: 203) calls the ‘semiotic conquest of nature’: the invention of natural and human capital heralds reinvigoration of the hegemony of the standard view. It enables capital to engulf nature and human labour, which previously constituted the conditions of production. Trees on a plantation, medicinal plants grown on a pharmaceutical herbarium, and silk moths reared on a silk farm are all examples of natural capital. Even if these ‘conditions of production’ are not produced following the laws of value and the market, they are treated as commodities. Commodification of natural objects began with the birth of capitalism, which now extends to biodiversity in wild lands and to local knowledge pertaining to uses of biodiversity. Both biodiversity and

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knowledge of biodiversity use become ‘reservoirs of value.’ Managerial treatment of nature as capital thus essentially devalues nature by ‘price-tagging’ it. The profit motive, rather than the conservation motive, is reinforced by the globalization of capital, which readily converts into money. Conservation, if it ever happens, becomes an incidental – and ephemeral – consequence. The managerial treatment of the natural capital ignores the fact that market price of useful things does not necessarily reflect the true value of their utility, and therefore market-based valuation of natural resources is bound to remain incomplete. Missing or incomplete valuation is a form of local market failure, in which the real rent of the resource is not included in the existing market price. For instance, market prices of the various forest products do not reflect the rent of the forestland from which the products are gathered. When the forest is open-access, the gathering activity itself is careless of the value and productive potential of the land. As Pearce (1998: 183) has argued, ‘the effective zero or negligible rents perceived in the market place owe much to the absence of property rights’ to the user community. This problem will be discussed later in section 7.5.1.

2.2.3 Costing the Uncostable A fundamental understanding that has emerged in recent decades is that the externalities of production need to get internalized in economic analysis. With the emergence of environmental economics, cost/benefit analyses are being employed to suggest the environmental trade-offs of economic growth. Beginning in the late sixties, research into the problem of externalities showed that the cost of pollution to the victims is almost impossible to calculate, and often too large to quantify (e.g. Costanza 1997a, 1997b; Costanza and Folke 1997; Hohmeyer et al. 1996; Kadekodi 1999; Martinez-Alier 1990). When these costs are considered, the benefits of most industrial development activity is often outweighed by the environmental, health and cultural damages (‘negative externalities’) caused by the production process (Hohmeyer et al. 1996; Hueting 1980; Mishan 1967). Attempts of environmental economics at valuation of biodiversity (Figure 3) is aimed at enhancing the economic value of a species or ecosystem, to incorporate its different use values into the economic valuation, so that the costs of its damage or loss could be internalized, thereby reducing the likelihood of destruction of the environmental resource items from commercial activity. In a seminal paper, Costanza et al. (1997) estimated an approximate economic value of 17 ecosystem services for 16 biomes, which amounted to be in the range of US$16–54 trillion per year. Indeed, the entire economics of the world would perish in the absence of the ecological life support systems of the Earth, ‘so in one sense their total value to the

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economy is infinite’ (Costanza et al. 1997: 253). The study included only the renewable services, and omitted several of them because there were no published estimates of value; it even omitted many ecosystems that had never been valued. The authors arrived at an average of US$33 trillion per year, which they asserted must be considered a minimum estimate, given the nature of the uncertainties. In a similar study, Pretty et al. (2000) estimated the environmental and health costs of modern agricultural practices in the UK for the year 1996 at £2,343 million, equivalent to £208/ha of arable and permanent pasture. This study encompassed costs of air and water pollution, soil erosion, loss of wildlife and their habitats, food poisoning and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). However, this estimation included only ‘those externalities that gave rise to financial costs, and so is likely to underestimate the total negative impacts of modern agriculture’ (Pretty et al. 2000: 113). Indeed, such estimates are bound to underestimate the costs arising from the loss of environmental services of the various components of biodiversity, as well as from the loss of their existence value and bequest value. For example, Bein and Rintoul (1996) show that prevailing estimates of social costs of global environmental change may be one or two orders of magnitude too low. Any such cost/benefit analysis of the environmental goods and services may demonstrate the ‘insuperable difficulties’ in application of cost-benefit analysis to environmental problems (Ekins 2000). However, the objective of such studies is not to arrive at a precise valuation of the biosphere, but to give a common idea of how immeasurable value nature has, and what great harm developmentality has done to it. The point, as a critic put it, is that ‘The dollar index may be one effective gauge of the environment, but let’s not kid ourselves that it can capture the essence and magnitude of the loss we are facing’ (Perry 1997). Nevertheless, ‘One has to communicate with people in the language they understand’ (Costanza 1997b). The language of monetary quantification is what politicians can understand, and any number is better than no number, in the world of homo oeconomicus. Pearce (1998: 39) argues that the only way to educate planners and policy makers about the value of the environment, and ‘to get the environment onto the economic agenda’ is to show that environmental goods and services have economic value. Barry (1999) considers the economic methodology and monetary valuation of the environment as not merely the lingua franca for policy-making institutions dominated and determined by the capitalist hegemony, but the ‘grammar of power’, in the sense that grammar is the rules for correct use of language. ‘Thus those who either do not know or refuse to accept this particular grammar (such as non-economic arguments for environmental preservation) are at a severe disadvantage in trying to influence environmental policy-making within the current institutional framework’ (Barry 1999: 142).

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Thus, ‘monetarily costing of “uncostable” ecosystems services is more visible now than “ecological” aspects’ (Herendeen 1997), while a comprehensive estimation of the social cost of an environmental damage seems impossible. We are simply incapable to determine the precise value of environmental goods and services. As Figure 3 illustrates, current economic valuation techniques can estimate little more than the immediate market value of a commercially useful living resource, say a tree. While the tree has a direct use value as timber, it has numerous indirect use values in terms of its ecological services – oxygen production, greenhouse gas reduction, noise buffer, albedo reduction, soil conservation, and so on and so forth – none of which can be reduced to a market price. Indirect use values of environmental entities, such as carbon sequestration, soil erosion prevention, water recycling, or the albedo effect, are functions of species and ecosystems that constitute the physical preconditions for the existence of human societies. An exercise of valuation of all the ecosystem services of the different elements of biodiversity would be staggeringly complex and little more than peremptory. The environmental economic attempt to approximate the value of the components of biodiversity by including their aesthetic and recreational values. The widely recognized method of such valuation is called ‘hedonic pricing’, based on existing market prices of certain goods and services. For example, the value of a quiet landscape is calculated by comparing the market prices of homes in quiet places with those of similar homes built downtown or near an airport. The aesthetic or recreational value of a riverside, or a species of attraction is calculated by adding up the costs of travel for all campers, hikers and picnickers who visit a given spot in a year. This travel cost estimate is expected to approximate the value of the aesthetic and recreational quality of a given locale or species. This value, plus the market value of the species or components of the ecosystem, is then put up to justify conservation of the species, ecosystem or the landscape. However, such valuation approaches fail to grasp the intrinsic values of species and ecosystems. The value of an ecosystem ought to be ascertained by the needs and ecological functions of the species comprising the ecosystem, not by the number of tourists visiting a place in a year, or by the amount of donations of environmental activists. The valuation approach is merely an extension of the economist’s bottom line argument for commodifying nature: that which is missed from valuation will have no value, and therefore may be destroyed without any harm to humans. If the ecological functions of a species cannot be fathomed in terms of utility, and captured in monetary terms, the cost of extermination of that species get externalized. Indeed, a staggeringly large number of services of biodiversity has no obvious use to humans. The most importantly cognizable ‘non-use value’ of biodiversity is the ‘existence value’, which relates to the value that individuals are

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willing to pay for mere existence of an element of biodiversity, regardless of its utility. An individual may be unwilling to fell a tree for the market price it might fetch, even if she uses none of its parts, because the tree’s existence itself may be enormously valuable to her. The existence value of a tree or a bird is extremely variable as it depends on the individual’s level of awareness about the value of living entities. A computer salesman in Brasilia, who fails to appreciate the existence value of the Brazilian rainforest, may be unwilling to donate money to save the forest, whereas many environmental activists in Germany are willing to contribute to a fund raising campaign to save it. Thus, the intrinsic or existence value is subjective, and its estimation of necessity relies on ‘contingent valuation’ method, which comprises subjective judgments of monetary worth of an environmental entity. This worth is estimated from an aggregation of what consumers are willing to pay to conserve, or conversely, willing to accept to allow disappearance of the living entity. Economists now also speak of the ‘bequest value’ of elements of biodiversity, which captures the value accrued to the next generation. It may not be out of place to record here that many Indian forest villagers plant slow-growing trees on degraded common lands so that some indefinite benefit would accrue to the community in the future. Also, it is not rare to find in South Asian villages an octogenarian woman nurturing a plant sapling in her backyard in the hope that her grandchildren will consume its fruits a decade later, when she would not remain

Fo od Fo dd e Fu r el St ru ct M ura ed l ic in R ec al re O atio xy ge nal n C b ar bo ala nc pH n s e e bu qu ffe es So rin te rin il g bi g W ndi at ng er r N ut ech rin ar g t A lb cyc ing ed lin o Et re g hi du ca ct l io Ex n is te n B eq ce ue st

Figure 3. Illustrative Use Values and Non-use Values of Biodiversity and Economic Valuation Techniques

Biodiversity Value

Direct Use Value

Indirect Use Value

Non-Use Value

Valuation techniques Market pricing

Optional / Contingent Valuation, Shadow pricing

WTP/ WTA

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alive. There is no available method to estimate the value of this ‘bequest’ to posterity (Figure 3). The concept of value needs a thorough change in the context of environment, and must transcend the monetary value of goods and services. Instead, an understanding of a non-market value based on the life-support and culturesupport functions of environmental components is necessary. Once it is understood that without this imponderable fundamental value, all efforts to valuation are meaningless, the environment will appear too costly to own the right to damage. To inculcate this understanding of value of the environment into our educational systems and institutions, one must turn to indigenous resource use norms. Current human ecological research indicates that many indigenous nonindustrial cultures ritually protect different species and ecosystems, although not directly used for any purposes. Many trees, ponds or even landscapes are considered sacred in these cultures, although there may be no economic activity associated with these elements of biodiversity (Deb and Malhotra 2001; Spadoni and Deb 2005). Traditional cultural institutions like sacred groves and ponds seem to express the love and respect for life, which Fromm (1968: 365) calls biophilia, rather than any consideration of direct economic benefits. It is likely that such cultural reverence for nature captures the indirect use value and nonuse value of biodiversity much better than any monetary valuation exercise (Deb and Malhotra 2001).

2.2.4 GNP and Environmental Care Over the past two decades some economists claimed that when plotted against GNP growth, many environmental health indicators, such as air and water pollution, show an inverted U-shape: in the early phases of economic growth, environmental concerns receive little attention, raising pollution along with industrialization. After a threshold, when basic physical needs are met, interest in a clean environment rises, reversing the trend. Now society has the funds, as well as the willingness to spend to reduce pollution. This extension of the Kuznets curve to environmental health in general does not stand scrutiny. Support for the so-called environmental Kuznets curve has come mainly from variations in income and pollution across countries, however, rather than direct examination of how pollution within a country changes as its income increases (Deacon and Norman 2004). Cross-country resource consumption data indicate that energy, land and resource use do not fall with rising income. Recent ‘ecological footprints’ analyses indicate that more advanced industrial countries have the biggest footprints. Ecological footprint is measured

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by how much land and water area a human population needs, given the current level of technology, to produce the resources consumed and to assimilate the wastes generated by the population. By 2001 accounts, India’s footprint is 0.8 global hectares per capita, China’s footprint is 1.5, UK’s 5.4 and USA’s, 9.5 global hectares per capita (Boutaud 2002). In terms of mineral and fuel consumption, 75 million U.S. citizens are the equivalent of 2 billion Colombians, 10 billion Nigerians, or 22 billion Indonesians. Total energy use in most developed countries is still rising. In terms of air pollution, the average US citizen produces 18 times as much CO2 as does the average Indian, and 66 times the average Nigerian (see Table 3.1). If pollution has decreased in the most advanced industrial countries since the 1980s, that is because public support for environmental protection increased dramatically around 1970, spurring increased efforts to improve environmental quality (Deacon and Norman 2004). The environmental Kuznets curve thus appears to be a chimera. The extent to which environmental quality improves, as well as its distribution, depends on the existence of legal and political institutions, educational and awareness levels of citizens, civil society activism, and functioning markets that determine the prices of environmental protection efforts.

2.2.5 Prosperity vs Capability Sen (1999) suggests that development be directed toward the goal of liberating people by increasing their ‘capabilities,’ rather than making them rich. A person’s ‘capability’ is a kind of freedom: ‘the substantive freedom to achieve alternative functioning combinations (or less formally put, the freedom to achieve various lifestyles)’ (Sen 1999: 73). In this view, poverty is ‘capability deprivation’ (Sen 1999: 87), which may be instrumentally enhanced by income poverty. However, capability poverty can also prevail in a society that curtails democratic rights and freedom even when citizens have high incomes. Thus, high income may not guarantee freedom and happiness. For example, black slaves in the US south seem to have had a relatively high pecuniary income, and a higher life expectancy than most free industrial workers in the US and Europe. And yet, slaves did run away, and there were excellent reasons for presuming that the interest of the slaves was not well served by the system of slavery. In fact, even the attempts, after the abolition of slavery, to get the slaves back, to make them work like slaves (particularly in the form of ‘gang work’), but at high wages, were not successful. (Sen 1999: 29)

Sen’s critique of the standard view is based on his attempt at bringing neoclassical economics back the ethical grounds of classical political economic tradition. He envisages development as constituted by instrumental freedoms,

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including political freedoms, economic facilities, social opportunities, transparency, and protective security. Material prosperity does not matter much in consideration of substantive freedom, which is fundamental in social development. Development policy ought to focus on the expansion of the capabilities of persons to achieve actual livings that people have reason to value, rather than on the means of good living.

2.3

Persistent Failures, Nonetheless

A neo-classical economist is a proverbial cynic – one who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. The very exercise of valuation itself is subject to criticism on ecological grounds. Firstly, within the market-based pricing paradigm, valuation of environmental goods and services would never get close to the real worth of natural resources, especially of the living resource. Secondly, the price tag itself may facilitate destruction of the object, instead of protecting it. A rich industrialist is entitled to buy his right to destroy a forest or lake by paying the calculated price. Unless one assumes that the price of a forest can be assessed from an aggregate of its timber value (ascertained from the market price), plus the value of oxygen it produces (estimated from the cost of factory production of oxygen), plus the value of greenhouse gas removal service, plus the value of albedo reduction service, plus its recreational value (determined by travel cost to tourists), plus its existence value (estimated by WTP), and so on, the real worth of the forest will remain imponderable forever. Even the direct use value of a plant or animal is likely to change, given its potential of a novel use (say, medicinal use) currently unknown. Thus, attempts at tagging a monetary price on environmental services and goods only prove the futility of the exercise. As a Cree Indian proverb warns, Only after the last tree has been felled, Only after the last river has been poisoned, Only after the last fish has been caught, Only then will you understand that money cannot be eaten.

In the dominant paradigm of neo-classical economics, the exercise of valuation of environmental components, goods and services is considered highly important, because species extinction episodes and industrial pollution appear to be a result of market failures (imperfections in the workings of the market system). To patch up market system imperfections, and in response to environmentalist critique, the defenders of neo-classical economics have opened up a new front of environmental economics, which attempts to rescue the environment by turning it into a set of commodities. However, several attempts at valuation and CBA

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of disparate components of environment, out of their ecological and evolutionary contexts, have failed to capture the real value of the environment. Internalization of the environmental goods and services in commerce and industry does not warrant conservation of the environmental components considered valuable. Destruction of old growth forests for timber has been ‘not due to their exclusion from the capitalist’s balance sheet, but rather to their inclusion’ (Foster 2002: 35). Nor does the market ensure conservation of a valuable commodity when it becomes rare. High market values of minx pelt, rhino horn and soft corals have pushed these animals to the brink of extinction. The rising cost of land has never been able to deter real estate development. Punitive fines imposed on polluters cannot stop automobiles and factories from polluting, any more than prisons and penal codes can stop crimes. So long as pollution is accepted as unavoidable for growth, and unless the pollution fines are too high to maintain steady profit rates, industry will continue to pollute, pay the fine, and make profits. Despite some short-run success in bringing down industrial pollution in the US, tradable pollution permits are inefficient too, simply because, by definition, they permit pollution, albeit to a limit; and also because these permits are tradable – implying that one can purchase the right to pollute. The neo-classical economic principle is pivoted on turning the environment into a part of a self-regulating market system. Environmental economics is merely a tool in the hands of professional economists for reinforcing the standard view, without changing any part of the neo-classical edifice, which attempts to reduce the environment to ‘natural capital’ and subject it to CBA. The assumptions, methodology and directives of environmental economics are ensconced in the neoclassical economic paradigm, and therefore, fail to prevent economic growth from disintegrating environment and human welfare A growing understanding of the limitations of environmental economics has occasioned the emergence of ecological economics, which not only repudiates the neo-classical premises of its predecessor, but aspires to build an ethical foundation into the political economic value system as an alternative to the predominant market-based one. I relegate the discussion of the scope and merits of this alternative economic thinking to Chapter 7.

Notes 1. Game theoretic models, in which two players engaged in a recursive Prisoner’s Dilemma game are given choices of either defection or cooperation, were used to examine the possibility of the evolution of cooperative behaviour in selfish individuals. Recursive games imply that ‘moves’ of the ‘players’ continue indefinitely and each player has a chance to

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retaliate in the future. One such model – Tit-For-Tat (TFT) – provided insightful results, indicating that evolution of cooperation is indeed possible in recursive games in which the players simply repeat the opponent’s move – defection if the opponent defected, and cooperation if the opponent cooperated. This TFT strategy leads to suppression of defection in order to ensure return of cooperation from the opponent in the future, even though defection may give greater immediate benefit than cooperation (Axelrod and Hamilton 1981). The TFT was found to be an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS), which means that no other evolutionary strategy can get the better of it, and the player adopting TFT strategy always wins. A logical discrepancy in inferring TFT as an ESS is that a rival strategy of defection or Pure Cheat (DDD) is also an ESS. Subsequently, however, TFT has been shown to be an ESS conditional to certain initial conditions (Kitcher 1985: 99–101). A further analysis shows that ‘there is no ESS in the Prisoner’s Dilemma,’ and ‘any assumptions to the contrary must be false’ (Marinoff 1990: 471). 2. However, despite mathematical rigor, game theoretic exercises are unable to explain social behaviour. Game theory aspires to find the best or optimal actions for individuals – ‘to provide a normative guide’ under certain circumstances (Forgo et al. 1999: xii–xiii). It views the possible alternative actions as a ‘game’, and then ‘theorizes a hypothetical best way to play it, not why and how people actually play it’ (Burke 2001: 455). 3. As John Donne said, ‘Things naturall for the species are not always so for the individuall.’ 4. Suicide bombing in New York or Israel is often sneered at as desperate acts born of religious fundamentalism that is opposed to modern, secular, Western science, civilization and development. However, this view of suicide bombers as misguided, ignorant, un-enlightened youth nurtured in a fundamentalist Oriental culture is subverted by a recent study of Japanese Kamikaze pilots. This study (Ohnuki-Tierney 2002) shows that most of the Kamikaze soldiers were well-read university students, familiar with European languages, literature and philosophy. Far from being fanatic warriors, some of them were against the war. All of them were convinced that their desperado would not bring victory to their country, but aimed primarily to lift the spirit of the country even after the defeat. 5. The solution of this equation is Nt = λ1 (N0 – λ2) – λ2 (N0 – λ1) exp(– αt)/ [N0 – λ2 – (N0 – λ1) exp(– αt)]

(eqn. N1)

where λ1 and λ2 are roots of the equation, and α = [(PA + PJ b)2 – 4 PJ bH/K]1/2

(eqn. N2)

The feasibility condition of this equation is that (PA + PJ b)2 > 4 PJ bH/K. The two roots of the equation are λ1 = (PA + b PJ) K + αK/2 b PJ and λ2 = (PA + b PJ) K – αK/2 b PJ The population asymptotically stabilizes at λ1. The other root λ2 = 0 when H = 0. I am grateful to Swati Sircar of the University of Washington for working out the solution and the feasibility condition of equation N2.

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6. Long before Pigou or any other economists, Marx showed that the price of manufactured goods does not include the value of ‘free’ natural elements that went into its production, unless these elements cannot adequately produce the commodity in demand: Natural elements entering as agents into production, and which cost nothing, no matter what role they play in production, do not enter as components of capital, but as a free gift of Nature to capital, that is, as a free gift of Nature’s productive power to labour, which however, appears as the productiveness of capital… Therefore, if such a natural power, which originally costs nothing, takes part in production, it does not enter into the determination of price, so long as the product which it helped to produce suffices to meet the demand. But if in the course of development, a larger output is demanded than that which can be supplied with the help of this natural power, i.e., if this additional output must be created without the help of this natural power, or by assisting it with human labour-power, then a new additional element enters into capital. A relatively larger investment of capital is thus required in order to secure the same output. All other circumstances remaining the same, a rise in the price of production takes place. (Marx 1894: 745) 7. A more informed report by influential economists on the economic impacts of global warming is published in the Stern Review (2006: vi), which summarizes its observation: The scientific evidence is now overwhelming: climate change is a serious global threat, and it demands an urgent global response….the Review estimates that if we don’t act, the overall costs and risks of climate change will be equivalent to losing at least 5 percent of global GDP each year, now and forever. If a wider range of risks and impacts is taken into account, the estimates of damage could rise to 20 percent of GDP or more. 8. This missing, or unpaid, value of labour is what Marx (1862) called surplus value. Marx further showed that this unpaid labour produces artefacts and value for someone else – the capitalist – and thus is qualitatively different from the natural functional work that humans must perform for living and recreation. This inherent difference between the worker’s vocational labour and her work necessary for her own upkeep as a human being dissociates her from her occupation, her labour from nature, and the object of her work from what she produces. Marx (1844) identified this multi-level ‘alienation’ of labour as a major characteristic of industrial capitalism predicated on positive rates of profit. 9. A normal rate of profit is what is considered to be normal in a particular business. The normal rate of profit is said to be positive when the mean probability of profit is positive, although a significant part of the distribution of the rate of profit is negative (because many firms make losses). 10. Pigou (1952: 185) treated the problem of uncompensated ‘incidental services’ to the society when ‘resources devoted to fundamental problems of scientific research, out of which, in unexpected ways, discoveries of high practical utility often grow.’

C h a p t e r

3

Propagating Profligacy

T

he basic reason why industrial-capitalist development destroys the environment is that capitalism endorses and thrives on liberalism of the market, where the individual, Homo oeconomicus, is given sanctity and priority over the community, allowing her to pursue her profit-maximizing interests ‘relatively unfettered and oblivious to the social consequences of her actions’ (Shutkin 2000: 41). The fact that capitalism is subversive of the integrity of the natural environment and social values is fairly obvious, but socialist experiments in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China have also led to the degradation of their environments. Both Soviet Union and China launched gigantic drives for industrialization to achieve socialism’s liberatory goal, with monumental consequences on the environment, including the human environment. The tragic death of the Aral Sea (see Section 4.2.2) and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster are just a few examples. Such drives in socialist countries for industrialization at the cost of the environment were primarily inspired by an urge to fortify state power with a strong economy. Porritt and Winner (1988: 11) have identified industrialization itself as ‘a “super ideology” embraced by socialist countries as well as by the capitalist West.’ Industrialization in both capitalist and socialist economy involves massive production of goods, requires massive amounts of energy and raw materials, and entails drastic changes in landscapes. All these lead to rapid destruction of the natural environment. This in turn endorses the epistemic dichotomy between nature and the human, a dichotomy that underlies developmentality and reinforces the Baconian programme of humankind’s conquest of nature. The adoption and intensification of industrial development in socialist countries, whose official political ideologies were contrary to capitalism, are nonetheless 103

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consonant with developmentality. As discussed earlier, Marxism endorses technoindustrial growth as a necessary condition for the emancipation of humanity from nature’s forces as well as for abolishing private property and profit – the foundations of capitalism. Thus, from the Marxist perspective, escalating technological and industrial growth seems to be in conformity with socialism’s professed goal of resolving the major contradiction that characterizes capitalism – the contradiction between an enormous productive force of society and the increasing amount of wealth appropriated by private monopolies at the cost of social wealth. The socialist economy in principle attempts to socialize the benefits from technological advances by abolishing private property. However, the quest for economic growth seems to have gained prominence in socialist economies not only in order to foster and escalate militarization of the state, but also to maintain a high living standard of citizens. Economic growth was considered to be the remedy to all lacunae in governance, deficits in implementation of social development schemes, and individual moral lapses. Thus, both in capitalist and socialist economies, economic growth became a universal creed, ‘the indispensable ideology of the state nearly everywhere’ (McNeill 2000: 335). By the 1950s, the West and the East, capitalist and communist countries, industrialized as well as underdeveloped nations of the South, accepted the model of Western-style development based on industrial growth as a priority on the national agenda to overcome poverty and achieve prosperity. With this global acceptance of the Western hegemonic definition of development, the terms ‘developing’ and ‘underdeveloped’ were, and continue to be, used in a self-referential manner. Betokened by increasing industrialization, urbanization and the rise of the service sector, economic growth continues to be professed by economic theorists, prescribed by international financial agencies, and legitimized as the key to prosperity of the poor nations. The doctrine of development has thus taken roots in government policies as well as public minds, and has been fortified with abstract generalities and models in the standard economic literature, in which ‘nature [has] figured, if at all, as a storehouse of resources waiting to be used’ (McNeill 2000: 335). Consequently, the environmental concern has taken a rear seat in this global development discourse, which interprets sustainable development as sustained growth of industry and GNP.

3.1

The Colonial Campaign of Development

The Industrial Revolution in Europe prepared the Western mind to consider wilderness as an undesired existential reality, which it was the duty of civilization to tame. For Hobbes, the state of nature is where there is ‘no Arts, no Letters, no

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society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, danger of violent death’ (Hobbes 1651: 186), a state of darkness which ought to be redeemed through civilization, culture and cultivation. The ‘Dark Continent,’ Tropical Asia and NeoTropical Americas, with bounteous wilderness, were the diabolical abode of savage natives, ferocious wild animals and tropical diseases. In contrast, civilization was to be seen in Europe’s countryside with farms and pastoral beauty. Nature’s charm was seen more in gardens and farmlands than in untamed wilderness. Agriculture represented the civilized mode of living, produced food, fibre, and revenue, and typified industrious use of nature. With the rise in food prices in Britain from the 1760s, which continued in the 1800s, demand on marginal lands intensified, and moorlands, fenlands and woodlands were all enclosed for farming. Within a century following the first Enclosure Act of 1701, 3.5 million acres of wastelands were brought under plough (Coates 1998: 113). Indeed, Europe’s prevalent view of nature was shaped to a great extent by economic needs, which operated in full swing in her colonies in the form of land use policies, aimed at escalating production and generating revenue from the land. Nature was not to be left untamed. After the Industrial Revolution, development of the capitalist Weltanschauung characterized a rapacious ethic of opportunistic foragers: exhaust a pasture, and then move on to a greener pasture. The expansion of capitalist economy required new colonies to exploit, new sources of raw material, new markets to garner profit. Successful colonization of new lands required superior weaponry and warrior skills to conquer new lands. After the industrial revolution, improved weaponry and seafaring skills enabled Europe to rapidly colonize the globe. The ecocidal and genocidal consequences of European colonial expansion were fuelled and justified by the values of capitalism: to establish neo-Europes in colonies across the globe was obviously necessary to spread the idea of progress, of Western civilization, at the cost of all indigenous cultures and biota (Crosby 1985; Diamond 1992). The capital’s search for new markets employed both the Cross and the rifle, usually in that order, to colonize the barbarous world outside of Europe: the Cross represented the European moral superiority to the savages, and justified the use of the rifle, which represented the technological supremacy of the West. In the era of triumph of capitalism, technology – including military technology – had become the most powerful instrument to bring the world under the reign of the Order of Civilization, alias the European Sceptre. In the Western campaign to civilize the East, the wilderness and the primitive, equally and inclusively, it appeared unnecessary for the development of technology to remain mindful of the indigenous cultures, life forms and life-supporting environment of any particular locale. The Western military-technological supremacy was represented and symbolized in

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acts of vanquishing indigenous ‘savage’ people and bringing wild lands under the civilizing plough. Capitalism’s inherent drive for market expansion, combined with the Western progressivism predicated on techno-military supremacy, engendered what Foucault (1979) called ‘governmentality’ to subjugate and totalize subjects of the state. In the colonies, this governmentality itself became subsumed under developmentality, an entrenched system of self-legitimizing domain of authority that sought to replace the old architectures of pre-colonial social life with new forms that it considered normatively superior and empirically more productive. Developmentality had already replaced in Europe all ancient regimes of community management of resources with private ownership. Developmentality endorsed that private or corporate ownership would allow incentives for growth, while taxes on such property would allow the state to redistribute benefits to the populace. This scheme left no room for community control over common property resources. Communities themselves were disintegrating in response to the emerging market economy. Enclosure of the commons had become a state policy in Europe, as a result of which peasants were ‘first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the discipline necessary for the wage system’ (Marx 1887: 688). The same policy was extended to Europe’s colonies, where forests and wetlands were enclosed and converted to open access no-man’s lands, subject to the Hardinian tragedy.1 The enclosure of the commons not only decimated the natural wealth of biodiversity, but also brought about unprecedented hunger, oppression and strife for the indigenous people in the colonies. Developmentality also engendered and fostered a range of unproven and simplifying assumptions in the name of scientific facts that were systematically used to establish the doctrine of development in the colonies. The assumption of the absence of advanced intellectual faculty and technical capability in the ‘primitive’ societies of colonial ‘natives’ and ‘niggers’ was one such fiction. The unilinear evolutionary course of development for societies the world over was another myth, which in turn spawned the myth of racial hierarchy. These myths and fictions, in the garb of science, legitimized the depredations wrought in the name of civilizing the savages. One such myth was that ‘rain follows the plough.’ Numerous agricultural scientists and geographers promulgated the idea that breaking the soil released some mysterious vapour into the air, which encouraged rainfall (Davis 2001: 120–21). This ‘scientific’ idea was corroborated by the bountiful crop harvests in the initial years of cultivation in American Great Plains and Canadian Prairies. This gave empirical support to the Western civilizing mission, and legitimized

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Europe’s plunder of the natural wealth of her colonies by bringing ‘wastelands’ under cultivation throughout the 19th century. When Europeans set sail for trade with Asia, the largest manufacturing districts in the world were China and India – not Europe. This remained true until the 18th century. Recent historical research reveals that until the victory of European empires in Asia, India was producing one-quarter of world manufactures, while China’s overall economic development excelled that of England throughout the 18th century (Davis 2002: 20). Furthermore, the myth that British rule improved the condition of the Indian labourer who has been stereotypically portrayed as ‘a half-starved wretch in loin cloth’ is subverted by comparative data of living standards. ‘Indeed, there is compelling evidence that South Indian labourers had higher earnings than their British counterparts in the eighteenth century and lived lives of greater financial security’ (Klein 1984: 196–97). Until the 1750s, per capita production of cotton cloth in Lower Yangzi in China equalled UK’s production of cotton, wool, linen and silk cloth combined in 1800. Indian cotton cloth reigned supreme in European market until the Indian weaving industry was throttled in the 1850s. The English bought Indian cotton to manufacture cloth in Manchester and sell it back to India. As Davis (2002: 21) has remarked, market competition was a less significant factor to dismantle the looms of India and China ‘than war, invasion, opium and a Lancashire-imposed system of one-way tariffs.’ Indeed, all attempts by India and China to regulate their terms of trade were thwarted by a military as well as an economic response from Britain. The use of force to configure a ‘liberal’ world economy is what Pax Britannica was really about. The Victorians resorted to gunboats on at least 75 occasions. The simultaneous British triumphs in the 1857 Indian Mutiny and the 1858 Second Opium War in China were the epochal victories over Asian economic autonomy that made a world of free trade possible in the second half of the nineteenth century. (Davis 2002: 21)

British military supremacy, which easily translated into racial superiority over the vanquished colonies, justified the colonial plunder. In India this plunder began with the British East India Company occupying the governance of Bengal (comprised by today’s Bangladesh, West Bengal and parts of Jharkhand) in 1757. This power entitled the Company to appropriate the revenue in excess of the payment to the Mughal emperor. This resulted in the East India Company’s amassing of incredible fortune from ad libitum collection of revenue. Whereas India had been generally free of famines under the Moghul emperors (Davis 2002: 18–19 and citations there)2, the Company rule occasioned in 1770 a remarkable famine in Bengal that took an unprecedented toll of 10 million – a third of the population of Bengal.

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The direct and proximate cause of this famine was the Company’s imposition of excessive taxes on peasant farmers (Deb 2001b). In fact, the early decades of the Company rule in India is infamous for the fantastic fortunes that English nabobs (the early English spelling of nawabs, the extraordinarily opulent rulers of Indian states) made out of the combination of taxation, trading on favourable terms, and sheer loot.3 The British Crown took over India’s governance after the 1857 Mutiny. India soon became a revenue plantation for British economy. The founding of a radically new system of land use and the export of food grains as well as cotton, indigo and opium divested local populations of their traditional food security and caused widespread starvation in the country. Throughout the 19th century, half of India’s net savings was confiscated as revenue (Chandra 1991: 102). India, the brightest jewel in the British crown, supplied not only the revenue but also the raw material for British industries – primarily, cotton, indigo and teak. Even much of the surplus of Indian wheat made the Londoners’ bread. With the opening of Suez Canal and the growth in steamship transport, grain export from the Indian subcontinent to Europe became increasingly profitable. Famines did not interrupt the export of India’s rice and wheat. During 1877–78, when the century’s most destructive drought had caused poor harvest in England and severe famine and deaths of millions in peninsular India, 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat was exported to Europe (Davis 2002: 7), while the government refused to reduce food prices in India. British officials operated on the utilitarian belief in omnipotent markets overcoming famines, and obeyed Adam Smith’s injunction against state intervention. Thus, development of the market in British India accelerated rather than relieved famines. It constituted a continuous ‘drain of wealth’ to England and devoured the country’s poor. The most important sign of development – the ‘lifesaving’ railways – was linked to increasing mortality of peasants. In peninsular India, the population declined more rapidly in the districts served by railways than where there were no railways (Davis 2002: 7). European rule in the colonies had hideous ecological consequences. In India, as elsewhere in Asia, people used to gather free goods from forests and water bodies, which were communally managed and used. The commons like village tanks, forests and pastures used to serve as stores of resource reserves and contributed to rural equity (Davis 2002: 27–28). The East India Company’s administrators considered all these commons as unproductive. By turning village tanks and wells into private property, British legislation closed previous free public access to water for irrigation and drinking purposes. Consequently, water scarcity became a problem for the poor who did not hold colonial land-deeds. In conformity with the prevailing English utilitarian concept of nature to be exploited for the benefit of

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civilization, wild lands were considered wastelands and ‘a bar to the prosperity of the Empire’ (Ribbentrop 1900: 60). Clearing these wastelands for cultivation was a priority task of the Company, which instituted the Bazé Zameen Daftar (wastelands office) and Bazé Zameen regulation in 1788, which prohibited landholders from making rent-free land grants. This restriction, however, resulted in a slump in agricultural recovery after the 1770 famine (Chaudhury 1976: 299). The Western approach to land use has fundamentally changed the very land use ethics in indigenous societies, by instituting a perverse land tenure system in which ‘the colonizer has an incentive to clear because clearance is evidence of tenure’ (Pearce 1998: 183). Thus, in early colonial periods in the New World, immigrant European settlers were given titles to as much frontier land as they could clear. In British India and Burma, frontier areas like the Sundarbans and northeast Indian woodlands were cleared by settlers who thereby obtained legal titles to the land for cultivation and plantation. In the early decades of colonial rule, forested terrains were a sign of backwardness of a country, while human settlements and agricultural landscapes were signs of progress and civilization. British officials often expressed their disappointment that after years of civilized rule in the subject country, ‘immense tracts of forest still remain untilled’ (Butler 1855: 250). The rationale of colonial land occupation and use was control and subjugation of wilderness and maximization of revenue extraction from the land. In Baruah’s (1999: 47) words, ‘the colonial concept of “wastelands” ran roughshod over the “social meanings” of land to the peoples’ of all pre-colonial states, and brought an abrupt end to traditional land rights. Protests by indigenous people, who had used the woods for centuries, were of no avail, and were brutally quelled. The most important colonial land use legislation in India was the 1793 Permanent Settlement Act that created the class of zamindars (feudal land holders) whose tenure depended on timely fulfilment of the quota of revenue to be paid to the East India Company, and subsequently to the British empire. This act initiated the process of transforming all ‘wastelands’ either into taxable private property or state monopolies. The zamindars’ urge to produce enough revenue prompted clearing of more and more village forests in order to bring them into cultivation. A vast portion of India’s forested land, covering the entire eastern, and parts of northern India, was thus converted into agricultural land. In eastern India, forest tribals were initially hired to clear the jungles and were settled by zamindars as cultivators, but were subsequently replaced by more skilled nontribal peasants (Duyker 1989). In south India, large evergreen forest tracts were sold at extremely low prices to European planters to raise coffee plantations (Chandran 1998: 692). In both areas, the hunter-gatherer and shifting cultivator

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communities lost their traditional economic base for subsistence, and were compelled to migrate to different districts. The attitude towards forests as wastelands dramatically changed in the late 1850s, when forests were viewed as valuable mines of timber, which was increasingly being extracted. The view of the jungle as ‘the worst enemy’ of the British (Rangarajan 1996: 98) reversed soon after the 1857 Mutiny,4 when the need for developing an extensive network of railways was urgently felt to ensure successful governance. The demand for timber from the forests of South Asia escalated for supply to railways and shipbuilding industry. The government soon felt it necessary to take urgent measures of ‘conservancy.’ To make good for the early years of reckless ravage, a set of Forest Acts were passed in the 1860s that established exclusive state monopoly over all forests (Malhotra and Deb, 1998). Forest products, which had hitherto been gathered and freely used by the community, became commodified and legalized. All forests were enclosed to protect them from the ‘savage’ forest-dwelling people – the hunter-gatherers and shifting cultivators – who had been managing them for centuries as their communal resource. Forest legislation outlawed all indigenous systems of resource management. Even the institution of sacred groves, a prime traditional institution for biodiversity conservation (see Section 6.2), was seen as ‘contrivances’ to prevent the government from claiming the property (Subash Chandran 1998: 689). The new land use policy sought to establish control over all valuable forest resources and manage them by principles of ‘scientific forestry,’ which principally consisted in raising monocultures of commercially valued timber species and eliminating competition from ‘inferior’ species of plants, with a view to maximizing revenue (Guha 1989: 59–61). The principles of forestry were ‘part of the enlightenment project and early science, where nature is considered a mechanical clockwork, and a willing labourer and producer of human goods and services’ (Öckerman 1998: 78). The ‘conservancy’ objective of silviculture was ultimately based on commercial utility. Scientific forestry consisted in devising efficient ways to manage forests as tree farms. Vast tracts of pristine evergreen forests in central, east and south India were stocked with teak monocultures, and Himalayan forests were replaced with monocultures of pine. Both these species are known to have a marked allelopathic effect on the forest understorey. The colonial agenda of raising commercial monocultures proved detrimental to forest-fringe village economies, and elicited long-standing conflicts between villagers and the state forest department (Gadgil and Guha 1995: 85-6; Guha 1989: 57-61; Rangarajan 1996: 86, 207). Focus on the yield of commercially valued timber resulted in rapid simplification of the forest ecosystem and concomitant species loss (Gadgil and Guha 1995; Kohm and

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Franklin 1997). Trees that provided food, fodder, medicines and raw materials for crafts and implements were largely replaced with timber species that had little use in village economies. Forest villagers, who had thrived on a multitude of nontimber forest produce (NTFP) for subsistence beyond marginal farm economy, now encountered a scarcity of natural resources. The hateful state of the colonized forest divested of its species richness was expressed in a central Indian tribesman’s description of Hell ‘as miles and miles of forest without any mahua trees’ (Elwin 1958: 13). The disruption of the traditional livelihood based on forest resources caused marginalization and extreme immiseration of tribal populations, which fuelled tribal and peasant resentments, leading to a series of uprisings against the colonial rule (Duyker 1989; Guha 1989; Sen and Deb 2001; Sivaramakrishnan 1999). The enclosure of the commons served two purposes for the rulers. On the political plane, it asserted the authoritarian right of the state over wilderness. On the economic plane, it forced forest dwellers to abandon their ‘savage means of livelihood’ and bound them down to settled agriculture, which would generate both revenue and labour force for the empire (Rangarajan 1994). Moreover, it served the agenda of civilizing the wild. The profound economic and cultural jolt that the forest tribes experienced from their forced expulsion from the forest found expression in bloody struggles of resistance as well as folkloristic metaphors, such as the Gond’s description of heaven as ‘miles and miles of forest without any forest guards’ (Elwin 1958: 12). The brute who refused to adopt the civilized livelihood of settled agriculture – the Lodha of Bengal, the Baiga and Gonds of central India and the Chenchu of Hyderabad State, among others – were branded ‘irredeemable’ savages (Deb and Malhotra 1993; Rangarajan 1996). The Criminal Tribes Act was passed in 1916 to control these ‘incorrigible criminals’ (see Section 2.1.1). Both positivist criminology and utilitarian land use policy eliminated ‘savage’ economies and cultures to ensure progress of civilization and generation of wealth for the empire. The drive to protect forests from the forest tribes was aimed at preserving timber for railways and shipbuilding. With the growing value of forests, many private forests were commercialized as tree farms. For example, Midnapore Zamindari Company, with the British firm Andrew Yule as an associate, was an important timber producer from eastern India. Contracts for the removal of timber and commercially valued non-timber forest products from state forests were given at concession to timber merchants. For example, Shaw Wallace & Co. had the monopoly for nettle fibre collection and Burn & Co. was given concessions for regular timber and bamboo harvesting from reserved forests of Darjeeling in north Bengal (Sivaramakrishnan 1999: 255). Such commercial enterprises thrived on silvicultural

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plantations of commercially valued species at the expense of natural species diversity that had previously supported village economies with a plethora of NTFP. These tree farms were exploited to maximize short-term revenue, especially at wartime. Throughout India, forests were ‘overworked to provide timber and fodder for military use between 1914 and 1918, and exploited even more excessively to meet wartime wood needs between 1940 and 1944’ (Flint 1998: 441). Revenue earning was the priority of colonial land use policy, even at the expense of its professed conservancy goals. This is testified by an 1894 policy document (cited in Flint 1998: 432) endorsing sacrifice of forests ‘without hesitation’ in cases where demand for arable land could only be met through such sacrifice. The government allowed forest clearance not only for subsistence agriculture, but more frequently for cash crops like tea, coffee, rubber and sugarcane. Obviously, the intention was to increase proceeds from taxes on agricultural land. Shifting cultivation was therefore vigorously replaced with settled cultivation. Because plantations of cash crops generated more revenue, much of the forest and agricultural lands were also converted into tea gardens in Darjeeling and Assam, and coffee and rubber plantations in Kerala. In the 1860s, the Bengal Tenancy Act (which was also applied in Bihar, Orissa and Central Province) abrogated all customary rights to land under temporary (shifting) cultivation that produced insubstantial revenues. Since it was more convenient to collect revenue from a settled peasant than from shifting cultivators, tenancy rights were entitled only to farmers working their lands for at least twelve years (Rangarajan 1996: 105). The new settlement thus goaded many of the tribals to settle as tenant cultivators, only to be subsequently evicted by zamindars by imposing arbitrary cesses and rack renting – exploitations that led to a series of tribal rebellions (Sen and Deb 2001). Development schemes were designed to establish and extend settled agriculture throughout the country. Except in the northeast Indian States, extension of irrigation, conversion of wastelands into farmlands, and expulsion of huntergatherers and pastoralist populations from forests and revenue lands in all States brought the entire savage world into the mainstream of civilized governance. In the Punjab, the British government rebuilt and expanded early Moghul waterworks to create a vast network of irrigation canals to extend agriculture and replace the scattered cattle and camel herders. Migration of farmers by thousands to the ‘canal colonies’ of the State replaced the nomadic herders and generated a substantial base of revenue and loyal army for the empire: By 1915, the transformed Punjab provided more tax revenue for the Crown than any other district in India, and created loyal subjects too. Punjabis volunteered in droves for service in World War I because veterans could expect irrigated land in return. The British India Army enjoyed strong support in the Punjab. (McNeill 2000: 160)

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Development in colonial agriculture was pivoted on advances in the imperial agricultural science, which had gained momentum during the period 1830-1880, with the growth of soil chemistry and a fertilizer industry. The earlier concept of an inherent and limited ‘latent power’ of the soil was replaced with the understanding that soil is composed of various chemicals like nitrogen and phosphorus, which account for the fertility of the land. The key contribution to this understanding was from Justus von Liebig, whose pioneering work Organic Chemistry in its Applications to Agriculture and Physiology appeared in 1840. This knowledge, together with the first factory production of soluble ‘superphosphates’ in 1843, marked what many authors call the ‘second agricultural revolution’ that was bound up with industrial capitalism (Foster 2000: 148–49). Industrialization of agriculture in Europe and America resulted in export of crops and livestock for food and fibre from country to town across vast distances. Unidirectional flow of biomass from the farm fields became imperatively intensive with growing international trade in crops. Some leading agronomists on both sides of the Atlantic voiced their concern about the declining soil fertility, and urged to plough back the municipal wastes as organic manure into agriculture. In The Natural Laws of Husbandry, Liebig (1863: 261) insisted that farm productivity could be sustained if ‘all the solid and fluid excrements of the inhabitants of towns’ were returned to the country farms, which generated the supply of agricultural produce for the town. Marx, who was thoroughly acquainted with the advances in soil chemistry and the works of leading agronomists of his time (including Liebig’s), deplored the industrial exploitation of the soil: Large-scale industry and large-scale mechanised agriculture work together. If originally distinguished by the fact that the former lays waste and destroys principally labour power, hence the natural force of human beings, whereas the latter more directly exhausts the natural vitality of the soil, they join hands in the further course of development in that the industrial system in the country-side also enervates the labourers, and industry and commerce on their part supply agriculture with the means for exhausting the soil. (Marx 1894: 813)

The continuing depletion of soil fertility during this period evoked a ‘virtual panic and a phenomenal increase in the demand for fertilizer’ in the West (Foster 2000: 150), and the search for sources and adequate supply of fertilizers continued throughout this period: European farmers in this period raided the Napoleonic battlefields of Waterloo and Austerlitz and reportedly dug up catacombs, so desperate were they for bones to spread over their fields. The value of bone imports to Britain skyrocketed from £ 14,400 in 1823 to £ 254,600 in 1837. The first boat carrying Peruvian guano (accumulated dung of sea birds) arrived in Liverpool in 1835; by 1841, 1700 tons were imported, and by 1847, 220,000. (Foster 2000: 150)

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The British monopoly on Peruvian guano led the government of USA to pass Guano Islands Act of 1856, and annex 94 islands rich in guano during the period 1856–1903. The demand for Chilean nitrates and factory-produced phosphates remarkably increased during the same period (Foster 2000: 150.). Although factory production of fertilizers was initially slow to spread in Europe, by the fi rst decade of the 20th century, Europe’s agriculture was completely industrialized, suffused with synthetic fertilizers. Knowledge of agricultural chemistry was profitably utilized in the service of capital, resulting in accelerating depletion of soil nutrients: ‘all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress toward ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility’ (Marx 1887: 475). With the expansion of the agrochemicals market, industrial growth enveloped agriculture, whose development was foisted on a mechanical view of agriculture – a view that endorsed what Sir Albert Howard, called the ‘NPK mentality’: The factories engaged during the Great [First World] War in the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen for the manufacture of explosives had to find other markets, the use of nitrogenous fertilizers in agriculture increased, until today the majority of farmers and market gardeners base their manorial programme on the cheapest forms of nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and potassium (K) on the market. What may be conveniently described as the NPK mentality dominates farming alike in the experimental stations and the countryside. Vested interests, entrenched in time of national emergency, have gained a stronghold. (Howard 1940: 18).

The imperial agricultural development policy encouraged expansion of farmlands and monocultures of cash crops in the entire South Asia and East Indies. The monocultures sought to replace a diversity of ‘unproductive’ food crops that were traditionally grown in peasant farms for subsistence. Throughout the 1850s and 1860s, food crops were increasingly replaced in a large number of farms with cash crops like tea, coffee, tobacco, jute, cotton, opium and indigo, which severely affected food production. Indigo farming was abolished when a cheaper synthetic indigo appeared on the market, but jute, cotton, tobacco and opium in the Gangetic plains, tea in Assam and Darjeeling Himalaya, and coffee and rubber in the Deccan continued to replace food crops and exhaust soil fertility. The thrust on cash crop and growing demand of rice for export to cities and abroad mobilized the process of erosion of agro-biodiversity and traditional agricultural practices involving multiple cropping and traditional water storage and harvesting techniques. However, the overall deficit in food grain availability, owing to export of cereals and diversion to cash crop, was offset by bringing more and more land into cultivation, intensifying cropping, and importing poor quality rice from Burma.

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Post-colonial Idioms of Development

The fact that European empires thrived on extracting revenue from the colonized lands, and had no concern for conserving nature for the interest of the ‘natives,’ was realized by a section of the enlightened elite in the colonies, and was often articulated in their critique of the colonial rule (Deb 2004b). Crimes of colonialism came to be vigorously discussed during the liberation movements in these colonies. It would therefore seem reasonable to expect that decolonization would liberate the former colonies from the Western imperial regime of environmental destruction. However, political freedom changed little in these ex-colonies in terms of environmental resource management. With the rapid spread of the development doctrine in the South through multilateral treaties and under coercion of debt repayment to international development agencies, industrialization began to be coupled with nationalist fervour. What US President Harry S Truman had envisaged in his January 20, 1949 speech (cited in Esteva 1992: 9) – ‘a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas’ – soon became the programme of development in ex-colonies. The elite of the liberated Southern colonies had already embraced the neo-classical economic paradigm of development as the panacea for all social ills. Independence from colonial rule appeared to remove the economic barriers to prosperity. By the 1940s, African, Latin American and South Asian countries designed their development plans in accord with the mass aspiration to emulate the Western (more specifically, American) standard of living. Following Truman’s categorization, all Third World countries were classified in the post-Second World War period as either ‘underdeveloped’ or ‘developing’ countries, requiring developmental aids from the ‘developed’ part of the world to improve their lots. The governments of ex-colonies continue with the legacy of the Western land use policy bent on economic development, defined altogether by commerce. In Brazil, the land settlement department continues to determine settlement rights to the extent of three times the cleared area (Pearce 1998: 183). Thus, the community user rights are abrogated to give land titles to colonizing individuals or corporations who want to work and develop ‘wastelands.’ This legalizes a system of disenfranchising the traditional user community, who finds no incentive to protect the land. When the state excludes the user community and usurps the commons, these communities perceive the commons as an open access resource at best, and the enemy’s property at worst. The result has been decimation of the resource, either by rapid extraction for individual gain, or arson and plunder as a token of protest by the traditional user community.

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Soon after the Second World War, the US economy replaced the European one as the paradigmatic model of development. The globalized craving for development has focused on the American experience as the template. The post-war American economic prosperity has become the global model of growth and consumption: America exported its prosperity system and the dynamics of its own history, as the model for others. It preached a doctrine of how to get ‘unpoor,’ aided and invested in the new players who followed the script, and occasionally punished some for their deviations. (Greider 1999: 32)

From the end of the War and for the next 50 years, European powers fell into a state of strategic dependence on the US, to defend the world against the Soviet Union (Kagan 2003: 17–18). ‘They were content to rely on the protection offered by the US nuclear umbrella, hoping that Europe’s safety could be preserved by the US-Soviet balance of terror and the doctrine of mutually assured destruction’ (Kagan 2003: 19). The American colossus soon achieved its dominant world power status, which earned economic dividends as well. The international economic and political dominance of the US assured Western Europe that it was capable of containing the threat of communism in general, and of the Soviet Union in particular, to Western security. American films and TV series of the mid-sixties stereotyped reds as the evil force and Rambo – the noble White American – as the world-saviour.5 This image of Yankee supremacy forged a cultural milieu in which American ideas, including the doxastic reliance on technoindustrial growth, were accepted as the only means to national prosperity. The spectacular American economic growth after the Great Depression of the 1930s became the American growth model. The post-war economic boom served as the additional proof of industrial growth leading to material prosperity. The ideas and ideology of the dominant as a rule dominates the ideology of the dominated.6 The US economic diplomacy and the influence of the US-dominated International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, in the words of Joseph Stiglitz (2003: 23), ‘bullied other nations’ into doing things the American way. American-style industrial capitalism became a unique, guaranteed formula for prosperity. Almost the entire South joined the development bandwagon, and received financial loans from the international development agencies. In the socialist countries too, industrialization was believed to ensure rapid development. Massive industrialization was therefore adopted in Soviet Union and China to achieve social equality and equity – socialism’s ideological goal. Industrialization also played a crucial role in the race for military strategic dominance between the First and the Second World. In the words of Porritt and

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Winner (1988: 11), industrialization itself has been ‘a “super ideology” embraced by socialist countries as well as by the capitalist West.’ Development through industrialization has now become doctrinaire, a global norm, in operation nearly universally – the only exception being Cuba (due to the US-imposed trade embargo) and a few sub-Saharan African states too poor to invest in industrialization on a large scale. The globalization of developmentality has been possible because of two complementary historical reasons. On the one hand, the industrialized countries adopted the growth formula because of the pressing need to gain overseas trade advantage after the Second World War, and to overcome post-war economic stagnation. On the other hand, the poor countries, most of them having achieved liberation from colonial rule, strived to catch up with the race for material prosperity; for these ex-colonies, to strengthen the national economy was a priority. The neo-classical growth formula, predicated on increasing GNP, was particularly appealing to the Southern nations because it promised solving the deepening problem of unemployment and poverty. Post-independence India graduated to become a ‘developing’ country by virtue of its centralized industrialization efforts and the loans it received for development from international aid agencies. The Gandhian vision of an artisan and peasant India was overthrown by the Nehruvian vision of an industrially prosperous India, glowing with mammoth development projects, immediately after independence. The doctrine of development has created in post-independence India what Chaitanya Krishna (2003: 591) called a ‘social conjuncture, the contours of which are defined by a basically feudal society on which has been superimposed the framework of a parliamentary democracy, a modern economy basically catering for the rich and powerful and a legal administrative ethos and culture which is a legacy of the colonial days and more or less a continuation and perpetuation of the same.’ India has not been alone: from Argentina to Mexico, Pakistan to Tanganyika, Vietnam to Zaire – all post-colonial national economic policies continue to emphasize on industrialization and market liberalization. Consequently, all social and environmental problems associated with industrial growth have become commonplace in all the Southern countries that are following the industrial path to development. The course of industrial growth in the South has overlooked the social and human health concerns of contemporary citizens as well as the economic needs of posterity. Problems of soil erosion in northern India, of salinization in Niger bend region of Mali, and of massive deforestation in Indonesia continue, and have even exacerbated after independence. Liberation from colonial rule changed little in the colonial land use policies in these countries. The colonial regime had instituted an extractive market-based

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economy bent on maximizing revenue generation from export monocultures – cotton from India, peanuts from Tanganyika, cocoa from Uganda and coffee from Latin America. Most of these colonies, after independence either expanded the area sown to the same monocultures, or added exports of other cash crops as well as non-agricultural resources (like timber and minerals) in a race to enhance economic growth. Consequently, environmental degradation continued, and even exacerbated over decades of pursuit of development. Indeed, as McNeill (2000: 347) states, ‘in environmental matters, as in so many respects, independence often proved no more than a change in flags.’ The prevalent elitist view of development in post-independence India is poignantly captured by Prime Minister Nehru’s description of large dams as ‘temples of modern India’ (GOI 1958), which was reflected in the second Five Year Plan’s thrust on industrial development: growth in heavy industry and large dams. Large river projects were supposed to, firstly, supply water for irrigation to agricultural land, and secondly, electricity to industries, and therefore signified a grand scale of agricultural production and industrial growth. This preoccupation with growth has not only determined the structure of national policy for development, but also shaped the structure of the bureaucratic apparatus of the state, and co-opted scientific and technological institutions. Bank loans are made available to the farmer for industrialization of his farm, but not to the one who wants to adopt organic farming, which does not rely on costly external ‘inputs.’ Big industries have always received, and continue to receive, massive state subsidies and loans, in contrast to small-scale industries that do not require much power and machinery. Cottage industry is of course supported by the state, albeit on grounds of principle and in homage to the Father of the Nation, who advocated for national development through cottage industries run by rural cooperatives, but the financial support it has received over the past 50 years is little more than a trickle, compared to that received by big industries. In fact, soon after Independence, Gandhian ideals were ‘made redundant with a quite alarming rapidity’ (Gadgil and Guha 1992: 183). India’s development policies, born of coalescence of the doctrine of development and the vested economic interests of large landowners and industrialists, have worked to sacrifice the interests of the rural peasants, artisans and ecosystem people, and nurtured big industries as fathers of national development. The country’s resource use policy of the 1950s was devised to reorganize bureaucracy towards new national priorities, which were clearly articulated by the official Indian Government statement: Village communities in the neighbourhood of a forest will naturally make greater use of its products for the satisfaction of domestic and agricultural needs. Such use, however, should in no event, be permitted at the cost of national interests. The

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accident of a village being situated close to a forest does not prejudice the right of a country as a whole to receive benefits of a natural asset. (GOI 1952: 29)

Clearly, the ‘national interests’ were best served by industry, which it was the responsibility of the state to nurture. The arbitrary scale of state subsidies to industry is exemplified in the case of forest-based industries. In the 1950s and thereafter, the stock of bamboo in reserved forests was made available to paper and polyfibre mills at a throwaway price, while rural people were restricted from access to it. In 1958, the West Coast Paper Mill in Karnataka was allowed to buy bamboo at Rs. 1.50 per tonne. At that time, the market price of bamboo in the cities of Karnataka was of the order of Rs. 3,000 per tonne. While poor basket weavers paid a hefty price for this vital raw material, industry was given virtually free access to stocks on reserved forest lands. (Gadgil and Guha 1995: 46)

This scale of subsidies required revenue, which the state sought to secure through nationalization and total control of all forest resources. In 1965, the trade in tendu-patta (Diospyros melanoxylon leaves used in Indian bidi cigarrettes) was nationalized; timber was nationalized in 1972, and bamboo in 1973 (Anderson and Huber 1988). However, these nationalized forest products were finally handed over to the industry at throw-away prices. Even the remote forests of northeastern States have not escaped the industrial ravage. Bamboo harvested from Mizoram forests continues to be supplied to the Hindustan Paper Corporation of Assam (Singh 1996: 144). To facilitate prosperity in industry and commerce, the government thus flouts its own professed objective of conservation. This has obviously benefited the bureaucrat-industrialist-businessman clique, which Gadgil and Guha (1995) identify to be responsible for the ongoing depletion of natural resources in India. Development in the poor countries has nurtured this clique and disfavoured the poor as a rule. At the behest of the First World countries, the Bretton Woods institutions were set up in 1944 with the mission of restructuring the post-war market economy and facilitating development worldwide. The World Bank soon became the official guide and purveyor of national and international development policies. Upon the Bank’s policy recommendations (and admonitions), industrial growth promotion, earning foreign exchange by export, and enclosure of the commons became the three conspicuous programmes of all national development agenda. However, in the face of rising political discontent and social unrest throughout the Third World, and the spectre of communism in the First World, the development theory added emphasis on agricultural modernization in the 1960s. Increasing the food production became an additional priority for the South. From the 1960s

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onwards, the World Bank increased its loans to the poor countries for agricultural development, which included mammoth irrigation projects and crop science research. Agricultural modernization entails industrialization of the means of agricultural production, transfer of capital and expertise from the North to the South and a flourishing agribusiness. The objective of agricultural development is the production of cheap food and cheap labour in the South, to make capital investment more profitable. The consequences of the agricultural modernization programme in the South involved, as de Janvry (1981: 199–200) has summarized: ‘a massive increase in research expenditures on food crops (the Green Revolution); the strengthening of extension programs; greater availability of agricultural credit; and the entry of multinational firms into agricultural production, the manufacturing of inputs, and the processing and distribution of products.’ The impact of the Green Revolution will be discussed in further detail in Section 4.2.2. The rule of development – and developmentality – pivoted on GNP growth, has continued unchanged into the rolling decades, in spite of remarkable changes that have occurred in political, cultural and environmental situations the world over. The divide between the developed and the underdeveloped countries has only changed nomenclature in the recent decades. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc (the Second World), the First World has been termed the ‘North,’ which comprises all advanced industrialized countries, while the countries that were described as the Third World are now being described as the ‘South’ – an apparently neutral term for the economically ‘backward’ countries. In this new division of the world, the South does not include Australia, New Zealand, Japan and the oil-rich Middle East, although they all lie in the Southern hemisphere. Even in pure economic terms, the North-South divide is not uniform. The differences between the Southern countries are no less than those between the North and the South in terms of GNP per capita, average life expectancy, land ownership, child mortality rates, per capita calorie intake, per capita carbon emission, and so on, and these differences seem to reveal the inadequacy of the parameters for a full description of economic and social well-being of people in these countries. Nevertheless, one common feature that all Southern countries share – with the exception of China, Iran and Thailand – is that all of them are former colonies of western European countries (Calvert and Calvert 1999: 6). Other common features in the Southern countries include: (a) arbitrariness of national territorial boundaries, giving rise to continuing conflicts between neighbouring countries as in South Asia; equally arbitrary are the State boundaries, decided by the central Parliament, creating grounds for incessant conflicts of sub-nationalities based on

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language and ethnicity,7 (b) institution of a centralized authoritarian administrative order; (c) unequal distribution of, and control over resources, leading to unequal development of States and friction between federal and State governments; (d) emergence of a class of Westernized elite, who, ‘as heirs to colonial overlords, may seek to milk the state for all it is worth’ (Calvert and Calvert 1999: 8), and (e) overarching influence of industry and business on political decisionmaking processes that serve to marginalize the poor and indigenous cultures and destroy the environment. The creation of the bureaucrat-industrialist-businessman clique has been the most important by-product of development that is responsible for most environmental crimes in the South. The backdrop of these ‘Southern’ institutional characteristics will be helpful to understand the diverse consequences of development in the South. Over the past decade, the march of free-market liberalism in the South has reinforced the right of the advantaged lot to private property accumulation and profit maximization. The autonomy of all social institutions, including science, is becoming subservient to business interests more than ever before in history. The intellectual property rights (IPR) regime under the WTO has usurped all indigenous knowledge bases and traditional innovations, and has commodified life, life forms and life processes. Thus, development has culminated into a set of programmes of corporatocracy, which has transformed all public goods and services into private enterprises. The ‘globalization’ agenda of WTO seeks to impose a set of economic restructuring programmes worldwide to homogenize and simplify the rules of corporate control of national politics to ensure conquest of the global market. Simply phrased, the professed goal of the globalization is unbridled development and prosperity, fostered by a minimalist state to enhance private profit. Globalization ideologues claim that the state poses an obstacle to economic development – a claim that reiterates the 19th century capitalists’ demand for minimal state intervention in market operation. Of course, an open market is necessary for the ideal free flow of capital for an adequate incentive to invest, and the state in the underdeveloped countries is a debacle to creating an open market. The state is also incapable of inducing the necessary changes in institutions and cultural habits and practices. The structural adjustment programmes (SAP) of the World Bank, begun in 1988, aimed to overcome these debacles. The programmes called for, inter alia, privatizing state-owned enterprises, removal of import barriers, reducing tariffs and interest rates, removal of price control on food, energy and agricultural inputs, and removal of bureaucratic control on industry. All these transformations were enhanced under the WTO rules, and are being executed to provide ‘inducement to investment,’ on the premise that individual profit motive,

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underlying ‘economic rationality,’ is a stronger driving force of productivity than welfare drives of the state (Mosley et al. 1991). The globalization agenda seeks to replace the very notion of welfare state with corporate services on purchase. The rollback of the state under the WTO regime engenders a situation where business groups dictate polity and state polices, and the accountability of the state seems to disappear. Consequently, the responsibility of the state to cater to fundamental needs of citizens – food and nutritional security, education, health and shelter – is being confined to putting all these services on auction for bidding by private enterprises. In India and other Southern countries, free medical treatment in state hospitals is being increasingly restricted; the cost of education is skyrocketing; even the supply of safe drinking water is becoming increasingly contingent upon MNCs (Coca Cola and Pepsico) rather than the municipal authority. The new regime of privatization has abrogated sovereign rights of states over their natural resources, citizens’ rights to public services, farmers’ rights to seeds, and all labour rights earned through much bloodshed in the past. If previous idioms of development had left the lid of Pandora’s box of injustices and inequalities ajar, globalization has now opened it wide.

3.2.1 Crimes of Development Crimes of development ultimately concern violations of human rights in various forms. Pollution and biodiversity erosion are examples of environmental crimes of development that abolish inter-generational equity of a country’s citizens; erasure of livelihoods, displacement, torture and killing of victims and opponents of specific development projects exemplify heinous social crimes; coercion and overthrow of democratic governments to facilitate operations of Northern MNCs, causing a gradual decline of state welfare responsibilities, constitute facets of political crimes.

3.2.1.1 Environmental crimes National industrial policies in the South have connived at diverse environmental crimes perpetrated by industrial development – from destruction of forests and wetlands to killing marine mammals by PCBs, emitting greenhouse gases and contaminating food and water with carcinogenic compounds and heavy metals. These crimes were first perpetrated in the North, and then exported to the South, where they have been ignored in the name of ‘national economic interests.’ Industrial accidents with horrific consequences on animal and human lives are common in the industrialized North and the industrializing South alike. The

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Exxon Valdez oil spill, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Bhopal are the only prominent instances because of the enormous scale of damages they caused, but thousands of silent and invisible crimes of development are being perpetrated in all countries with impunity. The developing state either ignores as insignificant or censors reports of people killed and maimed by exposure to radioactivity from uranium mines and nuclear test sites or to toxic agrochemicals. Multilateral aids to development have always entailed environmental disintegration in the borrower countries. Extensive deforestation to lay pipelines and build large dams in the developing countries have almost always been supported by the World Bank, resulting in the submergence of hundreds of villages, thousands of forests and agricultural lands, and displacement and killing of thousands. Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the Bank contends that over the past 50 years, its policies have promoted and safeguarded the interests of a few powerful industrialized nations and the Wall Street (Stiglitz 2002a; 2002b), and ignored the environmental and social welfare of the countries where it has supported development programmes. The Bank – as well as the IMF – has funded only a class of projects that secure the interests of industry, transform landscapes, displace and pauperize ecosystem peoples, encourage transfer of resources from the poor to the rich and cater to urban consumer needs. Since its founding in 1944, the Bank has lent out about $58 billion on 527 dam projects in 93 countries, all with major environmental consequences. As Le Prestre (1989: 28) observes, the Bank ‘has largely emphasized an indirect approach to environmental destruction.’ Its environmental concern has remained confined to funding and reviewing specific development projects which proposed – albeit often on paper alone – to minimize the environmental impact, rather than supporting any project for abatement of environmental pollution or conservation of biodiversity. The few projects that directly dealt with controlling water pollution were supported because they were purported to provide the basic needs – health, sanitation, or water supply (Le Prestre (1989: 32) – without which there would be no scope for profitable industrial investment. Trade provisions of WTO and North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) empower big industry to pressure the governments to allow them an unregulated access to all ‘natural capital’ – including common resources like the planet’s freshwater stock and crop genetic diversity – that have hitherto been left out of commerce and trade. Thus, all natural resources are amenable to industrial and commercial exploitation for corporate profits at the cost of the local communities and the entire country. Alongside, the WTO admonishes governments to remove all ‘trade barriers’ – like environmental protection laws – to promote capital investments and free trade. The WTO regime has forced signatory

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countries to either modify or nullify key environmental protection laws in order to facilitate trade. Several provisions of the US Clean Air Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act and Endangered Species Act had to be softened to make them compliant with WTO rules. WTO ruled against Japan’s refusal of import of biological materials carrying invasive species. The national ban on the MMT, a carcinogenic gasoline additive, was repealed in Canada; Guatemala cancelled a health law that forbade food companies from advertising baby food formulas as healthier than breast milk (Mander 2003: 115); the US ban on shrimp caught by trawlers in ASEAN countries without turtle exclusion device was repealed (Shiva 2000: 42) – because such regulations were all trade barriers. NAFTA has allowed maquiladora sweatshops to mushroom in Meso-America, where unregulated dumping of toxic industrial wastes has severely polluted the environment and impaired workers’ health (see Section 3.2.3).

3.2.1.2 Social crimes Crimes related to and resulting from development programmes are not confined to direct and indirect environmental harms. Development projects begin with, and entail, corruption and crimes (see Section 7.1.3). The Economist (28 February 2002, p. 4) recorded that many investment companies ‘believe that in large parts of the world a company that does not pay bribes does not do business.’ These companies bribe their way into the Southern countries with various development projects, but the price of bribery is ultimately paid for by the people of these countries, ‘in the form of increased debts incurred for overpriced and poorly planned projects that often provide little benefit to the people or country’ (Hawley 2003: 1). Almost without exception, externally-aided development projects in the poor countries cause despoliation of the resources, traditional cultures and of the local knowledge base, as well as abrogate the poors’ livelihood options. Dams, urban sprawl, highways, power stations remove local people from their homelands, and such displacement leads to mass migration, poverty, loss of indigenous cultures and consequently, further erosion of the natural resource base. The growth of industry, fuelled by multilateral aid and national subsidies, has also generated several hidden forms of social crimes, through stifling rural artisan economies and disrupting traditional systems of social security for the impoverished millions. Most development projects fail to rehabilitate displaced people, and systematically create millions of development refugees, who are immersed in lifelong poverty, strife and destitution. Destruction by development programmes of the human environment – an essential component of the environment – amounts to violation of human and civil rights.

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These social crimes are deliberate, in the sense that all major development projects, like massive river dam projects, are planned, designed and implemented after prolonged feasibility studies, cost benefit analyses (CBA, now including EIA), negotiations and financial arrangements between multilateral aid agencies, consultants, construction companies, politicians and government bureaucrats of both the North and the South. They are also deliberate in the sense that precedents of disastrous effects of similar development projects on the human environment are well known to all the consultants, aid agencies and government departments interested in the new projects. Santa Kumar and Rajagopalan (1993) have shown that government departments were quite aware of the hydrological problems (like water logging and sedimentation of reservoirs) leading to reduction of installed capacity and escalation of costs of dams linked to any river irrigation and hydroelectricity schemes they have passed for execution. The ensuing damages to the human environment are also by no means unexpected or unintended. And yet, ‘no compensation is envisaged for the cultural losses, violence, intimidation, loss of livelihood and psychological damages suffered by affected communities’ (Lang et al. 2000: 127). The urge to minimize compensation and rehabilitation costs leads to another type of state crime – that of under-reporting damages to human lives, and then under-compensating the project victims. The numbers of development refugees are, as a rule, under-reported in all official figures. For instance, the World Commission on Dams recorded that according to official statistics, over 10.2 million people were displaced by large dams in China between 1950 and 1990 (34 percent of all displacement due to development activities, including urban constructions). ‘But independent sources estimate that the actual number of dam-displaced people in China is much higher than the official figure, with 10 million displaced in the Yangtze Valley alone’ (WCD 2000: 104). Large dams in India displaced 16–38 million people, till the beginning of the year 2000. But these numbers ‘do not include the millions displaced due to other aspects of the projects such as canals, powerhouses, project infrastructure, infrastructure, and associated compensatory measures’ (WCD 2000: 104). The fraction of the displaced people who are actually resettled is often ridiculously small. In the case of Bargi dam in India, for example, the fraction was just 10 percent. In the case of Yacyreta project in Argentina and Paraguay, just over 30 percent of the displaced people were resettled in 20 years (WCD 2000: 105–6). Development projects are known to involve brutal state violence, periodically unleashed on the affected people. Police and military atrocities, including massacres, have been frequently recorded in documents of the World Bank as well as human rights NGOs. A whole range of human and civil rights abuses, including forcible eviction, illegal detention, rape of women and custodial torture and killing of protesters by the police and contractor’s musclemen, were systematically orches-

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Chixoy Dam Project

T

he Chixoy dam, Guatemala, was built from 1978 to 1983, during a civil war. The military dictatorship of the country received a fund of $175 million from the Inter-American Development Bank and of $116.6 million from the World Bank over the period 1978 to 1985. LAMI, a consortium of US and European contractor companies, planned, designed and supervised the construction of the dam. Blunders in the design (for example, siting the dam over a geological fault) required repeated redesigning and reconstruction work, delaying the construction and more than doubling the cost of the powerhouse. Beginning in 1980, the indigenous Maya Achi people of Rio Negro registered their dissent to the project. A few weeks later, military police opened fire on the villagers, killing seven. In July 1980, two village representatives, who went with all documents on resettlement and cash compensation agreements to a meeting convened by INDE, disappeared. A week later, their mutilated bodies were found, but the documents were lost forever. In February 1982, the local military commander ordered 73 men and women to report to an upstream village, where they were all – except one – raped, tortured and murdered by PAC, a paramilitary ‘death squad’ of the dictatorial regime; only one woman fled. In March 1982, state soldiers rounded up the surviving villagers, marched them up a hill, and massacred 70 women and 107 children. In May, another 82 were killed. In September, 92 people from another neighbouring village, including 35 orphaned children, were machine-gunned and burned alive. Filling of the reservoir began soon afterwards. The involvement of the construction companies in these crimes can only be inferred from eyewitnesses (WFP 1995). The dam started producing electricity in July 1983, but owing to snags in the pressure tunnel, had to be shut down within five months. Repairs cost two more years and an additional $57 million, largely from a World Bank loan, which the Bank sanctioned in spite of the Rio Negro massacre three years before. The construction cost of the dam, after completion in 1985, rose to $1.02 billion – over 377 percent higher than the cost estimated by LAMI in 1974. Years after repair, in the early 1990s, further leaks were discovered in the dam’s tunnel. Every year since, around $8 million is spent on repair and maintenance of the dam. A confidential Project Completion Report of the World Bank surmised that ‘with hindsight, [Chixoy] has proved to be an unwise and uneconomic disaster’ (cited in Lang et al. 2000: 125). The state-owned National Electricity Council (INDE) has blamed LAMI for the disaster, but LAMI has consistently refused to take any responsibility for the technical faults and failures, which have drastically reduced the dam’s installed capacity, expected efficacy and life.

trated in order to facilitate the Pak Mun dam project in Thailand, Narmada Valley Development project in India, Ilisu dam project in Turkey and Chixoy dam project in Guatemala (see Box 3.1), among several others. In Mexico, employees from the

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Papaloapan River Commission set fire to homes of 21 000 Mazatec Indians who were unwilling to move from the Miguel Aleman dam site (WCD 2000: 106). Development by violation of all types of human rights finds earnest support and legitimation from both the right and the traditional left in state power. The killing of dozens of farmers, and rape of women who refused to part with their land for a proposed ‘chemical hub’ in Nandigram of West Bengal by the ruling communist party cadres on 14 March 2007 and on November 7, 2007 (see Box 3.2) bears testimony to the fact that when it comes to industrial development, no state power can afford to uphold human rights and social (including environmental) justice. Social crimes of development include abuses of second- and third-generation human rights to health and clean environment. As in the case of the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal (see Box 8.2), MNCs can afford to neglect all labour and environmental safety measures in the Southern countries, where labour safety and environmental laws are pliable. Operations of Northern MNCs in Asia, Africa and Latin America have caused a whole range of human rights abuses. Nike factories in Indonesia and Pakistan, Wal-Mart factories in China, and maquiladoras (exportoriented factories) in Mexico, Honduras and El Salvador are known to exploit workers in infernal sweatshops and squalid living conditions. British Petroleum operations in Colombia have led to brutal repression by the Colombian army. The oil operations of the Royal Dutch/Shell in the Ogoni area in the Niger Delta have dramatically increased Nigeria’s GNP, but only ‘at a horrendous cost to the six million people living in the Niger River Delta’ (Monshipouri et al. 2003: 977). The ruling military dictatorship has ruthlessly repressed the Ogoniland inhabitants who dared to protest. Similar brutal repression has facilitated the Unocal Oil Corporation’s operation in Myanmar, where slave labour, eviction of entire villages, torture, rape, and murder by Burmese soldiers have taken place over a decade (Monshipouri et al. 2003: 977). Following WTO, more and more MNCs are interested in outsourcing their products from poor countries, because MNCs find it particularly easy in the Southern host countries to avoid compliance with both national laws and international standards of wages, occupational health, industrial safety and environmental integrity. MNCs thus find it increasingly profitable to manufacture their products through ‘outsourcing’ to Southern countries. In Mexico and Honduras, the maquiladora system of outsource manufacturing (see Section 3.2.3) has increased their foreign exchange earnings, but the workers are reported to ‘work up to twenty hours a day making only thirty-one cents an hour’ (Monshipouri et al. 2003: 976). Child labour, abysmal working conditions, health hazards and poor wages of workers are a rule in these industries. WTO has also facilitated the acceptance of MNCs with past records of social crimes, with the promise of quick quantum jumps in economic growth, qua expansion

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Singur and Nandigram Faces of State Terrorism and Development

I

n the wake of a fresh new industrialization drive in 2001, State governments of India began to appropriate vast amounts of farmlands and pastures – evicting resident peasants – to be ‘developed’ by private industry. In many cases, the state took over private farmlands without any prior information to, or negotiation with the owners, and acted as a broker to the big national and multinational corporations. In the process of dispossession of the peasants, the issue of compensation involves only the landowners, to the exclusion of all sharecroppers and peasant labourers associated to the appropriated farmland. In the event of peasant resistance to this land grab, the state has organized syndicated violence - killing, injuring and imprisoning the peasants, including women and children. State violence and peasant resistance have created a paradigm of the land wars. In at least seven States of India, the force of arms and ammunition in the hands of the police force is being used to assault and kill farmers and tribals defending their land rights, guaranteed by the Constitution of the country. In all recent instances, the state has either leased out or sold off the appropriated land to private enterprises like Tata and Reliance of India, the Salim Group of Indonesia and POSCO of South Korea, to set up industry under fabulous financial incentives, apparently in gratitude for facilitating a prospective GNP growth. In Singur, the government of the State of West Bengal forcibly acquired the fertile farmlands for an undefined ‘public interest’ – which turned out to be the interest of Tata Motors, one of the largest and the richest industry houses in India, to found an automobile factory. There was no tangible programme to rehabilitate the 14,000 evicted peasant families. The peasants refused to quit their ancestral lands and livelihoods, a daring act against the state, which invited volleys of atrocities from the police and the ruling party, culminating in gang rape and burning of a teenager. This has led to a land war between a determined mass of peasant farmers and the state power, which includes the ruling communist party’s cadres in arms. In Nandigram, the same government issued a public notice in January 2007 to acquire farmlands for setting up a proposed ‘chemical hub’ – a group of factories to manufacture assorted petrochemicals (including PCBs and plastics). The thousands of farmers, who sensed the impending extirpation of their livelihoods and cultural roots, rose against this hideous plan. The State government responded by deploying a large police force and an army of cadres of the ruling communist party, who perpetrated a massacre on 14 March 2007 – 14 protesters, including children, were killed, women and minor girls raped and their genitals terribly mutilated, their houses ransacked (AICI 2007). The State government – and the ruling communist party – first tried to suppress the facts, and then, when media reports of unilateral state violence were telecast, explained that Nandigram had been captured by a group of political continued...

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continued... opportunists, Luddites, and terrorists. When a section of Left sympathisers and renowned social activists balked at party-led violence, the party began a slander campaign against them. The state violence unleashed in Singur and Nandigram was a result of the ‘imposition of unilateral party and corporate decisions on villagers without even informing them that their land had been acquired for corporate profit, private profit now designated as public purpose’ (Sarkar 2007). However, this rampant state terrorism has turned the peaceful farmers of Nandigram ‘fierce to the point of violence, determined to pay any price that was needed to protect their land’ (Sarkar 2007). In the face of this stern resistance, and protests from a large section of the civil society, the State chief minister declared in May 2007 that the proposed chemical hub would not be built in Nandigram. However, the villagers are not yet assured by this pledge because an SEZ has already been declared in the neighbouring area, and violent attempts of communist party cadres to capture the village continues.

of job market. Governments of the Southern countries earnestly want to create a favourable industry-friendly environment to vie for FDI. In this frenzy of becoming industry-savvy, the government takes on the task of appropriating fertile agricultural land on behalf of the investor. Although the per capita land holding in India is 0.25 acre, the government is using the colonial Land Acquisition Act of 1854 to purchase any land that the industrialist deems suitable for its operation (Sharma and Goswami, 2006). To lubricate the entry of FDI, the Indian government has enacted a legislation to create special economic zones (SEZs), in which both the radical Right and the traditional Left in state power show fervent interest. In the SEZ, the investor would pay absolutely no taxes for ten years; would be free to bring in export proceeds without any time limit and make foreign investments from it; set up off-shore banking units with income tax exemption for three years and subsequently pay 50 percent tax for another two years. Furthermore, there would be no environmental impact assessment of any project within SEZ, and the industry need not comply with any labour, environment and public health laws of the land (Sharma and Goswami 2006). In India, the Industrial Disputes Act has made collective bargaining and strikes illegal in SEZs (CRC 2007). Even without SEZs, the host country governments tend to abet the MNCs in the manufacture of luxury commodities and emission of highly toxic substances, and are apt to suppress any public protest to the dispossession of farmers and environmental damages. Coca Cola and Pepsico, whose bottling plants are known to rapidly deplete groundwater and cause water famine in the surrounding area, nevertheless receive financial incentives from the Southern governments.

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In order to avoid legal and bureaucratic hurdles, industrial houses are enlisting transnational consultancy firms like Price Water House, Ernest & Young, and Feedback Ventures, to prepare master plans ‘in such a format using the right vocabulary so that its gets the government’s nod’ (Sharma and Goswami 2006). At the same time the State governments too are utilizing their services to ensure that the land transfers do not invite unwanted litigation. Firms often obtain government approval by giving false promises of creating a bloated number of jobs and by influencing a corrupt bureaucracy. Big industry paying kickbacks to ministries is a common practice in the South. In 2002, Monsanto made an illegal payment totalling $50,000 to a senior official in Indonesian Ministry of Environment, to influence him ‘to repeal an unfavourable decree that was likely to have an adverse effect on Monsanto’s business’ (USSEC 2005). With the increasing pace of corporate takeover of national economies, ‘supranational development actors’ are more accountable for such crimes than national governments: National governance holds all actors accountable within national borders, but it is being overtaken by the rising importance of supranational global actors (multinational corporations) and international institutions (IMF, World Bank, Bank of International Settlements). Needed are standards and norms that set limits and define responsibilities of all actions. (UNDP 1999: 9)

3.2.1.3 Political crimes If environmental crimes and human rights violations are a consequence of development programmes, political crimes in terms of global inequity are inherent in the very process of development. In the post-war era, the antiquated form of Western colonial governance has been replaced by economic subjugation of nonindustrialized nations through the precept, politics and policies of industrial development. As the US President Harry Truman asserted, ‘The old imperialism – exploitation for foreign profit – has no place in our plans’ (cited in Esteva 1992: 9); instead, globalizing the US economic hegemony is the new gamut of imperialism. This hegemony, what many term the ‘Washington Consensus,’ spawns international treaties to keep the poor countries bound by spiralling financial debt to the Bretton Woods institutions – the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Established in 1944 with a mission to rebuild economics ravaged by the Second World War, these institutions are bent on giving financial ‘aids’ – loans with variable rates of interest – to ‘developing’ nations to usher them on the path of economic prosperity (Johnson 2000). However, these ‘aids’ have often proved to be the Trojan Horse, causing a plethora of environmental, social and political ills in the borrower countries. The IMF and the World Bank loans made to the poor

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countries have as a rule served the interests of advanced industrialized countries and to widen the economic inequality and social inequities in the borrower countries (Friedrichs and Friedrichs 2002; Stiglitz 2002a). Both the IMF and the World Bank, as well as its subsidiaries like the Asian Development Bank, impose on the borrower countries a schedule of economic reforms that lead to violations of civic and human rights and withdrawal of state welfare responsibilities. Because these unpopular reforms are likely to be opposed and thwarted in a democracy, the World Bank has favoured strong dictatorship over strong democracies because the former is more capable of successfully implementing the reforms (Caufield 1996: 209). The Bank has a record of having denied loans to democratic governments (e.g. Allende government in Chile) to be overthrown by the US-supported military coup d’état, and lending money to military dictatorships (e.g. in post-Allende Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, and Guatemala). The Bank’s policies have, as a rule, protected the commercial interests of Northern MNCs (Ishii-Eiteman 2002; Lang et al. 2000) and the political interest of the US (Stiglitz 2002a). ‘For the past 50 years, the World Bank has invested in large, export-oriented projects such as pipelines and dams that cause severe environmental upheaval and penalize the very people they wish to help: the poor’ (Friedrichs and Friedrichs 2002: 25). Through sponsoring of undemocratic political regimes, introduction of economic reforms blind to civic welfare, and assistance to development projects detrimental to the environmental integrity in borrower nations, the Bretton Woods institutions created a system of governance in proxy – the rule of the Washington Consensus mediated by governments of poor nations who agree to accept packages of financial aid for their development. The aid proves in many cases to be an ‘odious debt’ (Chomsky 2000: 29) that is imposed on the people of the borrower country by threats of an international trade embargo, or political destabilization of governments at the behest of the powerful Western nations. Although the Bank’s Office of Environmental and Scientific Affairs (OESA) issued in the early 1980s guidelines for ensuring the maintenance of socio-cultural life of the indigenous people when it comes to relocation from a project site (Goodland 1982), these guidelines are often violated during implementation of rehabilitation programmes. Environmental activists point out that development projects financed by the World Bank and IMF have always entailed gross violation of human rights, in terms of the denial of basic needs of the people affected by development projects (Pereira 1997), and police and military atrocities on people demanding social justice (Caufield 1996). Friedrichs and Friedrichs (2002: 26) contend that the Bank’s mode of operation is ‘intrinsically criminogenic,’ because it has been ‘criminally negligent’ in its failure to assess social impacts of its

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projects, its complicity with state crimes unleashed on civil society, and its disregard for international and state laws relating to human and civil rights. This criminogenic nature of development manifests itself in the international operation of the multi-national private industrial sector, which benefits most from multilateral trade arrangements. Machinery and factory equipment, which have long been discarded in the North, are transferred to the South as state-of-the-art technology. A representative example is the dangerous chemical production system of Union Carbide Corporation (UCC), which took lives of scores of thousands of people in Bhopal (see Box 8.2). A governmental committee expressed its consternation at this discovery: As published in ‘Frontline’ dated January 03, 2003, the 1973 documents of UCC itself, discovered recently, prove that the UCC transferred substandard, inferior and dangerous technology instead of the ‘state-of-the art’ technology [i.e. proven, established and reliable technology that was being used at the American plant to produce MIC (methyl Isocynate) and Sevin] for ‘Sevin’ pesticide production system in total disregard of the assurance given to Government of India. In fact, UCC had ‘lied’ to the Government of India in the matter. (GOI 2003: 69)

MNCs not only transfer out-dated machinery and outmoded production systems, but also immensely hazardous products that are banned in their home countries. This constitutes a congnizable, if unrecognized, international crime, fostered and sometimes endorsed by the international trade and politics of development. Transnational pesticides firms continue to manufacture BHC (trade name gemmaxin) and aldrin in India, although both the sale and use of these pesticides is proscribed by WHO and banned in over 66 countries, including India, and severely restricted in other countries (Navdanya 1998). MNCs also export a host of unregistered pesticides. The US Environmental Protection Agency has refused to register Monsanto Company’s product butachlor, and Dow Chemicals’ haloxyfop on grounds of toxic residues and environmental effects (Greer and Bruno 1996: 76, 144). However, both these products are sold to South Asian farmers as ‘farmer-friendly’ herbicides under the trade names Machete and Gallant, respectively.

3.2.2 Malthusian Metaphors The most convenient handle for the Northern development agencies to espouse and implement development policies in the South has been the issue of poverty. All development projects launch with promises of more employment and a better future for inhabitants of project sites, and end up destroying the local resource base, creating millions of development refugees and benefiting the elite and big

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businesses. Despite historical evidence that development creates a formidable debt crisis that serves to perpetuate poverty and hunger in countries receiving loans from international financial institutions, development projects are pushed forward as silver bullets for eradicating poverty and hunger. Since the late 1940s Southern governments perceived the problem of poverty and hunger as paramount. To overcome the endemics of hunger, governments of ex-colonies took recourse in the industrial and agricultural development, as prescribed by neoclassical economics. The issue of hunger has been the prime motive in all ex-colonies for embracing the manifold development strategies from the late 1940s onwards (Escobar 1995). The strategies of national governments to ensure food security have since ranged from food procurement through centralized distribution system, food fortification and supplementation, nutrition education and comprehensive national food and nutrition planning, to fertilizer factories, the Green Revolution, land reform and international food aid. Closely tied to the issue of mitigation of poverty and hunger is the issue of population control. Volumes have been – and more could be – written on the policy, politics and practice of population control in the South. From the 1960s onwards, the World Bank’s neo-Malthusian rhetoric against population growth as the root cause of poverty and environmental degradation persuaded all Southern governments to implement population control programmes at the Bank’s behest. International aid agencies consistently indict the burgeoning population in poor countries for the persistent hunger and underdevelopment. National development policies conform to, and abide by, this neo-Malthusian view and incorporate programmes for curbing the rate of population growth. Thus the population problem occupies a permanent and prominent position in the development discourse. The rich countries blame the high population growth rate for the South’s persistent poverty. Within the South, the rich and the urban elite condemn the growing numbers of the poor: unless the poor immediately reduce their numbers, the country cannot prosper. While invoking Malthusianism in linking the population growth to poverty in development debates, the basic differences between Malthus’s own principles and neo-Malthusianism is often overlooked. Malthus, following Townsend, considered poverty as well as hunger as a ‘natural motive’ for national prosperity (see Section 2.1), while neo-Malthusians believe – or at least say – just the opposite. Malthus himself was against the use of any method of contraception and abortion to control population growth. In particular, he opined that making contraceptives available to the poor would unnaturally disallow the poor to multiply, and would make them ‘indolent.’8 In contrast, neo-Malthusianists recommend population control through state action – whether by distribution of cheap contraceptives, coercive sterilization, adolescent sex education or by female literacy

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campaign. Neo-Malthusianism therefore contains a subtle contradiction, as well as continuation of, the Malthusian view of economic development.

3.2.2.1 Population and economic growth From the Malthusian perspective, poverty (‘misery’ was Malthus’s term) is a necessary ‘price’ to be paid for the capitalist development. Malthus originally held that poverty was a consequence of rapid population growth, and also a powerful stimulus to the development of industry and the accumulation of wealth by the upper classes. Without this stimulus, Malthus (1828) argued, society would quickly sink into indigence and decay. Thus paying higher wages to industrial workers was undesirable, because that would encourage a catastrophic increase in the number of people of the ‘lower orders.’ Drawing on Malthusianism, Social Darwinists also saw poverty both as a condition resulting from the lack of industriousness of the poor and as a filter for natural selection to favour the ‘fittest’ wealthy classes. Thus persistence of poverty seems to have been both the cause and justification of growth in private profit and national economy. Industrial growth and economic development provided an explanation and justification of exploitation of the poor by implication. To the standard view, in conformity with classical Malthusianism, population growth is therefore a sign of economic growth and prosperity. Accordingly, early European colonists considered human habitation and agricultural landscapes to be almost synonymous with progress and civilization. Thus, after the British conquest of northeastern provinces of India, Major John Butler of Bengal Native Infantry was appalled by the desolate landscape of Assam where ‘not a vestige of any habitation or a human being’ could be found (Butler 1855: 24). After 14 years of his stay, Butler was happy to note signs of ‘civilization’ – ‘brick bungalows with glass doors, brick gaols, courts of justice and bridges of brick, iron and wood’ (Butler 1855: 249), but was disappointed that there was no prospect of ‘a dense population for ages to come’ (Butler 1855: 250) as there was yet no sign of any industry and trade. Soon afterwards, the British encouraged people from Bengal to immigrate in Assam in order to develop tea plantations and the inchoate coal and oil industry (Baruah 1999: 46). I cite this typical example only to show that an increased supply of labour force has always meant higher productivity of the economy. Capitalist economy has always encouraged population growth to generate a reserve army of labour for industry. Malthusianism endorsed this process of accumulation of surplus wealth at the expense of the people of ‘lower orders,’ and forbade any governmental checks on population growth. Aside from the natural disasters, famines and war,

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the only social checks on population that Malthus identified were vice, misery and moral restraints. Since both poverty and population growth are natural and beneficial to development in the Malthusian world, Malthusian appeals to prevent either should appear logically inconsistent. Indeed, if unchecked population growth leads to poverty, which in turn is necessary for national prosperity, why arrest that? If poverty is a necessary stimulus of economic growth, why disallow the poor to multiply? In reality, Malthusianism’s inconsistency provides a convenient escape route for the state to relinquish responsibility and accountability, while maintaining a façade of bourgeois democracy in protecting industrial and commercial interests in development. Thus, the British government, obeying Malthusian doctrine, refused to send relief to the Deccan villages and let 5.5 million Indian peasants die during the famine of 1877–78, but violated the doctrine by exporting millions of tons of wheat from India to England to ensure food availability to the English population (Davis 2002: 7) and by adopting measures to control the English population growth. In post-independence India, similar duplicitous state policies toward poverty reduction are illustrated by the massive contraceptive campaign, including high-handed methods of sterilization of the poor,9 while pushing up the number of the poor and unemployed – namely, by creating big dams and massive industrial projects, and privatizing state industrial and service sectors that periodically lay off workers by thousands nationwide.

3.2.2.2 Population growth and resource crunch The neo-Malthusian view of population growth (of the poor) as inimical to development owes primarily to the Malthusian fear that ‘excessive growth’ of population might outstrip the availability of food to everybody. This concern with the environmental carrying capacity is based on the conventional notion of the upper limit or ‘ceiling’ (or asymptote) of population growth, which is misconstrued to be stationary (see Technical Discussion 7). Just as Malthus was wrong in assuming an arithmetic rate of increase in food production (in contrast with a geometric rate of population growth), so the neo-Malthusians err in assuming that the upper limit K for a population is constant. This K is also called the carrying capacity of the environment. In reality, K fluctuates, depending on a plethora of environmental factors. More fundamentally, the original Malthusian model of population growth has no ‘ceiling’ of population growth in the first place: literally, the sky is the limit (K = ∞). The Malthusian model depicts continuous growth, periodically constrained by natural checks and social bounds. It predicts an infinite growth potential, with predictable doubling time (see

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Technical Discussion 5

Technical Discussion 5). However, no species population on earth follows the Malthusian model, which is unrealistic. In contrast, Verhulst’s logistic growth equation describes a more realistic model of density-dependent population growth, which is obeyed by all animal populations constrained by resources (Technical Discussion 7). Details for specific populations may vary, but every real-life population growth is density-dependent – contrary to the Malthusian growth, which is density-independent. Of course, human species differ from all other animals in being able to partly overcome the naturally-ordained constraints on the growth rate. With the advancement

Malthusian Population Growth and Doubling Time Malthus claimed that population tends to increase geometrically (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64,128, 256, 512 . . .), while, even with ever-increasing applications of labour to land, food supply increases only arithmetically (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 . . .). In mathematical notation, this geometric growth of population can be written as: Nt+1 = GNt

(eqn.3.1)

which simply means that the number of people Nt at time t will grow to GNt at time t+1. In this example, the rate of growth G = 2. Thus the population will keep on doubling at every generation time t. Because 2 = exponential of 0.69, eqn. 3.1 can be rewritten as Nt+1 = Nt e0.69

(eqn.3.2)

This formula can be generalized to predict the value of N at any given time t, if the initial population N0 is already known: Nt = N0 ert

(eqn.3.3)

where r is the intrinsic growth rate of the population. In this example, r is 0.69, but r could be any other real number. This is the Malthusian model of exponential growth, which is very fast: a population of a single self-replicating amoeba (N0 = 1), with an intrinsic growth rate r = 0.69, would exceed 15,600 by just 14 generations (see Figure 4). The growth curve looks like the Roman letter ‘J’ because the population tends to reach infinity, which is impossible for any real-life population. Demographers, however, use this exponential equation to describe population doubling, assuming that human population does not follow the logistic model (see Technical Discussions 7 and 8). Thus, when the population doubles after time t, the eqn. 3.3 may be written as 2 Nt = Nt ert

(eqn. 3.4) continued...

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continued... or, ert = 2, from which doubling time t can be calculated as ln(2)/r or 0.69/r. Obviously, t declines with increasing value of r. If a population grows at r = 0.2 (or G = 1.22), it will double every 3.45 years. For r = 0.02 (G = 1.02), which is currently India’s growth rate, the population will double every 34.5 years. Figure 4. Malthusian Population Growth with r = 0.69. 32000000

24000000

N t 16000000

8000000

0 0

10

20

30

t

of industry and medical science, the natural mortality rate has been drastically lowered in modern societies. Even when birth rates do not increase, a declining mortality rate would increase the overall growth rate of a population. No doubt this has resulted in bolstering the annual growth rate of the human populations in all countries.10 Technology has also bolstered food production faster than the population. However, all growth must stop at some point (which is the basic premise of sustainability argument), which implies that food production cannot increase beyond a certain limit. This also implies that human population growth also must stop naturally when that point is reached. The Malthusians fear that if the human population continues to grow even after the food production increase has stopped, the available food to population ratio will plummet. Finally, there will be a catastrophic famine, which will nullify the benefits of development achieved so far. This not unreasonable fear connects the overpopulation issue to that of famine and hunger. The spectre of a Malthusian cataclysm lurking round the corner, as it were, scared neo-Malthusian thinkers to propose diverse measures to check population

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growth. Among these, Boulding’s (1964) idea of a ‘marketable license for babies’ aimed to prohibit women below a minimum level of economic subsistence from bearing children: an accumulation of ten units of ‘deci-child’ license, by purchase, inheritance, or gift would entitle a woman to have one legal child. William and Paul Paddock (1967) went much farther with their proposal of a system of ‘triage,’ which would cancel all US food aid to those countries that failed to control their ‘overpopulation.’ Since their excess population could not be fed, they should simply be left to die – the sooner, the better. This triage logic was sharpened by Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, The Population Bomb, which immediately became a highly influential best-seller. It was imperative, he argued, that populations of the poor countries be immediately checked, even by coercive means. One of the coercive means he suggested was to withhold all financial and food aid to the Third World countries unless their governments, in turn, coerce their excess population to stop breeding. Ehrlich drew an analogy of an overcrowded lifeboat, and suggested that no more people ought to be taken on board: the excess people (the poor) must drown, or else the lifeboat itself will sink. This triage logic is an extension of Rev. Townsend’s (1786) argument against state interference that aimed to reduce poverty, because it was unnatural. Such ‘unnatural’ measures would only ‘increase the number of unprofitable citizens, and sow the seeds of misery for the whole community; increasing the general distress, and causing more to die than if poverty had been left to find its proper channel’ (Townsend 1786: 40–41). The neo-Malthusians’ suggestion as to withdrawal of food aid to the populous South is a clear parallel to Malthus’ original refusal to condone the Poor Laws of contemporary Britain. The same principle was employed by British administrators over a century ago to justify the government’s withholding relief during the Deccan famine of 1877–78, and later by Emperor Haile Selassy for the absence of state relief measures during the Ethiopian famine of 1973: ‘those who don’t work starve’11. Indeed, ‘those who don’t work’ constitute the excess population, whose size continually expands with industrial growth. ‘This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation’ (Marx 1887: 603). The excess people in all the ‘cold scientific’ treatments of the population issue – by population theorists from Townsend and Malthus to the Paddocks and Ehrlich – are the others. In late-Victorian England, the others were the uprooted peasants, the proletariats. In the Third Reich, the others were Jewish. In the USA of the 1920s and 1930s, the others were the Asian immigrants. Today these others are born in excessive numbers only in the South. Because the Northern people are already ‘developed’ and have enough means to indulge in over-consumption and dump their waste on the South, they have the right to live and let die the poor there.

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It is more than a political irony that many environmentalists in the North as well as in the South are wont to blame the non-White population growth for the global resource exhaustion. Many environmentalists have also accepted the ‘triage ethic’ as inevitable, and advocate coercion as a necessary evil in the race to stabilize global population and ensure environmental sustainability. Neo-Malthusians point out (e.g. Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1990) that if everyone is granted the right to breed freely, that will spell disaster for all the remaining forests, wildlife habitats and biodiversity, because everyone will try to overuse the natural resources. Overpopulation will only hasten ‘the tragedy of the commons.’ In the mid-1970s, the Government of India showed the practicability of the triage ethic, by bringing its population control programmes to the point of coercive sterilization of thousands of poor men and women in and around Delhi. Ostensibly married to poverty elimination programmes, such fascist measures drew support from a large section of the urban elite. The power of the state ideology reasserted itself in the fact that even the poor accepted that it was their numbers that kept them poor. The Malthusian design of blaming the poor for their failure to take advantage of the GNP growth is particularly delectable to state ideologues, because it keeps the state secure while maintaining inequalities in wealth, power and opportunities. Of importance to note here is that the population issue is always linked to the Hardinian ‘tragedy of the commons’ argument (Hardin 1967). The fallacy of this Hardinian argument has been discussed by recent empirical research (e.g. Berkes 1999; Burke 2001; Ostrom et al. 1999; Ruttan and Borgerhoff Mulder 1999), which has identified three loose knots in the string that ties up neo-Malthusianism to the ‘tragedy of the commons’ argument. First, the ‘commons’ that Hardin refers to is actually open access resource, to which nobody has a stake to conserve, and therefore the ‘tragedy of the commons’ argument is inapt. Rather – and this is where the second knot loosens – the ‘tragedy’ consists in the extirpation of the poor from the commons. The poor, who are blamed for the vanishing resources do not have any control over the resources, regardless of their numbers. There is growing evidence that communal management systems based on customary regulations can protect resources for use by future generations. The state programmes for industrial development break down the communal management systems, and denigrate the commons into either private or open access state resource. The fate of the commons is then determined not by customary ethics, but by the market value of the resource relative to alternative resources. Loss of the commons, in its turn, entrenches poverty by weakening traditional community support mechanisms with regard to resource use. Third, it is not the poor – again, regardless of their numbers – but the elite omnivores who mount an ever-rising consumption pressure on the commons, destroy the community and exhaust the communal

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resources for private profit, which translates into national interests and GNP growth. Indeed, the linking of overpopulation to resource conservation has a distinct political direction. The central point in ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ was that only private property could protect the environment against over-population, an argument which has become a cardinal tenet of contemporary neo-liberal dogma. The passion with which this conviction has been embraced by conservative policy institutes and multinational corporations is evidence that it is not really an argument to conserve nature or even, in the end, to limit population, but a means of legitimising an unrelenting process of privatisation and enclosure. (Ross 2000: 9)

3.2.2.3 Population growth, misery, and environmental ills A most prominent conjecture of neo-Malthusianism is that the people of the global South are poor because they tend to ‘overbreed,’ and thus are culprits behind the global resource depletion. In other words, the people of the South breed like rodents, eat away all resources, and dirty the environment (Ehrlich 1968; Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1990). However, this conjecture collides head-on with the historical fact that the growth rate of European population has far outstripped that of any non-European population over the past two centuries. The greatest expansion of the European migration took place between 1850 and 1960: over 60 million people – one-fifth of the European population at the beginning of the period – emigrated from Europe. Between 1750 and 1930, the European population increased 5.4 times, while in the same period the Asian population increased 2.3 times, and the African population less than twice. By 1930, one-third of the White population was living outside Europe; the proportion became 50 percent in 1970 (McNeely et al. 1995: 727). A direct consequence of this demographic explosion of the White population and the hegemonic ‘White consumption’ pattern is the rapid despoliation of the world’s resources. Oblivious to this historical fact, neo-Malthusians propound that the ‘excess’ populations in the poor countries are enemies of nature because the poor clear forests and poach wildlife. Coercive population control is therefore the only possible solution to the global environmental crisis (Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1990).12 Such propositions are truthful to the original Malthusian argument, which has always remained blind to the global statistics of resource distribution and consumption disparities, and served as an excuse for enclosing forests and other commons, promoting privatization, and maintaining distributional inequity. By suggesting that the ‘excessive procreation’ of the poor – rather than chronic or periodic unemployment, the abolition of commons and community control of resources, or high food prices – was the main source of their poverty, Malthus

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acquitted the propertied class and the capitalist social order of all accountability (Ross 2000: 2). The neo-Malthusian rhetoric successfully obfuscates the causal links between the population problem and poverty. It tends to prove, by sheer force of Goebbelsian propaganda rather than scientific evidence, that firstly, population growth leads to poverty and secondly, population growth of the poor is the root cause of all environmental ills. Let us take on the first assumption first, and match it with real-life data. Any cross-country comparison of demographic data would reveal that the rate of population growth tends to be higher in countries where the social and economic security of individuals is considerably low – either due to the failure of the state apparatus or the dissolution of the community. Security at old age is a salient concern of the poor. Small farmers and share-croppers in every village, and street-dwellers in every city in the South are worried about their fate in old age. Each of them considers children as insurance for the future. This in turn relates to a plethora of other questions of social security. I shall discuss only the most prominent ones. a)

More children means more hands – to work in the farm, to fetch water and fuel-wood, to assist in household chores, to beg for alms in the street, even to outnumber adversaries at quarrels and fights. The high frequency of early dropouts from schools in both villages and cities is testimony to the dire need of hands in poor households. The more the children, the better poised is the poor household to cope with social and economic insecurity.

b) Every family wants children. But when children are the only security for old age, the poor will naturally want more of them (Lappé and Schurman 1990). The poorer families therefore want to have – and do have more kids. c)

Perinatal health care of mothers and the newborn is another vital sign of social security. Poverty as a deprivation of basic capabilities (Sen 1999: 20) – such as poor health care – results in precarious maternal health, significant malnutrition of mothers and children, and high infant mortality. Given that the child mortality rate and average life expectancy are considerably higher among the poor (Sen 1999: 99–103), such families will want many more children than will be necessary to look after them. Every poor family will tend to see at least one of the children live to adulthood and look after his parents.

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d) I deliberately used the masculine pronoun in the preceding sentence, because a majority of the modern societies are patrilocal. That is, it is customary that a girl is married into her husband’s family. The few traditional societies that once used to practise uxorilocality (man living in his wife’s residence) are fast changing into patrilocality. This simply implies that girls, when brought up to adulthood, will most probably not live with their parents and thus will be unable to look aft er them in their old age. A male child, if he survives, is more likely to become a dependable son. Under this unfortunate social arrangement, the craving for a male child results in repeated childbirth, until a son is incidentally born (Lappé and Schurman 1990). A combined effect of factors (c) and (d) is that the average number of children per woman (total fertility rate) and crude birth rate (children born to every 1000 persons) tend to be higher in societies with higher risk factors – as indicated by child mortality. No wonder then that total fertility rates and crude birth rates are both strongly related to child mortality rates (Figures 5 and 6). e)

The persisting lack of women’s empowerment in the modern poor families (in contrast with traditional indigenous families, where women used to enjoy relatively more power and rights to decision-making) is a manifestation of underdevelopment of women, who are disallowed to even have a say in their family size. The very decision to partake in the conjugal sex act, to beget a child, or to prevent conception is almost unilaterally taken by the husband. The wife ends up conceiving often against her will, and having to carry yet another child to term.

f)

Social insecurity from severe political repression has the same effect – of expanding the family size. Embattled minorities living in constant fear of a holocaust in repressive regimes – like the Jews in the Third Reich and the Muslim poor in Palestine close to Israeli border – always tend to increase their number of children, almost as if to ensure that at least one of them survive the holocaust. This is another version of factor (c) above. Poverty is just another humiliating repression. As the UN Secretary General Koffi Annan said in his 17 October 2000 speech, ‘Almost half the world’s population lives on less than two dollars a day, yet even this statistic fails to capture the humiliation, powerlessness and brutal hardship that is the daily lot of the world’s poor.’ All poor parents want to raise numerous children in the hope that at least one of them will peradventure find a better livelihood than their own.

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Figure 5. Regression of Total Fertility Rates against Infant Mortality Rates. 6

6

5 Fertility Rate

Fertility Rate

5 4 3 2

4 3 2 1

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Infant Mortality Rate

R2 = 0.495 for data from all Indian States excluding Nagaland and Jammu & Kashmir, for which data are not available (left), and 0.911 for selected countries from South and Southeast Asia (right). For both slopes, P < 0.01. Source: Drèze and Sen (2002, Tables A1 and A3) Note:

Figure 6. Regression of Crude Birth (per 1000) against Infant Mortality Rates 40 Crude Birth Rate

Crude Birth Rate

40 30 20 10 0

30 20

10 0

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Infant Mortality Rate

100

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Infant Mortality Rate

R2 = 0.625 for Indian States excluding Nagaland (left), and 0.924 for selected countries from South and Southeast Asia (right). For both slopes, P < 0.01. Source: Same as in Figure 5. Note:

It follows that to argue that population growth leads to poverty is to put the cart before the horse. The truth is just the reverse. The rich have fewer children, because they are rich: fewer children don’t make the poor rich. A greater intensity of poverty and social insecurity needs an extra number of heads in the family. The threat of hunger and insecurity drives the poor to beget more children as an insurance against misfortune. If the state could ensure social security for the poor,

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shelter and food for old people, and women’s empowerment, the poor will find no reason to increase their family size. (Neo)Malthusianism warns – apparently sensibly – that population growth outstripping food growth would lead to hunger. However, it ignores the fact that hunger persists in times of overproduction too. Thousands of people have died in different pockets of India from the 1970s to the 1990s when excess food grains were rotting in government-owned buffer stocks. The collapse of the public food distribution system and relief mechanisms to secure the hungry is testimony to the deep corruption and inefficiency in administration. Moreover, overproduction of crops as a rule leads to sale price slump, to the extent that the sale price does not even cover the cost of harvesting. When state mechanisms of price control fail, overproduction often results in episodes of farmer suicides – as has happened in recent years in Punjab. Conversely, hoarding of food crops and market speculation lead to food prices far exceeding the purchasing power of the poor, who die of starvation – as they did during the 1943 Bengal famine (Sen 1981). ‘Famines can occur even without any decline in food production or availability’ (Sen 1999: 165). The Bangladesh famine of 1974, which occurred despite peak food availability is an example. Famines and hunger are, in the final analysis, a consequence of what Sen (1999: 164–68) calls ‘entitlement failures,’ caused by callous governance, rather than demographic features of the country. The Malthusian metaphor strives to avert this uncomfortable issue of iniquitous distribution by blaming the poors’ number for hunger. The second neo-Malthusian claim, that overpopulation is the root cause of all environmental evils, emerged in the 1960s. This claim cannot be simply dismissed as groundless. An increasing population – one that is developing in the Northern style and tempo – invariably consumes more resources, produces increasing amounts of greenhouse gases, pollutes more waters and harvests more natural resources for producing more food and consumer items. Even if a population refuses to adopt the Northern lifestyle and keeps its consumption levels considerably low, a high rate of increase in its size will eventually put considerable pressure on the finite resources it currently depends on. The populations of shifting cultivators in northeast India are a good example. Although these populations still observe certain traditional constraints on land use, maintain a non-consumerist attitude and have no big demands on the natural resources for their subsistence living, over the past few decades the pressure of their increasing numbers has resulted in, among other things, considerable damage to their environment. The growth in the number of jhum cultivators in a limited area of forest has curtailed the fallow cycles, and longer periods of cultivation have resulted in less and less regeneration of the forest, declining soil fertility, and increasing soil erosion

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(Singh, 1996). However, several other historical and economic factors, such as the reduced availability of forest lands for cultivation, immigration of non-indigenous populations, and changes in land use due to state agricultural policy are also to blame for the environmental impacts. Any unbiased examination would reveal that mounting population pressure can and does contribute to environmental degradation, but is by no means the root cause of environmental damages. To ignore the role of social, economic and political arrangements (including mechanisms for resource management) is by itself a vicious political stance. Put together, one encounters two closely related phenomena: on the one hand, the creation of development refugees, who add to the supernumerary poor in the South, and on the other, a massive destruction of wildlife and wildlands in the South. These two phenomena are highly correlated, but determining a causal relationship between them could be a good exercise for fresh students of statistics. A debate on the relationship between them is bound to be inconclusive and misleading, unless it takes into account the prominent causal factor – the disproportionate scale of consumption by the affluent. The Malthusian view of population as the cause for resource depletion is deceptive because it is blind to the impact of affluence on resources. The richest one-fifth of the world’s population, who live in the North, consumes 86 percent of all the world’s resources, and produces 53 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions. The Malthusian view of population as the source of environmental damages is also wrong because it ignores the environmental pollution caused by the affluent few. The industrial world, with just a quarter of the world’s population, accounts for about 90 percent of the CO2 (mainly from fossil fuel burning) that has so far accumulated in the earth’s atmosphere. The US alone, with only five percent of the world’s population, gobbles up 30 percent of the natural resource base, using 20 percent of the planet’s metals, 24 percent of its energy (the highest per capita consumption in the world) and 25 percent of its fossil fuels (Motavall 2000). When transposed onto the population issue, these figures imply that the average US citizen consumes 50 times more steel, 56 times more energy, 170 times more synthetic rubber and newsprint, 250 times more motor fuel, and 300 times more plastic than the average Indian citizen (Bell 1995). In terms of mineral and fuel consumption, 75 million US citizens are the equivalent of 2 billion Colombians, 10 billion Nigerians, or 22 billion Indonesians (ibid.). As the current UNDP (2003) assessment indicates, the British population contributes the same amount of CO2 (2.3 percent) to the global total as does the Chinese population, although the latter is 22 times larger. On per capita terms, this means that the average Chinese is 22 times less harmful to the global atmosphere than the average British citizen. Similarly, the average US citizen produces 18 times as much

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146 Table 3.1. Population Sizes and Indexes of Development, Resource Consumption and Environmental Impact for Selected Countries Country

HDI Rank

Population (million)

GDP per capita (PPP US $)

USA UK Colombia Paraguay China Vietnam India Zimbabwe Nigeria

7 13 64 84 104 109 127 145 152

288 58.9 42.8 5.6 1,285.0 79.2 1,033.4 12.8 117.8

34,320 24,160 7,040 5,210 4,020 2,070 2,840 2,280 850

Electricity use per capita per capita (kilowatt-hour) (million MT) 12,331 5,601 788 838 827 286 355 845 81

19.7 9.2 1.4 0.5 1.5 0.6 1.1 1.4 0.3

Carbon emission Global Share% 23.2 2.3 1.5 0.8 2.3 0.2 4.6 0.1 0.2

Notes: HDI: human development index; PPP = parity power of purchase. Source: UNDP 2003.

CO2 as does the average Indian, 33 times the average Vietnamese and 66 times the average Nigerian (see Table 3.1). Thus, every additional birth into the average American family has enormously greater aggregate impact on the environment and resources than an addition of a hundred in India, Nigeria, Colombia or Vietnam. As a Northern scholar acknowledges, If the world is to save itself from ecological disaster, the redemption cannot begin among the poor, however satisfying that idea may be for the missionaries. Only the wealthy few – that is, nations such as ours – have the power and the wherewithal to rescue us all from the impending consequences of mass consumption on a global scale. (Greider 1999: 27)

All these data are systematically ignored in the neo-Malthusian discourse. The burden of responsibility for resource depletion as well as environmental deterioration is imposed on the poor countries, who are advised to reduce their population size. Within the affluent countries, neo-Malthusians squarely put the blame for environmental damages on the immigrant populations. Two US organizations concerned with the population problem, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and Negative Population Growth (NPG), attribute virtually all degradation of environmental resources in the US either to reproductive pressures in the Third World, or to the ‘excessive’ procreative tendencies of immigrants and their descendants (citations in Ross 2000: 19). In the same vein, neo-Malthusians suppress the fact that hunger is caused by distributional injustices, rather than a slump in food production. As shown by Amartya Sen’s (1981) study of the 1943 Bengal famine, hunger is a consequence of faults in distribution – food being diverted from the poor for the consumption

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of the elite and militia and for other commercial purposes. As detailed sociological and historical studies reveal, the causes of hunger neither lie in an absolute scarcity nor in the number of people but in socially-generated scarcity arising from imbalances of power that deny entitlement of the majority to food. On the global level, the imbalance of over-consumption in the North and hunger in the South is apodictic.

3.2.2.4 The Malthusian appeal and the scared South All the logical inconsistencies, evidential lacunae and liberalist prejudices of the Malthusian argument notwithstanding, one must acknowledge its power to sustain the question as to ‘how many are too many?’ for more than three centuries. The greatest achievement of the Malthusian explanation of resource scarcity, poverty and environmental degradation has been […] to provide an enduring argument for the prevention of social and economic change and to obscure, in both academic and popular thinking, the real roots of poverty, inequality and environmental deterioration. As such, no other ideological framework has so effectively legitimised Western interests, development theories and strategies, especially the Green Revolution and, now, genetic engineering in agriculture. (Ross 2000: 1)

Larry Lohman (2003: 14) tries to explain why the factual incorrectness and inconsistencies of Malthus’s argument have not defeated it: ‘It redraws poverty and inequality, it does not explain them.’ Lohman argues that the logic of many of today’s neo-Malthusians, like Malthus’s own, is prejudiced and circular, because they claim to prove the very premises they assume at the outset. ‘Countering them with logic and evidence alone is unlikely ever to defeat them’ (Lohman 2003: 14), because Malthus’s populist appeal lies in its metaphoric strength, not its allusion to facts or scientific rigour. This appeal has repeatedly been used by multilateral development agencies to bring the South under the ideological pale of development. In the 1960s, the World Bank and IMF laid down population-control conditions for aid money to be doled out to all poor countries aspiring to become richer. Political leaders, policy makers, health workers, development NGOs and the media in the South were also zapped by the Malthusian metaphors packaged in poverty reduction programmes. Most governments in the South were soon struck by what Drèze and Sen (2002: 210) have described as ‘the family planning fever.’ Population control frenzy has suffused with much of the development dialogue, and in the 1960s and 1970s, hijacked most of public health expenditure. Health in South Asia’s development mostly meant asking people not to reproduce.

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The preoccupation with family planning targets pre-empted and degraded all other public health activities. Throughout the country, health personnel were given monthly or annual ‘targets’ of numbers of women accepting contraception or being sterilized.13 In the 1980s, the national budget for family planning, a euphemism for birth control, was greater than that for health services. Although the target-based programme in India was officially withdrawn in April 1996, subsequent field evaluations suggest that ‘the so-called “target culture” is still alive and well in many states, as is the preoccupation with “population control” among health workers’ (Drèze and Sen 2002.: 211). In fact, family planning has become a systemic policy drive of all Indian States, which continue to ‘persuade’ or coerce people into using contraception or sterilization to reach the ‘target’ numbers. ‘States have set up reproductive health centers and programmes, but their focus is still on family planning’ (The Corner House 2004: 28). A study by Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights observes: Although health services are in shambles, the central government is now contemplating bringing back an explicit commitment to targets in population policies and introducing strong disincentives to have more than two children. The Supreme Court has ruled that women wishing to contest panchayats [rural governing bodies] – in which one-third of seats are reserved for women – cannot have more than two children because of the ‘torrential increase in population.’ (The Corner House 2004: 28)

Family planning has become a fad of many organizations in both the North and the South. Even some feminists, who were once opposed to the targeting of family planning campaigns at women of the poor and minority communities, eventually agreed to the necessity of birth control measures for the greater common good. During the early decades of this century, the birth control pioneer, Margaret Sanger, who started out campaigning for working class and women’s rights, capitulated to the eugenicist efforts to control the numbers of the poor, the working class, minorities and new immigrants. This happened when Sanger came under the financial and political influence and the openly eugenicist ideology of the population control movement at the time. Later, in the 1970s, liberal feminist organizations such as NOW (National Organization of Women and NARAL (National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League), leaders in the abortion rights campaign in the U.S., refused to join the struggle for stricter federal regulations of sterilization… because sterilization abuse was not a major concern of white middle class women and because they did not want to lose the support of the population control organizations which were opposed to those reforms. (Bandarage 1994: 17–18)

The Malthusian thrust on poverty and resource scarcity was interpreted, since the 1960s, in terms of the poors’ purchasing power and food production deficit.

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Development planning entailed poverty reduction programmes – later called poverty eradication programmes – and the Green Revolution campaign. Both measures were supported by multilateral aid to develop infrastructure. The United Nations declared the 1960s as the Decade of Development, and proclaimed to achieve a goal of a minimum of 5 percent yearly growth in per capita income within all the developing countries by the end of the decade. This was to be achieved through investment of capital and technology from the richer to the poorer nations. By the 1960s all the post-colonial governments implemented their development policies, with support from international funding agencies, in a bid to close the technological gap between them and the industrial nations. The major thrust of the development economy lay essentially on industrialization and planning, which enlisted development economists and policy analysts to formulate mega projects to foster and promote growth of industrialization. Unfettered industrial growth was accepted by virtually all national governments as the veritable index of progress and a guarantee of food security. The developing countries’ urge to evade hunger and poverty through development is reflected in the multitude of treaties and declarations such as the Lima (1975) and Delhi (1980) Declarations on international cooperation in industrial development. In 1985 the UN General Conference on Industrial Development was reorganized as the UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), with the stated objectives of international cooperation in industry and enhancement of technological progress in the developing countries. International cooperation essentially consists of the transfer of technology and technical skills as well as financial loans (termed aid) from the North to the South to inseminate development through rapid industrialization of the latter. Aside from population control programmes, the Green Revolution was the most important part of this campaign for development, which the World Bank, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation designed to stave off the risk of a communist revolution in the Third World. The Green Revolution constituted a new form of land commercialization in the South – ‘a ruthless form of “land reform” (i.e. land appropriation) that was legitimated by reference to Malthusian population tendencies’ (Foster 2002: 149). The consequences of the Green Revolution will be discussed later in Section 3.4.2. The Malthusian scare of population growth leading to mass hunger was more than successful in creating a fear psychosis among the poor countries, who mortgaged their national wealth to Bretton Woods institutions for boosting cereal production and reversing population growth trends. Despite all doomsday prophesies, however, the Malthusian fear proves untenable. Even after India’s population has exceeded a billion, food production is still ahead of population growth. Both the food production and the amount of food

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stocked in government storehouses are considerably high – in fact so high that tens of thousands of tons of cereals stocked in the national Food Corporation storehouses often rot. In 2001, the parliament discussed the possibility of dumping rotten food grains into the Arabian Sea – an issue that became lead news in national dailies. Furthermore, the total fertility rate is rapidly falling over the past decade, much to the relief of neo-Malthusians and the government. As two leading development economists assure, ‘the population situation is not as terrifying as it is sometimes made to look, based on the citation of selectively chosen statistics (or non-statistics)’ (Drèze and Sen 2002: 198). However, endemic hunger persists even in situations of surplus food production. Hundreds dying from starvation in Kalahandi of Orissa, Palamou of Bihar and Shivpuri of Madhya Pradesh at a time when food grains were rotting in government storehouses is a glaring paradox of food security in South Asia. Hunger is not confined to the poor countries in the South alone: the US grows 40 percent more food than it needs, yet 26 million Americans live on the food poverty line. A global version of this paradox is the North’s policy to subsidize farms to not produce surplus food in the face of world hunger. After 50 years of modernization, world agricultural production today is more than sufficient to feed 6 billion human beings adequately. Cereal production alone, at about 2 billion tonnes or 330 kg of grain per caput/year and representing 3 600 calories per caput/day, could to a large extent cover the energy needs of the whole population if it were well distributed. (FAO 2000)

Clearly, food – like any other resource – is never ‘well distributed,’ and therefore hunger persists among the poor in all countries. As long as the machinery of development will continue to concentrate wealth in the hands of the few who have the political power to usurp most of the resources, poverty will never disappear, even if the human population could be drastically reduced, following Ehrlich’s triage ethic, to even a millionth of its current size.

3.2.3 Plunder by Aid and Trade Soon after the liberation of Asian, African and Latin American nations from European colonial rule, and with the US dominance restructuring international power relations, the American model of development became pervasive the world over. The aspiration of ex-colonies to attain a new Western living standard (modelled on the American lifestyle) drove their governments to join the global race for development. The dominant ideology of development produced ‘an unprecedented explosion of institutions, professions, organizations and disciplines whose raison d’être was the lodestar of development’ (Watts 1993: 263).

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These have created a new political infrastructure in which water, food and energy problems are all linked to industry and trade arrangements. This new development regime has facilitated infiltration of agents of development (the IMF, World Bank, USAID, ADB, and their ‘economic hitmen’14) into the South. It has created new markets for selling development projects, new disciplines like development economy and a new breed of development professionals to guide, plan and design the course of development. The Northern agents of development enter the new markets with multilateral aids that serve to bind the borrower countries in compelling trade agreements with the most powerful Northern governments. Thus, the system of lending development aid to the South seems to have established a new norm of charity: ‘rob Peter the pauper, pay Paul the robber.’ During the decades that happened to coincide with the rise of neo-liberal ideology, all borrower countries have experienced a widening of the economic inequalities (Altvater 1999; Galbraith 2002; Nayyar 2006), breakdown of national sovereignties (Hardt and Negri 2004), a growing influence of the Northern MNCs in national economies (Friedrichs and Friedrichs 2002), and a deepening human environmental crisis (Brown 2001; Monshipouri et al. 2003; Petrucci 2002; White 2002). Political opposition, from within the poor countries, to any development projects has been virtually nonexistent. Marxist political organizations in the South are aware of the potential socio-political change that would be brought about by industrialization, bur nonetheless believe that industrial development would ripen the historical conditions for a transition to socialism. Because the Marxian view of history (historical materialism) charted a linear evolution of societies from feudalism to capitalism as a historical necessity for socialist revolution to take place, the mainstream communist parties in India and Pakistan considered state-sponsored programme of transplanting of Euro-styled industrial capitalism in the South as a desirable step towards historical progress. In this milieu, environmentalism has often been dubbed a CIA-planted ‘bourgeois conspiracy,’ or at best a Western fad, to lead the Communist movement astray. During the ‘Decade of Development,’ the Left generally considered development of industrial capitalism in a poor country to be a hopeful monster, while environmental degradation and consequent effects on the workers’ health were either ignored or considered secondary to the issue of employment and wages. There was a minority faction of communists who argued that socialism could also be ushered in feudal and semi-feudal societies without recourse to industrialization. A majority of the Left, including Marxist revolutionaries, on the other hand, argued that comprador capitalists in the South were precluding the possibility of industrial capitalism taking roots in India. To remove the vestiges of feudalism and enhance

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industrial capitalism, these groups worked to bring about a neo-democratic revolution as a step toward socialism. Thus, both Marxist politicians and professional economists in the subcontinent considered that industrial growth would bring the destinies of the poor nations onto the expressway of history, eventually leading to the emancipation of the masses. The Left as well as the establishment vouchsafed industrial development to overcome economic backwardness, and branded the environmentalist critique of industrialism as ‘reactionary’ idealism. It was commonplace for environmentalism to be branded as a luxury, which the poor nations could afford only after having achieved prosperity at par with the North. The fetish of industrial growth thus ‘not only helped the pauperizing economic and political systems to reinforce and legitimize their positions, but it also led their victims to perceive their own situation in the same terms’ (Rahnema 1992: 217). In this atmosphere, Marx and Engels’ observations about industrial abuses of natural resources (e.g. soil degradation and profligate mode of resource exploitation under capitalism) went unnoticed by the Third World Marxists, just as analyses by Hueting, Mishan and Pigou (see Section 2.2.1) have been ignored by the neo-classical economic literature and neo-liberal policy structures. The faith in industrialization prompted all national governments in the South to industrialize agriculture and design mega development projects – such as big dams to generate electricity and irrigate lands to accelerate GNP growth. This reliance on techno-industrial means to development has bred a troop of engineers and policy economists who are blind to the environmental and social costs of development. In the case of agriculture, these engineers have focused only on the machinery like water pumps, sprayers, trawlers and harvesters, and infrastructure like roads, irrigation canals and dams, to the disruption of hydrological cycles and the marginalization of small farmers. Policy economists stressed on stepping up the output of staple food grains and ignored the serious faults in the existing land distribution and food pricing system that pauperize small and medium producers. In the case of big dams, the national research institutions (e.g. River Research Institute and Irrigation, Land Reclamation and Drainage Research Institute, later renamed Irrigation and Power Research Institute) conducted studies on the hydrology and structural aspects of large and medium dams, without adequate assessment of supply and demand of the resources, or consideration of the hazardous environmental and social impact of these dams. The irrigation establishment had been aware of the problems of water logging and sedimentation of reservoirs linked to the river irrigation and hydroelectricity schemes, but that awareness did not initiate any investigations by the research stations prior to the execution of the projects (Santha Kumar and Rajagopalan 1993: 592–93).15

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The primary rationale of development programmes all over the world is the principle of economic rationality, defined as the individuals’ pursuit of self-interest (Vriend 1996). Development economics assumes that economic rationality is natural to every individual everywhere, but cannot enable the poor to prosper because of industrial backwardness prevailing in the South. An enabling environment could be induced through injection of capital and human capital development (Williams 1999). Development specialists of the World Bank thus recommend financial aid programmes to inject capital infrastructure and develop individual skills in poor countries. These programmes would provide incentives to save and invest, safeguard the efficient working of the market, and ensure that all persons can contribute to and benefit from economic growth. The way to achieve development is by breaking the ‘vicious cycle of poverty,’ which is a key concept in development economics. Poor people in poor countries remain poor because The inducement to invest may be low because of the small buying power of the people, which is due to their small income, which… is due to low productivity. The low level of productivity, however, is a result of the small amount of capital used in production, which in turn may be caused at least partly by the small inducement to invest. (Norske 1953: 5)

Based on this argument, development economists prescribe three related target-programmes: i)

External aid (injections of capital) would provide ‘inducement to invest’;

ii) Investment would be targeted at increasing productivity through transfer of technology from the industrially and technologically advanced countries to the poor countries; iii) Government institutions should facilitate the functioning of the market to ease the flow of capital to the industries that are most capable of generating economic growth. The first programme facilitates foreign capital investments. World Bank or IMF loans help initiate development projects, which always are massive undertakings – huge river dams, pipelines, highways and heavy industries. Machinery as a rule is imported from the North, and building infrastructure needs foreign investments. Soon after the loan is sanctioned, multinational corporations (MNCs) enter the stage with promises of generating higher employment and greater revenues in the country’s domestic economy. The entry of MNCs into the host country’s economy is facilitated by multilateral financial agencies as well as the foreign policies of powerful Northern countries such as the USA. The World Bank also provides MNCs

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and large domestic corporations with ‘lucrative contracts, resource access, investment loans and gurantees, technical assistance, and advisory programs’ (Spitzer 2003: 14). Northern MNCs have close ties with officials of the multilateral development agencies like the World Bank, IMF and Asian Development Bank. These companies […] regularly meet with [the Multilateral Development] Bank staff to identify dam projects; invite project staff to company seminars; and involve themselves in the project cycle. Those who do not have ready access to MDB officials are able to call upon officials in trade ministries and embassies. (Lang et al. 2000: 5)

The host country encourages MNC ventures by offering a range of concessions including tax advantages and partial or sometimes total exclusion from national labour and environmental laws; in return it earns foreign exchange and receives transfer of technology and revenues from the MNC enterprises. MNCs in turn take advantage of low wages in the host country to truncate their production cost and make huge profits. Pauline Herrmann (1995) gives an example of the growing significance of MNCs in national economies. Mexico earned substantial foreign exchange by the maquiladora system in which a handful of Mexican firms assembled products manufactured in the USA and reshipped them back to the USA. In 1965, there were only 12 maquiladora firms. Following the 1993 NAFTA that has included Mexico as a signatory, the influence of US MNCs has increased (Hermann 1995). This growing influence of MNCs has increasingly caused transfer of much of Mexico’s export earnings overseas. By the end of 1998, the number of maquiladora firms rose to 2708. Out of this large number of firms, Mexican firms comprised only 28 percent, while 62 percent were owned by US companies, 4.6 percent by Japanese firms, and about five percent by other foreign companies (Sandoval, 2003). By mid-2001, Maquiladora firms numbered 3706 (Figure 7), most of which employed underage workers (San Martin 2000). In Honduras, maquiladora workers are reported to ‘work up to twenty hours a day making only thirty-one cents an hour’ (Monshipouri et al. 2003: 976). Workers in the Maquiladora factories are ignorant of the potential health hazards of the materials they handle. Inhabitants around the Maquiladora industrial sites, for example, suffer from inadequate housing and water supply; careless dumping of toxic wastes from the industry has resulted in serious health hazards including miscarriages and birth defects among the babies born to women Maquiladora workers (Kopinak 2004; Monshipouri et al. 2003). Thus, local communities and workers bear the social and environmental costs of the favourable industrial conditions in which the state nurtures the MNCs.

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Figure 7. The Growth of Maquiladora Firms in Mexico

Sources: NAFTA Facts Document #8312, http://www.mac.doc.gov/nafta/8312.htm; Sandoval (2003).

The transfer of technology, information and skills by MNCs constitute the second programme of development in countries receiving loans. Economic development programmes in the poor countries never fail to attract investments by MNCs, because their profits in developing countries are likely to be incomparably greater than in developed countries. Even in the era before structural adjustment, MNCs gained benefits in developing countries from lower production cost due to the obvious ‘Third World advantages’ (cheap labour force and ready availability of raw materials), and even greater benefits from transfer of outmoded energy- and material-intensive production, and of ecologically hazardous technologies into the newly industrializing countries (Dreyer et al. 1990). Technology transfer to the recipient country is also accomplished by hiring expert consultants exported from the Northern countries. These consultants help identify new market opportunities. They in fact impart ‘objectivity’ to the projects that benefit the Northern construction companies and equipment suppliers who scramble for contract bids in the Southern countries. The pattern of selecting experts is the same as that in the Bretton Woods institutions: The choice of heads for these institutions symbolises the institutions’ problem. While almost all of the activities of the IMF and the World Bank today are in the developing world, they are led by representatives from the industrialised nations. They are chosen behind closed doors, and it has never even been viewed as a prerequisite that the head should have experience in the developing world. (Stiglitz 2002b: 9)

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Joseph Stiglitz (2000) has also revealed the racism of the ‘older men’ who staff the IMF, by stating that the ‘IMF experts believe that they are brighter, more educated, and less politically motivated than the economists in the countries they visit’ – a belief that Stiglitz not only categorically refutes but adds that most of the IMF staff ‘frequently consist of third-rank students from first-rate universities.’ The assumed superiority of the North is enshrined in the customary arrangement for expert consultation. A huge proportion of the project money is spent on the consultants – to meet their bills of hotel accommodation, air travel, food and beverages, in addition to the consultancy fees. The average emolument for the experts from donor countries is several times higher than what their counterparts from the host country receive, although the latter are often more knowledgeable and experienced in the field. The World Bank Forestry Project in India, for example, brought in US experts who had little knowledge of tropical forest ecology, biodiversity, or of the local economy that was based on forest products. These ‘experts’ recommended monoculture plantation of exotics, with disastrous consequences for the forest ecology and village economies. The experts’ ignorance of ground – and background – realities (local land use histories, cultural practices and ecological features) often becomes evident in their project background reports that are gross generalizations based on secondary and tertiary data and generalities extrapolated from studies carried out in other locales – even other countries. Mistakes seem unavoidable under the circumstances, more so because of the elevated position of the experts at and around the top of the development hierarchy, which is far removed from field realities. The errors they make in designing any development project in any given locale are unlikely to ever get rectified, because of the almost insurmountable communication gap between the field-level development workers and the experts. As Lohman (1998) has shown, the knowledge of the field-level workers about real villages and real villagers cannot be communicated upward in the language of generalities spoken in the higher echelons of development. Richard Norgaard’s experience in Brazil is one such instance: During my first year in the Amazon in 1978, I repeatedly heard complaints from lower-level bureaucrats in the field. The evolution of Amazon development through experience, or ‘learning by doing,’ was not possible. Field administrators could neither alter the development plans themselves nor send adequate signals back to Brasilia as to why and how the plans should be modified... information from the field that contradicted the plans was not believed. Thus mistakes, such as the provision of credit to colonists only for the planting of inappropriate strains of rice, were repeated until the colonists went broke. (Norgaard 1994: 138–39)

Even well-intended development projects, funded by philanthropic institutions, often lead to ecological and social disasters because of the experts’ errors in

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perception, orientation and design of the projects. Experts tend to overlay certain key ecological generalities on the history of land use they imagine to be true. Examples of negative assumptions about traditional land use practices in the South are legion. Most environmental consultants, scientists, policy makers, agricultural experts, foresters, environmental NGOs and multilateral research and development institutions (like the FAO) have, until recently, bestowed upon the practice and practitioners of shifting cultivation a host of pejorative appellations: primitive, backward, unproductive, unsustainable, wasteful, exploitative and destructive of the environment. ‘They have been blamed for most of the world’s tropical deforestation, land degradation and climate disruption’ (IFAD et al. 2001: 41). This is the stereotypical ‘expert assumption’ about traditional resource management practices. Such assumptions are principally derived from the 19th century colonial administrative beliefs about the inferiority of native land use practices. The perception about shifting cultivation has recently changed on account of several field-based studies that have demonstrated this to be the most productive, environmentally friendly and biodiversity-promoting form of agriculture (see Section 6.5.1). However, ‘expert assumptions’ – even when proven wrong – legitimize importation of development schemes, but are not always tied to any particular project. The beliefs and myths held in the development hierarchy tend to become perpetuated as standardized knowledge of management. Thus most current national laws and policies are antagonistic toward shifting cultivation. Another example is the imagined land use history of Guinea which policymakers, development experts, local administrators and teachers have believed and propagated as an indisputable fact over three centuries. According to this history, shifting cultivation and other unwise land use practices by the local populace have, over centuries, degraded the once extensive forest cover of the country into today’s remnant forest islands. Recent research by Fairhead and Leach (1996) has subverted this belief, and shown that these so called ‘remnant forest islands’ were actually created by villagers through centuries of plantation (see Section 7.1). Failure to take account of these local ecological historical facts has often resulted in wrong resource management decisions and made local development programmes counter-productive (Fairhead and Leach 1996; Bob 2000). The third programme aims to facilitate private sector players in the economy. Beginning in the 1980s, the process of market liberalization has gained momentum, ‘first, by the politics of deregulation pushed on the world by global economic players and institutions from the IMF to the Davos World Forum; and second… by the meltdown of the socialist bloc’ (Altvater 1999: 37–38). Liberalization programmes like Structural Adjustment, followed by Deregulation, have buttressed the entry of MNCs into the South for garnering huge profits. Development

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projects aided by the World Bank, IMF and Asian Development Bank, etc., require recipient countries to adopt a broad range of neo-liberal policies – Deregulation, privatization, tariff reductions and export-led growth – that largely benefit MNCs (Spitzer 2003: 14). These MNCs increasingly, through international trade agreements, coerce national governments into opting for market liberalization, with an agenda for globalization of their operation. The most decisive trade arrangement was the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), supervised and arbitrated by the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which induced policies of trade liberalization and deregulation in the South, with promises of ‘development for all.’ The ambience of globalization itself has further delimited the very scope of environmental and human rights considerations in development projects that are primarily designed to serve the interests of what Gadgil and Guha (1992) call the bureaucratic-industrial-politician clique. In the words of Heinz Brunold, the head of civil engineering of the Austrian construction company Steirische Wasserkraft-und Elektrizitats-Akiengessellschaft. It is hoped that future generations will make their own philosophy to build harmonised, attractive, ecologically optimized and yet technically sophisticated and cost-effective facilities, based on well thought-out and honest planning processes. In our current economic system where unlimited liberalism is preached and the minimization of [construction] costs is the only priority, however, there is no room for works of this kind. Let us hope the time will change. (cited in Lang et al. 2000: 9)

The economic globalization agenda was born of this ‘unlimited liberalism,’ married to market-based economics, and enhanced market liberalization programmes. In effect, these programmes seek to remove all currency and trade restrictions, in order to reduce the possibility of rent seeking and enlarge the sphere of individual enterprises. Earlier, the World Bank’s sectoral adjustment programmes also attempted to promote the same objectives, but were targeted at specific sectors of the economy. Both kinds of programmes are pivoted on the ‘rational’ expectation that (a) putting an end to the reliance of agricultural producers on government arrangements would make way for incentives for enhancing production; and that (b) terminating the government control of industries would facilitate open market competition, which would accelerate industrial growth. ‘The clear rationale here is that the only way economic agents can be induced to engage in economic productive activity is by ensuring their autonomy and constructing the right kind of institutional framework’ (Williams 1999: 91). Because agricultural development is one of the most important components of development in the South, the Green Revolution opened a vast market for operation of giant MNCs in these countries. Clearly, the scope of garnering profits

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lay in three related fields: seeds, fertilizers and pesticides. In fact, all HYV seeds were sold to farmers as part of a package of these three elements of development. Most of the HYV seed producers are also the leading vendors of chemical industry – Sandoz, Pioneer Hi-bred, Cargill, Volvo, ICI, France Mais, Monsanto, Syngenta, Dekalb-Pfizer, BASF, whereas only six are traditionally seed producers. Cargill is now the world’s largest seed corporation, while Monsanto is the largest producer of PCBs and at the same time, the largest producer of GM crops. These companies are spreading their empire in the South by deploying PR outreach to persuade farmers, funding biotech research in prestigious institutions (like Bose Institute, Kolkata and Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore), and by bribing government officials,16 with an aim to establish their absolute monopoly in crop seeds business, and to usurp the agricultural economy of the target countries. Macro-level institutional reforms (‘structural adjustments’), aimed to remove government-imposed trade barriers, serve to ensure expansion of corporate profit. Structural adjustments and deregulation, prescribed by the World Bank, are thus welcomed by all MNCs, who, immediately after the opening of the market in the poor countries, have opened their plants and ramified their business operations. Globalization of their control over the resources of the poor nations is an inevitable consequence. Apart from macro-level institutional transformations, the World Bank has initiated numerous micro-level institutional reforms, with the objective of developing economic rationality among individuals of the poor countries. Such programmes, like the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Programme (CARP) in the Philippines, started in 1988, and the Literacy and Functional Skills Project in Ghana, started in 1990, give trainings to villagers in family planning, credit and financial management and accountancy skills that include calculation of profit. The programmes hope to instil economic rationality into these villagers, who can then contribute to productive economic activities. Williams (1999) identifies such programmes as attempts to turn the poor of the South into Homo oeconomicus, economically rational persons, subjected to the discipline of the market. [T]hese various projects and programs are designed to teach people the basic tenets of micro-economics, to promote various forms of capitalist accounting techniques, to see the connection between products and costs, to employ recognizably modern management practices, and to use a ‘systematic’ approach to problem solving. The self which these projects… create is disengaged and autonomous (free from negative and dangerous social customs) and innovative and reflexive (using a ‘systematic approach to problem solving’) and calculating (through functional numeracy and accounting techniques). (Williams 1999: 95)

Without exception, foreign assistance for development all over the South has supported income generation programmes, and each such programme has the

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built-in component of ‘capacity building,’ which is thought to be needed to ensure the sustainability of the project. The income generation programmes serve to consolidate the economic rationality, which not only surmounts group solidarity, but also instils a new morality of exploiting one’s own group members. In the villages of India, where endogamous tribal or caste groups were characterized by traditional group solidarity, the new exogenous enterprises have galvanized disintegration of traditional social bonds and forging of new inter-caste alliances based on short-term business interests. In the course of these projects, therefore, the traditional values attached to the natural resources and customary resource management institutions are subverted. The adoption of the new economic ‘rationality’ of pursuit of self-interest conflicts with the traditional community interest, which is eventually subjugated by the new forces of the market. Farm forestry and pisciculture, for instance, have prompted destruction of numerous village woodlots and ponds that were communally managed. Such despoliation has not only eroded cultural-religious institutions, but also destroyed the elements of ecosystems which were preserved over centuries for key ecological functions and services. Following persistent criticisms from environmentalists, the World Bank has recently adopted certain changes in its policy that now reflects a semblance of concern for the environment. However, its mission to export ‘sustainable economic growth’ as a rule to human sufferings and economic setbacks, which the Bank considers only short-term. The Bank reifies the North’s hegemony that has increasingly organized development in the South. The G7 and G8 meetings have proved that a few powerful Northern nations are decisive in forging trade relationships between countries. The first G7 Summit was held in 1975 with the aim to bring together leading capitalist economies in order to tighten their control over international trade. The intensifying power imbalance was signalled from the very first G7 Summit. As Putnam and Bayne (1987: 29) analyzed, The first and essential feature of the summit was that it should be small, select and personal. It should be limited to countries which carried weight and influence. It should bring together those directly responsible for policy.

The subsequent summits, as well as all international economic organizations, have increasingly indicated an intensifying inequality of power between the select few Northern countries and the entire South, which is excluded from any significant decision-making process with regard to trade conditions and regulations. Globalization of the market, through market liberalization in the South has been the major concern of the North to maintain its own resource base and standard of living. The globalization agenda is strengthened by the World Bank, IMF, and most

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recently the WTO, which serves the trade and political interests of the Northern political hegemony and business interests of MNCs (Friedrichs and Friedrichs 2002; Stiglitz 2002a). With its globalization agenda, the WTO seeks to align the world to a transnational economic order dominated by market-oriented capitalism. As Samir Amin (2003) has discussed, the neo-liberal dominant discourse seeks to establish a free-market empire, whose rules will be set and flouted at will by a global corporatocracy. Thus, deregulation and lifting of all import barriers are enforced in all Southern countries, while import restrictions and export subsidies continue – and sometimes are strengthened – in the US. Globalization is thus an attempt to forge a homogenized system of prices. The model of globalization that WTO seeks to establish is the model of the US commercial hegemony. ‘Beyond the market, plus liberal democracy (formal democratic rule), plus social pluralism, plus the worldview of CNN, there is nothing left but one-dimensional thinking – plus, of course, unpleasant villain states that benign free-market fighters are free to bomb when they wish’ (Altvater 1999: 37).17

Notes 1. As a brilliant exception to the general European policy of plunder of forests in colonies, the French colonial government in Mauritius passed an ordinance in 1769 stipulating maintenance of a quarter of all landholdings as forest to prevent soil erosion, reforest all denuded areas, and prohibiting destruction of all forest stands within 200 metres of water (McNeely et al. 1995: 733). 2. Walford’s 1879 study, published in the prestigious Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, recorded 31 serious famines in 120 years of British rule, in contrast with 17 famines in the previous 2000 years. These data fly in the face of the official British claim that they had rescued India from ‘timeless hunger’ (Davis 2001: 19). 3. The point of ‘sheer loot’ is perhaps best illustrated by Elihu Yale, who bequeathed a part of his property he had accumulated during his tenure of 27 years in India, in service of the English East India Company, to a proposed university in America. The money obtained from the auction of the goods he had sent in three ships was enough for completion of Yale University’s first college building in 1718. Yale was known as an English nabob in Wrexham, England, and, upon returning from India with a large fortune, was accused of sharp practice. Subsequently, other servants of the East India Company, notably Lord Warren Hastings and Lord Robert Clive, were similarly impeached by the British Parliament. Clive’s reply to his accusers is well known – ‘By God, Mr. Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation!’ 4. The Sepoy Mutiny was sparked by the rising discontent of the Indian sepoys (soldiers) of the East India Company’s army. The sepoys sought to reinstate the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah and many native kings, whose States had arbitrarily been usurped by the Company for accession. The fire of the Mutiny, which Marx identified as the ‘first

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6.

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8.

Beyond Developmentality Indian war of independence’, received wide mass support, spread throughout northern and central India, but was eventually quelled by the Company in 1858. Immediately after the mutiny was extinguished, the rule of India was taken over by British Crown. During this period, forests were considered ‘the worst enemy’ of the British because mutineers as well as tribal rebels before them had used jungles as a hiding place. In the 1960s and 1970s, political assassinations and racial disturbances at home and the Vietnam War marred the global image of ‘ideal American democracy’, which the US film industry tried to instil in the public mind abroad. At the same time, American films and TV series were – and continue to be – a principal means to expand the cultural hegemony inherent in the American economic and political expansion. Today, American movie and TV screens and, consequently, those in Western Europe are flooded with films spreading the idea of US world supremacy and lauding cowboy vainglory, racism, violence, cruelty and war. Scores of films like The Red Dawn, Rambo, Rocky-IV, White Nights, etc., are designed to portray the outer and inner aspects of neo-globalism (Gurevich 1990: 118) This truism frequently appears in writings of many modern non- and anti-Marxist scholars in post-modernist wordings, such as: ‘the discourse of the dominant shapes and structures the discourse of the dominated’ (Keesing 1994: 41). These authors either do not know or feel safe to ignore that this definition of ideology owes to Marx and Engels (1846: 67), later elaborated in the Gramscian notion of hegemony. As Sanjib Baruah succinctly puts it: The Indian constitution gives the central Parliament the power to form a new state, change state boundaries, change the name of the state – and it can do all that with simple majorities. These actions are not even considered constitutional amendments… two dozen or so amendments made by simple majorities have changed state boundaries or created new states in India. (Baruah 1999: 107) In the first edition of his Essay, Malthus described only two checks on population growth, namely vice and misery. In the revised and expanded second edition (1803: I.15), Malthus introduced a third check: moral restraint, which he narrowly defined as ‘the restraint from marriage which is not followed by irregular gratifications.’ For the Reverend Malthus, abortion and contraception were vices. In the 5th edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population published in 1817, Malthus noted: Indeed I should always particularly reprobate any artificial and unnatural means of checking population, both on account of their immorality and their tendency to remove a necessary stimulus to industry. If it were possible for each married couple to limit by wish the number of their children, there is certainly reason to fear that the indolence of the human race would be greatly increased; and that neither the population of individual countries, nor of the whole earth, would ever reach its natural and proper extent. (Malthus 1817, Appendix, cited in Hutchinson 1979: 14) By the time of the publication of the 5th edition of the Essay, contraceptive methods had already been in practice in France, although in Victorian England, they were associated with prostitution and venereal diseases. Much as Malthus disapproved, ‘an immediate effect of Malthus [in Europe] was the generation of interest in family

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limitation, not so much as a means of postponing an ultimate demographic catastrophe, but as a way of avoiding misery, if not vice’ (Hutchinson 1979: 15). The vice of abortion and contraception spread in late Victorian England through efforts of neoMalthusians. In 1877 two advocates of contraception, Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant (of Theosophical Society fame), were booked to trial in England for their contraceptive campaign, but eventually emerged victorious. Their case served to further popularize the contraceptive campaign which put England into the forefront of deliberate family planning. 9. The family planning drive in India includes post-partum sterilization or intrauterine device insertion without knowledge of women visiting health centres (Drèze and Sen 2002: 210–11, fn. 34). These patients as a rule belong to low-income groups from urban slums and villages. The health workers tend to believe that they did a good service to the women by saving them from the drudgery of repetitive childbearing (personal records, unpublished). 10. In 1948, William Vogt, head of the Conservation Section of the Pan American Union, blamed modern medicine and sanitation for saving the lives of millions of the poor, thereby increasing their misery, and causing disaster for the world (Foster 2002: 148–49). 11. The inherent injustice embodied in Selassie’s principle cited here relates not just to his intolerance of the other’s view of the good, ‘but to the principles of famine relief – more correctly non-relief – followed by his government’ (Sen 1992: 78). 12. The conjecture that poor people are the destroyers of nature has a wide acceptance, and is used by Southern governments to beg for international financial aid for poverty alleviation. However, this concern for environment qua poverty reduction protects the immense industrial-commercial nexus behind destruction of forests and wetlands. It also hides the converse fact that development programmes cause forest destruction, which in turn leads to poverty and disentitlement of ecosystem peoples – by extinction of their resource base and displacement. 13. The Indian government set targets for the Sixth Five Year Plan (1985–1990) at 22 million sterilizations and 7.9 million IUD insertions. Targets for the Seventh Five Year Plan (1980–1985) were 31 million sterilizations and 211 million IUD insertions. All these years, ‘reaching the target became more important than meeting a woman’s needs and wishes’ (The Corner House 2004: 27). 14. This term is borrowed from Confessions of an Economic Hitman: How the U.S. Uses Globalization to Cheat Poor Countries out of Trillions (2004) by John Perkins, a former member of the international banking community. In this book, he describes how he worked to liquidate the economies of selected Asian countries by bribing and intimidating their governments to borrow enormous development loans from institutions like the World Bank and USAID. 15. There is in fact no certainty that prior information or awareness of the problem would necessarily lead to prudence in policy formulation or execution of projects. Several warnings about environmental and health risks from the Aswan dam in Egypt failed to prevent policy planners from increasing the height of the High Dam (Hughes 2000). Warnings from scientists and even the World Bank’s report regarding possible environmental damages and social costs failed to stop the Sardar Sarovar dam in

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India’s Narmada Valley project. Rather, the height of the dam was increased, ignoring all environmental, human rights and social concerns. 16. In 2005, the US Security and Exchange Commission sued Monsanto Company for its illegal payment of US$ 700,000 to Indonesian Ministry of Environment officials, in order to protect its GM seeds business. The bribery amount ‘was derived from a bogus product registration scheme undertaken by two Indonesian entities owned or controlled by Monsanto.’ Monsanto agreed to settle the lawsuit upon payment of a civil penalty of US$ 10 million in 2005. In a related proceeding, the US Department of Justice entered into an agreement with Monsanto to defer prosecution on charges of bribery upon payment of a penalty of $1 million (USSEC 2005). 17. This comment was made long before the US attack on Iraq.

C h a p t e r

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Fantasies and Falsities

I

t behooves to reiterate what was stated earlier about the doctrine of development. The doctrine does not allow envisaging alternative modes of economic life. A body of critique of the market system exists, but is seldom acted upon. As discussed above, false assumptions and interpretations of data prevail in the neo-classical development discourse. The assumption that economic growth leads to environmental and social equity also remains unanimously accepted as a fact of life. Thus, contrary facts about economies on both the local and global level are often ignored or else accepted as anomalies at best. The whole gamut of the economic infrastructure, institutions, work force, corporations, consumers and their expectations – all seem to evince what Petrucci (2002: 112) calls a ‘radical inertia’ – radical because ‘the processes concerned are so deep-rooted that alternative modes of operation or social organization are simply not perceived or made permissible within existing ideology and practice.’ Neo-liberal capitalism seems to intensify this radical inertia by creating and re-creating a fantasy world of development in which everyone aspires to live in perpetual happiness and limitless prosperity. Happiness in this world is equated with acquisition of commodities. The consumerist pursuit for material proxy for happiness is fuelled by, and reflected in, the misleading figures of development, measured in terms of increasing production of goods. The radical inertia of society tends to forestall questioning the validity of the assumption of economic growth leading to happiness. The continuing pre-occupation with techno-urban-industrial growth is maintained by, and in turn sustains, the fallacies of neo-classical economic premises 165

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(discussed in Section 2.2). The fallacious fixation with technological fixes prohibits serious contemplation over consequences of development. In addition, the multifaceted myth of industrial development as emancipation creates a fantasy world, where conspicuous production and consumption of garbage become indexes for happiness and prosperity. This fantasy world thus maintains the radical inertia and also creates a resistance to change. Techno-urban fascism and corporatocracy thus are able to maintain a façade of democracy, which disallows citizen involvement in examining existing policy assumptions and in designing new policies to solve environmental problems. The following sections will examine the social processes that sustain this inertia of modern society ridden with developmentality.

4.1

The Fantastic World of Consumerism

As capitalism advances, money tends to determine everything that the individual needs – from having fun in a nightclub, getting special medical care to buying the right to plunder a resource. Possession of wealth therefore betokens happiness. The identity, worth and social status of the individual are determined in terms of the quantities of money (s)he can accumulate and is able to spend, especially on luxury goods for private consumption. The individual’s desire to acquire and own commodities to meet her ‘wants’, rather than fulfilling her necessities, constitutes what Marx (1887: 557) called ‘a conventional degree of prodigality, which is also an exhibition of wealth.’ Commodity fetishism and the desire to exhibit wealth propel the capitalist market, which fosters a spurious individualism by encouraging people to define themselves in terms of their purchases. ‘You are what you consume’. Acquisition of commodities thus becomes the primary means to achieving happiness. Consumerism, as ‘a materially embedded ideological reality’ (White 2002: 89), reinforces the power of money and the moneyed class, with a concomitant devaluation of the human values. Consumerism is ‘a name given to a process in which certain habits of consumption are intertwined with the pursuit of profit’ (White 2002: 86), a process that facilitates realization of surplus value. It is intricately linked to the process of commodification in which goods and services enter the market to satisfy ‘consumer needs’ for more materials – beyond the necessities of human existence. Expansion of the market requires creation of consumer wants for goods produced and services offered by industry. Since consumption plays a vital role in the realization of surplus value, the quantities of consumer goods and services are continually expanded by creating new needs and ensuring the rapid turnover of commodities through planned obsolescence, fashion

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trends, or accelerated technical innovation. This form of consumption is, in turn, sold back to the private individual as a form of ‘freedom,’ one that requires a minimum of effort or conscious reflection. (White 2002: 87)

The logic of market expansion is pivoted on the process of encapsulation of every individual within the sphere of consumerism. Consumerism functions best upon the breakdown of community at all levels (Haughley 1997), and is triumphant in a society where individualism is paramount. In a society where community interests prevail over individual interests, consumerism is restrained. The ideal of simplicity of living has repeatedly surfaced in various social movements and subcultures, where the long-term welfare of the community is linked with the individual’s spiritual unfoldment. Simplicity has always been admired as a virtue in all religions. The Amish society, with its legendary communitarian ideal, is proactively antagonistic to consumerism. Until recently, consumerism has remained suppressed in Israel’s kibbutz where the commune’s needs used to overtake the individual’s wants. In these as well as many traditional societies, simplicity has been upheld as the ideal for respectable living. Over the recent decades, the globalization of developmentality has corroded the very ideal of simplicity, which appears to be no less ridiculous and no more admirable in the modern world than does religious abstinence. Consumerism is a characteristic of developmentality in that it creates ‘lacks’ to be satisfied by material resources and consolidates the desire for more. The market creates and perpetuates the individual’s craze for more, what John Haughley has called pleonexia: ‘an insatiability for more of what I already experience or have’ (Haughley 1997: 19). This insatiability, based on relative wants, builds up a sense of deprivation, and sets the individual on a ‘Red Queen race’ for acquiring more (see Section 2.1). By turning shopping into a credo, consumerism turns people into Homo oeconomicus. Thus, all consumers are not producers, but all producers as well as non-producers tend to become consumers. As Marx (1887: 689) wrote, ‘The advance of capitalist production develops a workingclass, which by education, tradition, habit, looks upon the conditions of that mode of production as self-evident laws of Nature.’ Farmers as producers accept these ‘conditions’ and become consumers when they buy costly agrochemicals and ‘high-yielding’ seeds. Factory workers become consumers when they need trendy T-shirts and bottled beverages. They all become consumers when they decide that drinking coke, wearing Nike shoes and sporting a cell phone would bring them higher social status or greater influence. All become consumers when they get persuaded by advertisements to buy particular brands of body lotion, fabrics, or television set – to elicit ‘neighbours’ envy.’ In this embracing of

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consumerism, and acceptance of the material ‘want’ as necessity of life, developmentality is perpetuated. In the West, the craze for more materials for comfortable living has become a virtue. In the US, rampant consumerism was boosted during the Cold War period by the state’s campaign against communism – to demonstrate that freemarket capitalism was able to satisfy the needs of the individual more comprehensively than was Soviet communism. Indeed, one of the major factors for the collapse of socialism in the Soviet empire was growing consumerist desires among the youth who were disgruntled with the regime for denying them the life that their counterparts in the US appeared to enjoy. The socialist drudgery of free education, medical care, work for all and basic food security failed to stand against the free-market charm of Mercedes, Nike, Coke, Walkman and Van Heusen, any more than against pervasive corruption, the missing diversity of foods and freedom of opinion. Even after the end of the Cold War, the state’s drive in the West to strategically pose consumer satisfaction as an antidote to communism prevails. Despite being anti-Marxist, Pope John Paul II (1991: para 19) was precise in his statement: the affluent society ‘seeks to defeat Marxism on the level of pure materialism by showing how a free-market society can achieve a greater satisfaction of material human needs than Communism, while equally excluding spiritual values.’ Consumerism thrives essentially on the individual’s choice of commodities and services based on his perception of well-being relative to others. Satisfaction is derived on the basis of what others buy. Those ‘others’ that people seek to emulate are what sociologists call ‘the reference group’ or models. Commodities like clothing, cosmetics and cars that are used by the reference group thus become status symbols. As the market expands, consumerism creates newer and newer consumer needs, and consumption tends to become more and more conspicuous and costlier. Consumer needs do not reflect the quality of life, nor does it relate to the availability and distribution of materials needed for a healthy life. Rather, being linked to relative purchasing power, consumerism creates an illusion of good living by dint of acquisition of more and costlier goods. Consumer needs do not reflect the need to enhance public health, for example, but constructs a plethora of accessories as proxy to health care. Thus, the market creates consumer needs of food additives, food supplements and junk foods, instead of improving food quality. The diversity of essential food items (like different varieties of rice or pulses) is seldom advertised unless the varieties are associated with symbols of prestige or status. It pays the biotech industry to spend billions of dollars on manufacturing and advertising the genetically engineered ‘Golden Rice’ as a technological quick-fix to the problem

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of vitamin A deficiency in South Asia, rather than promoting locally available indigenous plant diversity with enormously higher contents of vitamin.1 The biotech industry poses GM foods as those with better quality, because they are manufactured by using modern technology. It is as if to persuade one to wear fashionable eyeglasses for the sake of looking better, rather than seeing better. The consumer’s want is shaped fundamentally by frequency-dependent preference. Initially, ‘want’ is constituted by the desire to acquire a group marker – a talisman of occupation, social rank and class affiliation. When ownership of specific commodities becomes a marker of opulence, class or status, everyone wants to own them. This triggers the dynamics of frequency-dependent bias toward the desired marker. Thus, lacework in clothing was fashionable in eighteenth century Europe because it was a marker of opulent aristocracy until the lace-making machine brought its price down to the reach of the general public. A similar dynamics is evident in most countries of South and Southeast Asia, where ownership of the cell phone – the ‘rich man’s toy’ – has become an index of high social rank, influence and affluence. In their initial phase of marketing, telecommunications gadgets have always been advertised as luxury attachments exclusively catering to the needs of the higher echelons of society. Even the first telephones to be rented out to public were offered only to people of ‘good breeding and refinement’ (Stern and Gwathmey 1994: 57). The cell phone as an index of the owner’s social status in the South, especially in newly industrializing countries, is no different from what the fur coat used to be in the past. Fashion demands of the rich in Europe catapulted the fur trade worldwide over the past two centuries, killing off numerous mammals, reptiles and birds, pushing many to the verge of extinction. The great power of conspicuous consumption is exemplified by the fact that 127,080 beavers, 30,325 martens and 1,276 wolves, as well as 12,428 otters and fishers, 110,000 racoons, and a startling aggregation of 16,512 bears were received in the French port of Rochelle in the same year [1743]. People today who have no reasonable expectation of seeing even one of these creatures in the wild without considerable effort to do so might well look carefully at these figures. (Peter Mathiesen 1987: 81)

Conspicuous consumption by the rich is a demonstration of the ‘handicap principle’ (Zahavi and Zahavi 1997) – showing off one’s financial prowess in terms of one’s ability to afford a pecuniary handicap (see Technical Discussion 6). Particular items of the handicap become an index of financial success, or ‘success in life’, which the poor always yearn to achieve and show. The poor and the underprivileged strive to emulate the rich and the glamorous élite by owning costly commodities. Brands become fashion statements through advertisements that equate

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ownership of brands with glamour and rich lifestyle. Exclusivity is the message of advertisements of all brand goods like Van Heussen shirts, Nike shoes and RayBan glasses, to be owned by exclusive, ‘successful’ people, the privileged class. Although an increasingly larger section of the middle class is subscribing to the cellular phone, its ownership still betokens a privileged social status held predominantly by the wealthier class, which now owns costlier brands. Once the market of cellular phones in Taiwan has become highly saturated, DBTEL company aims to turn the handset into an exclusive luxury fashion item, and has launched a series of handmade diamond phones in January 2003. The world’s most expensive handset is one with a diamond-encrusted flip cover and a three-carat centrepiece, costing $T 1 million or about twice as much as a family car in Taiwan. In this consumption pattern, advertising is an immensely powerful means of commodification of values. Advertisements work to make the masses feel discontented with what they have. Customers are not profitable if they are satisfied; discontented customers run the mill of profit. Hence all technological innovations undergo planned obsolescence. The advertising industry manufactures consumer needs using the raw materials of social values embedded in private property relations and personal choices based on aspirations of climbing the social ladder. It orients and sets consumer aspirations and choices. Advertisements are what specialists call ‘items of persuasive communication’ designed to change attitudes, beliefs and opinions of people receiving the message (Mullen and Johnson, 1990: 49). The relative level of social benefits (e.g., influence, power, prestige, wealth, income, sexuality, success) that the ‘hip’ brands represent is the key factor in persuading the consumer to form favourable beliefs about the product, acquiring strong associations with the product and with the use of the product. These positive feelings toward the product result in intentions to buy it (Mullen and Johnson 1990: 107). The advertisement induces people to participate in the sacrament of luxury expenditure in order to acquire the commodity that signifies a social position in the system of images of power, prestige, sexuality and success. The stronger the association of the brand with the social class to which the consumer aspires to belong, the more compulsive is her intention to buy the product. The business world is well conversant with this social memetics of consumerism. As the chair of DBTEL aphoristically expressed it, ‘Once people start to worship a brand, they will do whatever they can to own the products under that brand’ (Li 2003). The popular media (films, television commercials, pop magazines and advertisements that appear in them) almost exclusively portray the wealthy class, which becomes the emulative target for consumers. As consumer researchers assert, movie stars and television characters become lifestyle symbols and orient viewers

Technical Discussion 6

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The Handicap Principle and Conspicuous Consumption

Zahavi and Zahavi (1998) showed that animals may derive greater benefits from displaying evolutionarily costly features than those who cannot afford the cost of these features. For example, the peacock’s tail is a cumbersome handicap for its escape from a predator, but the surviving male’s tail sends the boasting signal to peahens that he is capable of affording the cost of the long tail. The handicap is a signal that indicates the superior quality of the individual who sends the signal. The handicap principle states that a signal that is costly to display will not be easily faked. Therefore, ‘handicap traits’ are reliable indicators of the possessor’s quality (Bowles and Hammerstein 2003). This explains the evolution of costly traits that aid in mate selection, just as it explains why the costly hand-woven lace was a fashion of the rich in 19th century Europe until lace-weaving machines were invented. The lace fell out of grace as soon as it became cheap and affordable to everyone. In a society where the rich enjoy greater social privileges, prestige and power than the poor, individuals tend to show off affluence. But showing off has a cost, which only the rich can afford, and boastfully display. Costly consumer items are good signs of affluence. Ownership of cars and the cell phone signal high social rank, influence and affluence in South and South East Asia. In the race for winning greater influence and status, richer people will tend to show off more by owning costlier gadgets (like palmtop computers) that less affluent individuals cannot afford to own. This can be formally shown in a coherent language of ‘handicap mathematics.’ I follow the description by Bowles and Hammerstein (2003: 162–63) of costly secondary sexual traits as an analogy to financially costly show-off traits in modern human cultures. Assume that Ri is the amount of money possessed by the ith individual, and that Ri is indicated by a signal of affluence si. In other words, personal wealth Ri is indicated by some show-off signal si. Now assume that R1 > R2, and that the signals s1 and s2 have certain social benefits b1 and b2, respectively. The benefits may be considered in terms of differential accrual of social prestige, status, or degree of personal influence commanded by affluence, so that b1 > b2 for s1 > s2. The signals have costs c1 and c2, respectively. In this game of winning greater social benefits from greater showing off of affluence, the payoff w to an individual is the social benefits (in terms of status, prestige or influence) from showing off less the cost of showoff, i.e., w = b – c. Let us assume that the population is at an evolutionary equilibrium and that the rich are always more influential and occupy higher social status than the poor. If the signal of opulence correctly conveys how rich individuals are, s1 must be the best response of R1 to societal appreciation and s2 the best response of R2. That is to say: w(s1, R1) ≥ w (s1, R2) and w (s2, R2) ≥ w (s1, R2). continued...

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continued... These inequalities imply the following comparative social advantage (in terms of prestige and influence, for example) for wealthier individuals: w(s1, R2) – w (s2, R1) ≥ w (s1, R2) – w (s2, R2). If the benefit function b depends only on the signal and not on the actual amount of wealth possessed by the signalling individual, then this inequality implies that the comparative cost of signal s2 for individuals possessing R2 is never less than the comparative cost of signal s1 for richer individuals: Δc (R2) ≥ Δc(R1) where Δc (R1) = c (s1, R1) – c (s2, R1) and Δc (R2) = c (s1, R2) – c (s2, R2). Thus, in a population where benefits depend purely on the type of signal si, it is the poorer individuals who will incur greater cost of showing off than richer individuals. In other words, individuals in good condition are better able than those in poor condition to bear an increased cost of display. This extra cost of showing off will thus become prohibitive of any ‘cheating’ display that would wrongly reveal affluence. Obviously, poor individuals will incur greater additional cost of appearing richer than will affluent individuals, because the latter can afford to bear the additional cost. In this game of signification of affluence, greater affluence is represented by costlier signals: the signal itself is reified. The signal remains a signal of affluence as long as it remains costly. Once the signal becomes cheap, so that everyone can afford to bear its cost, it will cease to become a reliable signal, because everyone can afford to bear its cost. As the signal loses its significance, display of the signal will become prohibitive of any cheating display. Thus, cheating display is prevented (a) when the signal is reliable and costly, as well as (b) when the signal is unreliable and cheap (i.e., when Δc (R2) = Δc(R1). This explains why the lace fell out of grace in Europe when it became cheap.

toward an array of commodities to buy: ‘Viewers [of television commercials] see and hear what members of other social classes have and how they consume, even behind their closed doors’ (O’Guinn and Shrum 1997: 279). Recent analyses of consumer behaviour indicate that since the 1980s, more and more people believe that good life can be had from great affluence, symbolised by more and more costly commodities. Juliet Schor notes that an increasing proportion of the population is identifying various luxury goods as necessities – a fact that indicates an ‘upscaling’ of consumerism over the recent decades. Furthermore, The increasing prevalence and importance of brand-name status goods (as well as their cheap counterfeit versions) is another indicator of the growth of affluent lifestyles. Visible labels appear to have proliferated to a whole range of products that were not previously heavily ‘branded’ or symbolized. (Schor 1999: 45)

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However, the memetics of fashion works in the reverse direction, too. In the wake of the counterculture of the 1960s, ghetto life as well as black music became a fashion statement for the Western youth. In the affluent West, the ‘edgy’ life of the poor and the rough is a model for the wealthy youth whose life is uneventfully smooth and unchallenging. The ghetto life thus gave rise to a distinctive fashion within the ‘edgy’ youth subculture.2 The jeans of miners and foundry workers thus became hip fashion. The beltless, sloppy jeans falling-off-hips style currently popular among modern urban teens presumably originated in prison, where inmates are forbidden to wear belts (Kotlowitz 1999: 70). For the urban, wealthy American youth, ‘the life of the ghetto kids is edgy, gutsy, risky – all that adolescents crave’ (Kotlowitz 1999: 71). However, this craving is not to live the ghetto life itself; it’s only fashion-deep: the beltless jeans, the slangs and expletives, the hard rock and marijuana – all are ‘hip’ because they hint at the ‘edgy, gutsy, risky’ life of the poor.3 The ‘copy-the-edgy-ghetto-kids’ meme has crossed international boundaries, and become just another fascinating fad for the wealthy youth. Outside of USA, it has lost most of its original social relevance and historical context, but retained its ‘hip’ value. A South Asian teenager hardly knows the origin of the saggy sloppy jeans, but happily wears them to feel and look ‘smart’ and ‘cool’. These fashion goods are fascinating because they create as well as satisfy consumer wants. Consumers aspire to be rich, look smart and appear ‘cool’ in the eyes of the world. Consumerist desires are inculcated, indulged and pushed by the advertising industry. The ad industry creates an interface between production of consumer goods and services, on the one hand, and socially constructed needs or wants designed to ensure consumption of these goods and services, on the other. Because ‘want’ is constantly created by the market and the progressivist conceptualization of continuous economic growth protects the consumerist ideology, limits to growth appear both unthinkable and impermissible. Growth sustains the process of commodification. ‘There is, then, a certain coherency in the way in which growth has become entrenched in the minds and hearts of many a private consumer, individual worker, economic planner, and corporate boss’ (Kotlowitz 1999: 71). Consumerism also entails the creation of wastes, and the problem of their disposal. The quantities of wastes and pollution increase proportionately with the level of consumption. As more and more countries in the South embrace the Northern model of development, noxious gases, chemicals, heavy metals and plastics are increasingly dumped into the country’s soil, air and water. Luxury goods become increasingly concentrated in a few pockets of prosperity within the country. The increasing disparity in resource distribution allures the poor to

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aspire for the luxury goods, which propels consumerism and the market. While equality of access to all life’s opportunities and comforts for everyone are the professed goal of progress, consumerism turns that dream into a nightmare. The nightmare, of course, is the prospect of a China whose 1.2 billion citizens will someday be prosperous enough to consume automobiles at the same rate as do people in advanced countries. At present, China has 680 people per private automobile; the United States has 1.7 people per car. Could the world survive such progress? If not, who must give up their cars, the Chinese or the Americans? (Greider 1999: 30)

The voice of consumerism systematically raises objection to the logic of sustainability and to environmentalist criticisms of continual growth. There are various kinds of such opposition to the zero-growth proposition. The principal objection that rises from the industry lobby is that environmentalism is counterdevelopment, and therefore acceptance of environmentalists’ demands – to stop all pollution and forbid construction of dams, highways and factory complexes in clean habitats – would cause death of economy in the country and plunge the populace into a prehistoric state of barbarism and misery. The end to growth implies death of consumerism in particular and the collapse of the market in general. The possibility of zero-growth economy is conducive to the environment, but inimical to capitalism. No wonder that the political elite seldom endorse either a zero-growth economy or a controlled market, and that mainstream economists would shower scorn at the ecological economic plea for zero-growth economy. Industry indulges in putting all its weight to press the accelerator of development, which of course proceeds to swell up the economy. Whether this swelling is edematous is a moot point.

4.2

The Swollen Face of Development

The swollen GNP figures of the Northern countries are systematically upheld as proof of the improvement of their material well-being. However, because the difference between people’s perceived wants and needs is never transcended, the euphoric implication of boosted GNP fails to match their perception of social, cultural and spiritual well-being. The big pie logic assumes that enhancement of GNP entails improvement of the standard of living – for everyone. The development doctrine has synthesized a standard of living for the entire world – a ‘standard’ that is modelled upon consumerism and wastefulness. Thus the ‘underdeveloped’ are led to believe that a bicycle is not enough for a higher standard of living; one ought to have one or more automobiles. Because motor cars bolster GNP and bicycles hardly do, GNP growth, development and a standard of opulent living come to

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be synonymous. The living standard of the affluent has become the model for everyone to emulate. For the poor nations, to raise the living standard of their citizens in Western/Northern terms has become a moral obligation. The drive for raising the standard of living as a sign of sound development has weakened the economic foundations of both the citizen and the nation. The American consumerism is proverbial because it is entirely geared to high living standard, equated to luxury expenditure, even by borrowing with abandon at high interest rates. ‘To borrow at 18 percent or more on a credit card to purchase a fancy bit of clothing is a commonplace in American life; to exhaust the equity limit in a second mortgage to buy a luxury car, leaving no margin of safety from dispossession, is by no means unusual – even dealers of Mercedes-Benz and BMW automobiles encounter few cash buyers’ (Luttwak 1999: 53). An inevitable result of this development is that ‘fiscal deficit’ becomes endemic at both micro and macro levels. By mid-1997, the total debt of all American households reached the unprecedented level of 89 percent of total household income. It is no coincidence that the foreign debt of the United States is now by far the largest ever recorded for any country at any time in history, for domestic savings are so small compared with both household and governmental debt. (Luttwak 1999: 52)

The foundation of the US prosperity now seems to be threadbare. ‘America, the richest country of the world, is seemingly unable to live within its means, borrowing more than a billion dollars a day’ (Stiglitz 2003: 223). The flamboyant economic development that is pivoted on continual borrowing cannot be said to be sustainable. In the light of this understanding, the current trend of development all the world over is unsustainable, because it borrows continually from natural resources without replenishing the same. Each year in the USA, the citadel of development, 800,000 acres of trees are clear felled, trillions of tons of waste (including wastewater) are generated, and billions of tons of toxic chemicals are released in the atmosphere – to maintain and improve the American living standard. Squandering of natural resources is unmindful of the abysmal degradation of living conditions. To give a simple instance of the exponentially growing amount of debt to nature and future generations, ‘thirty-four trillion pounds of hazardous waste per year is produced as a result of extracting gas, coal, oil and minerals’ in the US (Shutkin 2000: 57), only to maintain the level of prosperity befitting the glory of the US economy. All over the globe, economic development and industrialization have taken a heavy toll on the environment. At the turn of the century, environmental degradation in Latin America, Africa, South and South East Asia has been largely due to chemicalization and industrialization of agriculture, expansionist urbanization, logging and mineral extraction.

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After the Second World War, Japan was among the first industrialized economies in Asia. It brought about a rapid growth of the commercial and service sectors, and improvements in health, education, housing and nutrition. In South East Asia, rapid economic growth began in the early 1980s. Things appeared to improve in South Asia for a while after implementation of ‘structural adjustment’ and economic liberalization programmes. The spectacular pace of economic development in Singapore, Taiwan and Korea – the ‘Asian Tigers’ – resulted in a proportionately rapid decline in environmental conditions. Korea, for instance, became a country with the world’s greatest consumption of pesticides, heaviest reliance on nuclear power for electricity generation, and the highest rates of occupation-related illnesses (Foster 2002: 81–82). Similar assaults on the environment, with permanent loss of key environmental goods and services, have been witnessed in all South and South East Asian countries that have undertaken measures for rapid economic growth. Above all, the advantages of rapid economic growth have not percolated to all levels of society. At the end of the decade of reform, poverty remains a significant problem in South Asia where over 600 million people – around 39 percent of the population – live below the poverty line, with numbers still increasing (UNDP 2000). And yet, American-style development, dictated by the US economic diplomacy continues to shape and influence national fiscal policies. In the Roaring Nineties, ‘Uncle Sam became Dr. Sam, dispensing prescriptions to the rest of the world: Cut that budget, Lower that trade barrier, Privatize that utility’ (Stiglitz 2003: 23). Following WTO, the liberalization of the market and removal of trade barriers have induced a widespread change in lifestyle all over the South. An unprecedented growth in information and entertainment industry has occasioned a boom in commercial TV channels, computer and the Internet. The sale of new brands of cars and two-wheelers and the subscriber base of cellular phone companies has skyrocketed. With the onrush of MNCs opening their shops in all countries, all sorts of gadgets and consumer goods – from sneakers, soaps and soft drinks to dildos, DVDs and digital diaries – are now easily available at all corners of the Southern market. Sports and beauty contests being sponsored by MNCs have become an everyday phenomenon in the South. Globalization has thus brought about a homogenizing trend in lifestyle over the world. However, it has not equalized the living standards of people anywhere. Rather, it has dramatically increased the distance between the top and the bottom rungs of the economic ladder even in the most advanced industrialized countries. As analyses by the international guides of development reveal, GNP growth fails to provide the basic civil amenities for people in the ‘developing’ countries. At least one in three Asians has no access to safe drinking water and at least one in

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two has no access to sanitation. Average cereal consumption is one-third that in the advanced industrialized countries, and average calorie intake, though rising, is low in most sub-regions. Infant mortality and literacy rates tend to be low, particularly for women (ADB 1997; UNDP 2000). The main beneficiary of the ‘structural adjustments’ favouring market liberalization has been the private sector. Whereas the public sector contributed to about a half of the total capital inflows into public service infrastructure in 1990, that share has fallen to 40 percent by 2000. Meanwhile, the economic distance between those who enjoy the benefits of the market economy and those who do not has increased. This income disparity between the rich and the poor has increased both between and within countries. Because development enhances accumulation of wealth in fewer hands, within-country income disparity is inevitable. Looking at the GNP (the economist’s favourite index of development) and living standard of the richest countries, increasing disparity of wealth seems to be immanent in development. The interState income disparity of India is noteworthy: In 1981, Gujarat’s per-capita income was about twice that of Bihar; by 1998, the average Gujarati was earning 16,250 rupees a year (about $400 at then exchange rates), roughly three and a half times as much as the average Bihari. (Dhume 2000)

The 1990s have witnessed a marked increase in inter-State economic disparities. The Gini coefficient of inequality between States during early 1980s was slightly above 0.15; in late eighties it soared to 0.20, and by 1998 it reached around 0.23 – an increase by 45 percent (Drèze and Sen 2002: 320). Despite the general rise in GNP in India as a whole (speaking in the economist’s standard language), growth even declined in several States between the 1980s and 1990s. The growth of agriculture, on which the poorer States of India typically depend than do wealthier States, has been particularly slow in the 1990s. An extreme case is the State of Bihar, ‘where economic growth apparently came to a halt in the decade of liberalization’: […]while it is worrying enough to note that in the 1990s Bihar’s economy has not grown at all in per capita terms, it is even more alarming to find that Bihar’s agricultural sector has stagnated in absolute terms during that period (i.e. it has declined at about 2 per cent per year in per-capita terms). Given the overwhelming dependence of the poor in Bihar on agricultural sector, this compounding of regional and sectoral disadvantages has seriously affected the prospects of rapid poverty reduction in that state. (Drèze and Sen 2002: 320)

Advanced industrialization and faster development does not alter this rule of unequal distribution of wealth. Populations of the homeless and jobless workers are in fact burgeoning in Europe as well as the USA. For the latter, ‘the unprecedented

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post-World War II boom has not led to a golden age; Americans report a decline rather than an increase in happiness’ (Oelschlaeger 1994: 113). Many Southerners may find it blasphemous to note that the inequality in wealth distribution within the US is no different from that in India, Venezuela or the Philippines (Harper 2001: 271). Considering between-country comparisons of wealth distribution, the graph of the global inequality looks like a champagne glass: In 1960, the top fifth of the population was 30 times wider than the bottom fifth of the population. By 1995, the top fifth of the glass became 82 times wider than the bottom fifth (Harper 2001: 271–72). The richest 20 percent of the world consumed 86 percent of all the world’s resources, according to the UNDP’s Human Development Report 1998 (p. 30). The same Report finds that the three richest people in the world have assets that together exceed the combined gross domestic product of the 48 least-developed nations. The Human Development Report 2000 (UNDP 2000: 82) further counts that ‘The combined wealth of the world’s 200 richest people hit $1 trillion in 1999; the combined incomes of the 582 million people living in the 43 least developed countries is $146 billion.’ A positive correlation between GNP and living standard of the common people fails to show up with any consistency: with the fabulous rise in the gross global product, the number of people with less than a dollar income per day has increased over the past decade. The UNEP’s GEO 2000 discloses that average global per capita income has now passed US$5 000 a year but more than 1,300 million people still live on less than US$1 per day. Currently, over 2.8 billion people live on less than $2 a day; 1.3 billion people have no access to clean water; 3 billion have no access to sanitation. To hint at the obvious explanation, UNEP has remarked, The continued poverty of the majority of the planet’s inhabitants and excessive consumption by the minority are the two major causes of environmental degradation. The present course is unsustainable and postponing action is no longer an option. (UNEP 1999: xxix)

As if this is not enough proof of development, the UNDP’s Human Development Report 2002 provides further statistics: the richest 10 percent of the US population has an income equal to that of the poorest 43 percent of the world. The income of the world’s richest is 114 times that of the poorest 6 percent. The gap between the economies of Northern industrialized and Southern industrializing countries has widened, as has the income gap between the rich and the poor in developing countries. Despite the spectacular growth in economies, poverty lingers on. The rich have become richer and the poor become poorer with development. ‘It’s a maxim that is so often repeated and so often confirmed by experience, that it begins to sound like a law of nature’ (Hayes 2002: 400). In fact, the

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result of prosperity is that money flows from the poor countries to rich countries, from the poor villages to metropolises. Rich nations become richer by new trade arrangements based on the precept to benefit the poor nations. Yet, exactly the opposite occurs. ‘Yet time after time, the poor nations are left to bear the burden’ (Stiglitz 2003: 223). And yet, all the poor nations continue to consider the ‘present course’ as a viable option. The least developed strive to become the most developed in order to uplift their standard of living. India is no exception. Its planned development of infrastructure to facilitate industrial growth after independence placed its economy on a robust industrial base. The application of the all-powerful formula of development to agriculture appeared to work well in the initial period, with rising productivity statistics. Over the past five decades, India has nearly doubled its per capita net domestic product, from Rs. 1,200 in 1947 to Rs. 2,300 in 1997 (in 1980–82 prices). The economy has been growing faster: at 5 percent to 6 percent annually since 1980/81, compared to 3.6 percent between 1950–51 and 1980–81 (TERI 1998). However, with little success in poverty eradication programmes, the proportion of rural unemployment and the processes of marginalization of poor farmers have increased. India’s continuing poverty and wide income disparity are testimony to the non-conventional contention that economic growth does little to reduce poverty (Deaton, 2001). The condition of the poor seems to have remained inaccessible to the rhetoric of equity used in the national development project documents. The inequality gap has neither reduced nor is there any power at the decision-making level to reduce it. Poverty has become only an alibi of the state development programmes, which from the beginning serve to protect the interests of what Gadgil and Guha (1992) call the industrialist-bureaucrat-politician clique. As development continues, more and more resources are owned and usurped by the rich landlords and MNCs; the marginalized poor become increasingly desperate to extract their livelihoods from whatever resources are at their disposal; and consequently, natural resources become increasingly decimated. The course of development currently followed everywhere is systematically making the earth increasingly inhospitable for life. The escalating deforestation, the exorbitant rise in the rate of species extinction and the unprecedented level of poisoning the air and waters by toxic emissions and effluents characterize technourban growth and modernity. Acid rains in Scandinavian countries that had been caused by industrial emissions in the UK and Germany in the 1960s indicated for the first time that local extinction episodes and environmental damages had global impacts. For most industrializing nations, an important means to economic development is to earn foreign currency by export of natural resources, which severely depletes forest, marine and aquatic resources. Over 75 percent of the

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world marine fisheries catch (over 80 million tonnes per year) is sold on international markets. In order to boost export earning, governments in the South have deployed enormous fishing fleets in coastal and estuarine waters, causing global over-fishing. With modernization of fishing boats, gear and techniques, traditional customary restrictions like periodic recess and catch limits have been abolished, resulting in collapse of many regional fish stocks, thus forcing fishers to exploit international waters. Recent studies show that global fish stock has been severely depleted and global fish catch has been declining since the late 1980s, a trend that does not show up in the FAO data derived from the spurious statistics provided by governments of member countries (Watson and Pauly 2001: 534). The globalization of techno-industrial development has led to a globalization of environmental disasters. Signs of climate change are becoming visible everywhere, with direct economic consequences for many countries. A combination of high temperatures and low rainfall has created drought conditions in the tropics. As Lester Brown (2002) explains, ‘when temperatures range above 32 degrees centigrade, crop yields suffer’ from high evaporatory losses and heat stress. In the US, India and China – the top three food producers of the world – reports of heat stressed crops have been frequent in recent years. In spite of the expanding body of evidence and a growing understanding of meteorological impact of industrial emissions, the world’s most powerful country – the one that has the largest share of the global CFC and greenhouse gas emission – has defied the Kyoto Protocol, and stands as a model of industrial development devoid of all concerns of environmental equity and responsibility. By identifying most environmental and social concerns as ‘trade barriers’, the WTO currently promulgates industrial development sans environmental regulations, to the detriment of the planet’s biodiversity (Shiva 2000: 41; Harper 2001: 399–400; also see Section 8.2.2). Concomitant to environmental destruction, a cascade of social derangement is also triggered by the process of development. Bereft of the traditional cultural and resource base, the uprooted ecosystem people tend to become desperate for material goods and entertainment, as if to make good for the cultural losses. Even when a section of the local people are employed in development projects like mines and factories, they become uprooted from their traditional culture and values. With the loss of the traditional resource base, the community’s social organization as well as its love and care for the resources is also lost. These development refugees find their own cultural traditions irrelevant and incoherent to the new economic reality of mechanized, wage-based relationship with the transformed nature, and adopt new urban values and lifestyles. As a researcher (Tiwari 1996) has recorded in his report of ecological impacts of coal mining in northeast Indian hill districts, the traditional extended families and bonds of affinity become

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disintegrated, traditional moral restraints become loose, and the authority of traditional leaders and customary laws become eroded. This is evident in the fact that ‘less and less people are participating in traditional festivals and community rituals,’ while indulgence in alcohol, gambling and petty crimes is increasing (Tiwari 1996: 473). The cost of such social derangements caused by development hardly appears in development audits. I will illustrate the social and ecological impact of development on two kinds of land use, namely, forestry and agriculture. I choose forest and wildlife to represent a part of the natural wealth that is more carefully managed by the state than any other resources in the South. Forest management is pivoted on the stated objective of conservation of its supposed natural state, in contrast with agricultural land use, which, as the principal means of production, is subject to intensification of exploitation. Agriculture, because it is able to generate surplus, is considered by social historians as an advanced economy over hunting-gathering and nomadic pastoralism of pristine societies. The surplus it generates is considered to advance civilization. Thus, agricultural development implies enhancement of the power of humans to exploit the earth to produce more goods, in contrast with forest development, which is meant to conserve and protect nature from human ‘exploitation’, although the underlying principle of both management regimes is development of the economy. The state’s ideology, policy and techniques of land use have evolved over the past two centuries, from the colonial extractive agenda to the post-colonial management regime. The history of the colonial phase of land use in India has been extensively treated by several scholars from an ecological perspective (Gadgil and Guha 1992; Rangarajan 1994, 1996; Sivaramakrishnan 1999; Subash Chandran and other contributors in Grove et al. 1998, among others). In the context of the modern concept of development, as outlined above, I have already discussed the early process of development in forestry and agriculture (Section 3.1). Besides, I have discussed how post-war development economics has emphasized on agricultural modernization (Section 3.2). I will go on to delineate the impacts of development (and of developmentality) on the environmental and social integrity in the South. In this discussion, forest and agricultural sectors in modern India will serve as a paradigm.

4.2.1

Forest Development

Forestry has been one of the most contested sectors of development, with its twin objects of production for commerce and conservation for protecting wildlife. The colonial forest administration resolved the apparent contradiction between these two objects by developing a ‘scientific forestry’ that sought to regulate timber

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production in an efficient and systematic manner, while maintaining a stock for ‘public welfare.’ While the production aspect directly served the agenda of economic development, the conservation objective of scientific forestry conformed to the civilizing mission of colonial rule and engendered progress. Both these objectives have been maintained in the post-colonial forestry in the South as a development regime. ‘More than agriculture, industry, and other key sectors of the economy, forestry in India, as was the case in many other European colonies in the 19th century, witnessed the most sustained efforts by both colonial and subsequent nationalist governments to establish direct control over an important natural resource’ (Sivaramakrishnan 1999: 274). This control both symbolized and systematized the governmentality of the new state that emerged as the legitimate successor to the colonial ruler. This control was necessary both to establish the new government’s authority over all sectors of public life and resources, and to ensure unhindered supply of materials to industry and commerce for development, which had been denied to the colony. Soon after Independence, the rising demand of rapid industrialization mounted pressure on the forests. The demand seemed to exceed the supply of forest products from the stock maintained and protected by the state as ‘protected’ and ‘reserved’ forests. With an increasing pace of clear-felling (with shorter rotations) to meet industrial demands, India’s forest cover rapidly decimated after the independence. Soon private and ‘Unclassed’ private forests were brought under State Working Plans. Large private forests, originally composed of multiple species of fruit trees, were brought in the early 1950s under Forest Working Plans. Owners of private forests were now required to submit such plans to be approved by the State forest department (FD), which aimed to enhance timber yield from these forest stands. The Zamindari Abolition Act of 1951, followed by Private Forests (Acquisition) Act and estate acquisition laws in different States had vested ownership of all private forests in State FD. This extension of state control of the forest patches that had remained outside the state’s administrative jurisdiction served three purposes. First, it ensured the supply of an additional quantity of forest products to feed industry and commerce. Second, it saved much of the reserved forests from being worked and thus maintained the conservation objective of modern scientific forestry. Third, by abolishing the zamindari ownership of large private forests in the States under Permanent Settlement (see Section 3.1), it established a more pervasive state control over natural resources. However, the last zamindars and their inheritors scrambled for the last vestiges of profit from their estates on the eve of vesting them in government, and rapidly exhausted their private forests by putting them on auction (Deb and Malhotra 1993).

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After cycles of harvesting and clear-felling by contractors, the forests soon degenerated into low-diversity stands. Villagers’ gathering of brushwood and coppices from the denuded forests further degraded the forests. Notwithstanding several forest regulations and departmental policing, cases of wood theft accelerated in the post-independence decades. Local villagers, having been denied access to the forest resources through various colonial forest laws, had already considered state forests as the property of the enemy. After independence they felt free to exploit the ‘free’ state property which they saw was plundered by contractors. The colonial land use policy had estranged local communities from the traditional resource management ethos and mechanisms, and the diaspora of independence from colonial rule in many areas corroded the forest department’s legitimacy – why should the forest officials, who are no longer British government employees, keep national resources out of access to the country’s own people? All forests thus suffered the Hardinian tragedy of open access resource. With rapid clear-felling of forests for industries and emphasis on monocultures of commercial species, the species diversity of forests became emaciated. Commercial monocultures replacing the natural mix of species on which forestfringe villagers depend for meeting their subsistence needs is a legacy of colonial forestry, which had prompted the Gond to consider hell as ‘miles and miles of forest without any mahua trees’ (Elwin 1958: 13), mahua (Bassia latifolia) being a tree whose leaves, roots, flowers, fruits and seeds – all yield valuable products for village economies and cultures. The silvicultural practice of monoculture and selection felling had cut down the availability of various forest products valuable to local villagers. It also proved inadequate in the 1950s to meet the growing demand of forest-based industries. To save the industry, post-independence forestry further intensified monoculture. The Third Five Year Plan (1962–67) drove forestry into the rigmarole of economic plantation. In the second year of the Plan, plantation of ‘quick-growing species’ (QGS) like Eucalyptus spp., Prosopis juliflora, Casuarina equisetifolia, etc. began all over the country with World Bank support. By the 1960s, trials with Eucalyptus tereticornis on lateritic soils were successful, and Acacia auriculiformes was found to thrive well on a wide range of soil (Malhotra and Deb, 1998). This QGS plantation programme, consisting of a drive for monoculture plantation of these exotics, essentially increased the production of wood for paper, match and synthetic fibre industry. With the enormous scale of QGS plantations, India retained its position of a major global exporter of pulpwood. The Fourth Five Year Plan launched an aggressive campaign for greening the country with exotic QGS in the name of Social Forestry, which provided incentive to large-scale industries to clearfell ecologically rich forest areas and common

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property lands for commercial plantations. Social Forestry, supported by the World Bank, USAID, ODA and other donor agencies, was promoted not only around farm areas but also along roads, canals, water bodies, railway lines, village wastes and community and corporate lands (Banerjee 2004: 47). Different species of eucalyptus and Acacia auriculiformis4 were found suitable for the entire IndoGangetic plains and the Deccan peninsula, Prosopis juliflora for arid western India, poplars in Himalayan foothills of north India, Caribbean pine and Cryptomeria japonica for the northern and eastern Himalayan semi-evergreen zones. The reasons that the FD chose these species is that primarily, they are capable of rapid growth; second, these species are in general not a preferred species as fodder, and hence remain protected from browsing cattle and goats from forest villages; third, the coppicing ability of these species kept the land perennially ‘under green cover’ without much protection cost, and showed an increasing area on the map of India’s land under tree cover. In a frenzy to raise non-browsable QGS plantations, the FD often extirpated root stocks of sal in degraded forest lands of southwestern districts of West Bengal, in favour of Eucalyptus tereticornis monocultures (Deb and Malhotra 1993; Malhotra and Deb 1998). Social Forestry promoted QGS plantation in private agricultural lands all over the country, with the intention of helping the poor by growing marketable eucalyptus poles. However, like most other schemes to ‘help the poor’, the Social Forestry campaign soon turned out to create more profits for the commercialindustrial sector than for farmers. Eucalyptus plantations in villages were planted on farms that had earlier been used for food crops, resulting in the disappearance of common lands and resources. After the first few years of rapid growth and proportionately high rate of uptake of soil nutrients, productivity of most eucalyptus plantations declined. Within a decade, an oversupply of eucalyptus poles created a market glut, farmers received decelerating economic returns from their trees than they had initially envisaged, and had their farm soil robbed of fertility (Gadgil and Guha 1995; Saxena 1994). In spite of massive plantation drives, however, forest cover continued to dwindle, forest revenues plummeted in many parts of the country, and the erosion of forest biodiversity continued. Neither the mounting pressure from subsistence needs of an expanding population nor the open access nature of the forest resources suffices to account for this denudation of forest cover. A new thrust on development projects to benefit the industrial-commercial sector was a more decisive factor. Between the 1950s and 1970s, millions of hectares of forest land were leased out to industry at heavily subsidized rates, subject to generous contributions to the politicians’ coffers, who would then influence the Forest Department to turn a blind eye (Gadgil and Guha 1995). Until 1980, all Indian States enjoyed – and

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utilized – the legal power to sacrifice forest lands for non-agricultural purposes. ‘Various States earmarked large areas of forest for such purposes as irrigation and hydropower projects (which generate secondary deforestation far in excess of the amount of woodland directly submerged), industrialisation and mining, urbanisation, and road construction’ (Flint 1998: 451). The Damodar Valley project in West Bengal and Bihar, the Bhakra-Nangal river project in the Punjab, Narmada river project in the central and western States of Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat, the Tehri Dam in the Himalaya, coal mines in Bihar and Jharkhand, oil wells in Assam, large township developments at Durgapur and Asansol in West Bengal, Bokaro in Bihar, Raurkella in Orissa, Bangalore in Karnataka and Kanker in Madhya Pradesh – all have cleared large tracts of forest. In addition, the timber contractor-forester collusion often facilitated largescale commercial timber extraction from the forest, leading to rapid degradation, even complete disappearance of the forest in many places. The disappearance of a large forest stand from Rajuara instanced such a case, which was discussed in Maharashtra State Legislative Assembly in 1985. The absolute authority of the forest department over the forest, and the system of granting monopoly rights to contractors over forest products have fostered and systematized corruption in the FD and exploitation of forest villagers. Dasgupta (1986) has recorded a number of cases of corruption in the FD, extending from forest guards extracting food grains from villagers to forest officials in collusion with contractors selling off valuable trees. Villagers were exploited by contractors as well: License is issued to a contractor for the collection of the commodity for a particular area. The contractor then allows people to collect the commodity and sell it to him. Since he is the monopoly purchaser, he is able to exploit people to the hilt. Thus, what was once the right of the people becomes right of the contractor who invariably cheats both the government and people. (Dasgupta 1986: 59)

Of course people rose in protest, often in violent outbursts. Ever since the state takeover of forests by force of forest legislation, a series of tribal unrest rocked the subcontinent throughout the 19th century and the first part of the twentieth century: the Santal insurrection (1855–57) in eastern India, Naikda revolt (1868) in Gujarat, Rampa rebellions (1879, 1922–24) in today’s Andhra Pradesh, Munda (1899–1900), Khond (1914–15) and Oraon (1914) revolts in central India, the Bhil uprising (1921–22) in Rajasthan, the Kacha Naga revolt (1882) in Assam, the Kuki uprising (1917–19) in Manipur, and so on. After Independence, the continuation of the exclusivist forest policy, official highhandedness and corruption evoked similar rebellions in different parts of the country. The most organized and protracted demand for reinstating people’s customary rights to forest use was what came to be renowned as Chipko of the 1970s

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in north India (see Section 5.4). Grassroots activists in different parts of the country militated against forest felling operations conducted by forest contractors in collusion with foresters. Each of these protests was quelled by police and army oppressions. More recently, in 1990, the Bhils of Dang district in Gujarat rose against their expulsion from the forest and cleared a small area in the reserve forest for cultivation. Police terrorism shattered the movement in 1991. The principal objective of excluding local people from forests was to extract commercially valuable forest products. Despite people’s protests, the forest department stuck to this exclusivist policy, resulting in the rapid impoverishment of forest villagers and a massive loss of the timber stock. In the early 1980s, the government focused on raising QGS plantations for rotational harvest of poles, rather than old-growth boles, to secure a steady supply of raw materials for paper, match and allied industries. QGS not only removed indigenous species, but also suppressed undergrowth through allelopathic effect (Malhotra et al. 1993). This eliminated numerous forest species and a wide range of NTFP, and deprived forest villagers of the diverse use of the forest. In view of the fact that NTFP as raw material supports 90 percent of the women’s employment generated in forest-based enterprises (Palit 1996b: 397), one can surmise the impact of the reduced NTFP stock on employment and income opportunities of millions. The large-scale, nationwide replacement of native vegetation with exotics was carried out on what Shiva (1987: 49) calls the assumption of ‘ecological equivalence’ – that all species and ecosystems are interchangeable, and that an aggregation of trees constitutes a forest. Thus, the lack of an ecological understanding pervading in Indian forestry continued to raise tree farms, by eliminating ‘minor’ species of biodiversity, to buttress the industrial-commercial sector, and created caricatures of the forest. In the past, a large diversity of NTFP was available from the forest composed of native species. After homogenized QGS plantations were raised in the forest lands, the forest villagers had little supply of fruits, fibre and fodder species to rely on for subsistence, and therefore resorted to extracting the timber species for sale in the market. Thus, the new afforestation drive in parts of India became as negligent of the subsistence needs of the rural poor as the continuing deforestation in other parts of the country (Shiva 1987). The post-independence forest policy, motivated by short-term industrial benefits, has justified commercial QGS plantations by the technocratic concept of ‘consumer needs,’ which are effectively the needs of the commercial-industrial sector, which Gadgil and Guha (1995: 193) identify to have been ‘the prime beneficiary of state forest management.’ The new forestry decimated not only the NTFP stock of forests, but also created a black market of NTFP trade, thus further depriving the poor. In the Third

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and Fourth Five Year Plans, the government nationalized timber as well as nontimber forest products. Almost all NTFP commodities became nationalized in different States in the period between 1965 and 1979. After nationalization, villagers are legally required to sell the NTFP items only to government agencies, so that no trader could exploit the poor by paying unfair price. This arrangement has failed to protect the poor from exploitation, however, because ‘government agencies find it difficult to make prompt payment’ (Saxena 1996: 49), and because the clerks at NTFP collection centres are delinquent. A National Commission’s investigation in Madhya Pradesh revealed that after walking a long distance to the office of the Forest Corporation to sell the NTFP, tribal women often find it closed, or are asked to come another day (Bhatt, 1988). NTFP gatherers in the eastern States of Orissa, Bihar, West Bengal, Chattisgarh and Jharkhand also share this experience (personal field records). Villagers are often compelled to sell the forest products – mainly tendu leaves and sal (Shorea robusta) seeds – to private traders at much lower price. As Saxena (1996: 50) has noted, Private trade in sal seeds is illegal in Madhya Pradesh, but shopkeepers manage to exchange it with tribals for daily necessities at a low price. They then sell it to government bodies, thus defeating the very purpose of nationalisation.

The decelerating benefits from forests to villagers, in contrast to timber contractors clearing forests with FD license elicited disgruntlement and anger in the forest-fringe villages; to them the forest had become the property of the enemy. With the vanishing concern of the poor for the ‘enemy’s property’, wood theft became a widespread phenomenon. In southwest Bengal, the antagonism between the FD and villagers often took the form of whole villages participating in wood theft, physical assaults on FD staff and deliberate destruction of forest trees. With hundreds of foresters killed by angry mobs and continuing forest denudation, some of the forest officials understood that without villagers’ participation in forest management, the State forests had no future (Palit 1993: 4). Villagers themselves were suffering from great hardships. In the late 1970s, many regions experienced an acute ‘wood famine’. In the absence of fuelwood to cook rice, villagers in parts of western Medinipur district in West Bengal were obliged to soak rice in water overnight (Deb and Malhotra 1993). With such hard lessons, villagers became aware of the importance of the forest. This conjugation of the FD’s need to win the villager’s confidence and the villagers’ willingness to save the forest led to the genesis of the Joint Forest Management (JFM). The institutional process of JFM was evolving in West Bengal in a preparatory political background. The movements for grassroots participation and local selfgovernance found a fertile ground in this State, where the Naxalite movement of

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the 1960s had stirred up the demand for land reform, people’s rights to land and water resources, and empowerment of the poor through participatory democracy (Duyker 1989). The Panchayat legislation in the late 1970s gave more political power to Panchayats (village councils). A coalition front of Left-wing parties came to power in West Bengal in 1977 and passed a significant legislation of land reform to protect the interests of share-croppers and agricultural labourers. Social movements from the 1960s through 1980s demanded participatory democracy through empowering grassroots institutions. It seems to be a matter of consilience (sensu Wilson 1998) that the importance of local people in forest maintenance was also articulated in the Forest Policy of 1988, which evinced a remarkable shift from its previous focus on revenue generation to conservancy objectives. It also advocated fulfilment of the needs of local communities and oriented forestry toward NTFP more than timber. Along with this new Forest Policy, the JFM approach has proved to be a prominent watershed in modern Indian forestry (see Box 4.1 on JFM). JFM proved to be the right way to implement these new policy objectives. The approach was endorsed by different Government Circulars (SPWD 1993), and its application showed positive results in many States. As Anuradha Joshi (1996: 5) has listed the points of achievement in West Bengal, Forest cover has increased, timber production has increased, conflict between foresters and communities has decreased and the yield of NTFPs has increased. According to satellite surveys, the forest cover in West Bengal increased by 4.5 percent between 1988 and 1991. Of this increase in forest cover, 67 percent has occurred in South West Bengal, the region that contains the largest number of FPCs, although it has only 37 percent of forest land… The number of forest personnel assaulted is another broad indicator – this has decreased from a high of 60 in 1982–83 to 18 in 1994–95. Similarly the number of forest offences (cases of illegal extraction) of timber has decreased.

After the success of JFM in a number of what British forest legislation had classified as Protected Forests, an enthused FD sought to replicate the model in the other category of forests – the Reserved Forests, to which local villagers have the most restricted access and user rights. The FD proceeded in the 1990s to form Eco-Development Committees involving local villagers in these forests. In exchange for preventing wood theft and poaching, the villagers would receive various benefits from the forest department – roads, wells, and in some cases monetary aids to EDCs for economic development. The policy underlying these management schemes is ‘reward the guard to safeguard property’. The ‘joint’ approach also serves to mitigate the local villagers’ antagonism to and mistrust of the state bureaucratic actors. Enlisting the locals for protecting forests largely secures the forest – the state property – from ‘illegal’ use by the local people, while the lure of benefit-sharing ensures the people that

Box 4.1

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Joint Forest Management: An Altered Forestry Approach

W

hen the conventional custodial management through policing had failed to protect forests and generate revenues in southwestern districts of West Bengal, key officials of the State Forest Department (FD) concurred in a meeting in 1972 that without villagers’ participation the State’s forests had no future. A joint forest management (JFM) approach was deemed necessary to protect the forests (Deb 1993: 369). In the same year, Dr. Ajit Banerjee, a Divisional Forest Officer in Medinipur district made an experimental arrangement with local villagers to manage a block of forest at Arabari – an experiment which was to become a watershed in concretizing the JFM approach. Banerjee offered the villagers free use of NTFPs and employment, and later on, a share of the profits from the sale of timber, in exchange for protecting a demarcated area of forest through the formation of an informal forest protection committee (FPC). Simultaneously, he lobbied within the FD to get this experiment accepted as a special ‘Socio-Economic Project’ (Joshi 1996). At around the same time in Purulia, another DFO, Mr. S. Palit, struck a similar joint management arrangement with villagers, although he promised the villagers neither full employment nor any share of the profits from the final harvesting (because he did not have the ability to deliver on those promises). He successfully convinced the villagers that keeping the forest was beneficial to them as well as to the country (Palit 1996a). Villagers themselves were now able to see the connection between the hardships they were facing and the vanishing forest cover. This was when the Chipko movement (see Section 5.4) kindled a popular environmental awareness everywhere. An inchoate environmental awareness, promulgated by various NGOs, enlightened youth clubs and schoolteachers, made villagers alert and willing to protect their resources. The most obvious cause of hardship had been a declining availability of NTFP, which the villagers reckoned must be reversed by allowing the forest to regenerate. Villagers in many places in southwestern Bengal took initiatives to form informal forest protection committees – beyond the official paraphernalia of registration with the FD. This subaltern story is often missing in the official stories of the emergence of JFM (Deb 1993). Yet another subaltern force was in operation. Since the early 1970s, members of the West Bengal Subordinate Forest Employees Association, who mainly bore the brunt of villagers’ wrath, took initiatives to promote dialogues between the FD and villagers for a more collaborative style of forest management. The Association held annual seminars in each forest circle to discuss the need to involve villagers, and presented summaries of these meetings to the forest minister (Joshi 1996: 7). In the mid-1980s, Dr. Banerjee joined the World Bank, and drew attention of the Bank to the success of his innovative project in Medinipur. The Bank funded the West Bengal Social Forestry Project which was restructured in 1987 to include a JFM component ( Joshi 1996: 6). The West Bengal Forest Directorate issued a Circular in 1989 to officially endorse the JFM approach, and in 1990, the government agreed to entitle the FPCs to a quarter of the net profits from the sale of timber. The Union continued...

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continued... Government’s adoption of the national JFM Resolution in August 1990 led, in subsequent years, to implementation of JFM in all the States. In some States the net sale proceeds are equally divided between the FD and the FPC. In the northeastern State of Nagaland, a full 80 percent of the benefits goes to the village committee for joint management of a Village Council forest owned by the Naga villagers, while the FD is entitled to get 20 percent of the sale proceeds. However, in many cases, forest beat officers did not bother much to brief the FPC members about the benefit-sharing arrangements. In the initial years of JFM, most of the forest officials were suspicious of the participatory approach to management and the ability of villagers to protect the forest from the razing fuelwood demand. As one of the engineers of JFM reviews the situation, The FD continues to dominate over the FPC based on two undercurrents. One is that the FD personnel do not like to shed their powers voluntarily. Second, there is a perception among forest personnel that indigenous knowledge about forest management is insufficient and that the technical direction of the FD is essential. In some FPCs, the leader or the E[xecutive] C[ommittee] has usurped the power of the FPC… (Banerjee 2004: 53) As a consequence, the much-extolled participatory approach has in most forest ranges transformed into a paternalistic ‘I-do-you-participate’ principle. In the case of plantation, for example, it is the forest beat or range officer who decides where to raise the plantation, how many saplings of which species to plant, how many workers to employ, and so on, without seeking any advice or approval of the villagers. Official forestry operation schemes and programmes have seldom reflected the villagers’ needs, although many such programmes have been undertaken under the banner of JFM. Plantation programmes have continued to raise QGS, to the negligence of the local needs of NTFP diversity. Within a decade of much fanfare of JFM, villagers in many forest beats became disillusioned, de-motivated or even felt cheated when they learned that they would receive only a quarter of the net benefits to be accrued from the sale of forest trees after 10 or 12 years of protection. They felt cheated because the trees they would be protecting over a decade of night watching would all the same be lumbered and sold out to contractors. Some also felt insulted by this ‘reward’ scheme, because the sale proceeds, after deduction of all operational costs and after being divided among all FPC members, would amount to a pittance, which stood proxy to the true value of their motivation and labour for forest protection over years. Nevertheless, JFM in a large area of southwestern districts of West Bengal and western Orissa showed good results, because of the significant attitudinal change among the forest department staff. Wherever these foresters have been successful in building bridges of reliable communication, and have shared authority of management with the villagers, JFM has achieved marked success. In these areas, JFM’s success is marked by the flourishing diversity of native species, improved canopy structure, and an increase in availability of NTFP in the forest (Deb and Malhotra 1993; Malhotra and Deb 1998).

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commercial working of forests would also benefit them. On a subtle ideological plane, however, this policy almost recapitulates the North’s policy to facilitate its own commerce and trade in the South’s resources by giving aids to the South. This analogy may seem unfair, because of course, wildlife reserves and national parks do serve the conservationist principle, and of course several forest officials and policy makers have made genuine attempts at saving the forest as well as benefiting the ecosystem people through the JFM approach. Nevertheless, these attempts have often been defeated on the micro level of grassroots implementation, by managerial decisions of forest officials imposed on villagers, and by the continuation of QGS plantation in most parts of the country, to the negligence of NTFP availability to local people. On the macro level of policy, the government does not hesitate to sacrifice the conservationist precept as well as the sanctuaries when it comes to safeguarding industrial-commercial interests. Not only are the local people excluded from protected wildlife areas (PWAs), but large tracts of protected natural habitats are often de-notified to release them from the legal fold to facilitate commercial plunder. The number of de-notified sanctuaries rose in the 1980s and 1990s, to give way to mines, tourist resorts, golf courses, power projects, cement factories and highways. Thus, the Narayan Sarovar sanctuary in Gujarat was denotified in 1993 for mining of lignite and bauxite for the Associated Cement Company’s factory. The ACC is also building a $40 million cement plant on the boundary of Balpakaram National Park in Meghalaya. In Maharashtra the state government has denotified a 500 km zone around the Melghat tiger reserve to allow highway and mining activities. In Madhya Pradesh, The Sanjay Gandhi Thermal Power Station is slated to come up 30 km from the Bandhavgarh National Park. The failure of official forestry to integrate a genuine ecological understanding of ecosystem complexity with a cognizance of social realities such as unequal power relations has led to its failure to devise a sound programme for sustaining biodiversity in the PWAs. The ‘fencing-guarding-policing’ approach of the forest department continues to alienate the local people who are the potential keepers of the forest, and antagonize them as obstacles to conservation. Local people around the PWAs are often ‘subject to the constant harassment of fines, become victims of the corruption by the functionaries of the forest department, and live under the constant cloud of imminent displacement’ (D’Souza 2003: 33). In addition, replacement of fodder species with commercial monoculture stands and shrinkage of forest areas due to encroachment by tea, timber and mining industries, have caused disappearance of the food resource for a majority of large mammals who are compelled to forage outside their natural wild habitats. An increasing frequency of deaths of humans and livestock on account

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of elephants, tigers and leopards depredating into surrounding villages has turned the PWAs into hotbeds of conflict and violence. Clashes between villagers and PWA authorities, frequently leading to police firings and killings are a common occurrence. A perceptive forest official who spearheaded JFM realized that ‘in a country where millions depend on the forests for their sustenance, we cannot keep such natural resources under lock and key’ (Palit 1996b: 408) – a realization that is yet to be translated into a rational, people-oriented forest policy. The failure of the conventional forestry to conserve biodiversity has become the background justification for the World Bank’s introduction of ‘ecodevelopment’ projects, with the objective of creating market incentives to local people for conserving natural resources. This new rhetoric of management is ultimately aimed at further dismantling the commons, abolishing traditional usufructory rights of the community, and at strengthening the market (D’Souza 2003: 33–34).

4.2.2

Agricultural Development

Modern forestry and agricultural science arose to simplify and homogenize nature to minimize process uncertainties and ensure efficient production of marketable goods. This orientation of natural resource management has lingered for more than a century. Pristine forests have thus been converted into tree farms, bereft of natural multi-tier architecture and biological diversity, and agriculture today consists of intensification of a few crops, at the cost of a magnificent crop genetic diversity that arose as a result of millennia of farmer experiments. Monocultures of commercially valuable species have shaped modern forestry and agriculture, which work as efficient means to rapidly eliminate life forms, impoverish the soil, and destroy the earth’s life support systems. Agricultural industrialization in 19th century Europe was accomplished with the introduction of chemical fertilizers by agricultural institutions. Advancement of knowledge in soil chemistry led to factory production of fertilizers to enhance agricultural production in Europe. Thus food production substantially increased, while the concomitant decline in caused major concern among agronomists in Europe and the USA (see Section 3.1). In the second half of the 19th century, Justus von Liebig in Britain and Henry Carey and George Waring in the US wrote that with the advent of industrialized agriculture, the flow of biomass from the farm fields to cities – removal of people, livestock and agricultural produce from the land – had robbed the soil of its nutrients (cited in Foster 2000: 152–53). These warnings seem to have assumed greater significance in today’s world. Yet, modern agricultural development policies have systematically promoted application of

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chemical fertilizers. Export of industrial agriculture, as a part of the overall economic development package to the poor countries, has led to growth of urbanization and consequently, increasing depletion of soil fertility. The early agriculturists’ insight into the ecological consequence of agricultural development is reiterated in the ecological literature of the 21st century: As a consequence of urbanization, local, essentially closed, cyclically integrated ecological production systems have become global, open-ended, horizontally disintegrated throughput systems… Agricultural soils are thus degraded – half or more of the natural nutrients and organic matter from much of Canada’s once rich prairie soils have been lost in a century of mechanized export agriculture – and we are forced to substitute non-renewable fertilizer for the once renewable real thing. (Rees 2000: 149)

In spite of a plethora of empirical evidence of the adverse consequences of industrial agriculture, industrially pursued large-scale agriculture has become the norm of agricultural development in all countries that seek to emulate the Western growth model. The dominant economic worldview fails to recognize that the ‘externality’ of the natural ecological functions of soil must be internalized in the economics of production, and that ‘industry and commerce on their part supply agriculture with the means of exhausting the soil’ (Marx 1894: 813). Development of agriculture persists in focusing on industrial employment of technological innovations like the tractor, power tiller, agrochemicals and improved seeds to promote yield, and remains oblivious to the vital role of biodiversity in farm productivity. In the South, the emphasis on the industrial aspect of agriculture has deepened its financial debts to Northern aid agencies; the ignorance of agro-ecology has accelerated the erosion of agro-biodiversity and increased the unsustainability of conventionalized food production systems.

4.2.2.1 The genesis of the Green Revolution At the behest of the First World countries, the Bretton Woods institutions were erected in 1944 with the mission of restructuring the post-war market economy and facilitating development worldwide. The World Bank soon became the official guide for national and international development policies. Upon the Bank’s policy recommendations (and admonitions), fostering industrial growth, earning foreign currency and enclosing the commons have been the three conspicuous programmes of national development. However, in the face of rising political discontent and social unrest throughout the Third World and the spectre of communism in the First World, development theory shifted its emphasis toward agricultural modernization in the 1960s. Increasing food production became a

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priority for the South, and the World Bank increased its loans to the poor countries for agricultural development that included enormously expensive irrigation projects and crop science research. The consequences of the agricultural modernisation programme in the South involved, as de Janvry (1981: 199–200) has summarized: ‘a massive increase in research expenditures on food crops (the Green Revolution); the strengthening of extension programmes; greater availability of agricultural credit; and the entry of multinational firms into agricultural production, the manufacturing of inputs, and the processing and distribution of products.’ Agricultural modernization entailed industrialization of the means of agricultural production, transfer of capital and expertise from the North to the South and flourishing of agribusiness. The objective of agricultural development was the production of cheap food and cheap labour in the South, to make capital investment more profitable. Because agricultural development is one of the most important components of development in the South, the Green Revolution opened a vast market for operation of giant multinational companies (MNCs) in the South. Clearly, the scope of garnering profits lay in three related fields: seeds, fertilizers and pesticides. Seeds of high input-responsive crop varieties (wrongly termed high-yield varieties or HYVs)5 were sold to farmers as part of a package of agricultural development. Most of the HYV seed producers are also the leading chemical firms – Sandoz, Pioneer Hi-bred, Cargill, Volvo, ICI, France Mais, Monsanto, Syngenta, Dekalb-Pfizer, BASF, whereas only six are traditionally seed producers. Monsanto is the largest producer of PCBs and at the same time, after its alliance with Cargill, the world’s largest seed corporation. To achieve a giant leap in production was the motivation for total industrialization of agriculture in Socialist economies as well as the capitalist West.6 In the former Soviet Union, the consequences have been disastrous, and proportionate to the massive scale of its industrialization drive. The killing of the Aral Sea is a tragic case in point. Beginning in 1960, vast irrigation canals, including the 1100 km-long Karakum canal, were built to accelerate productivity of the lands surrounding the Aral Sea. These canals, draining the Amu Darya and Sir Darya rivers, have diminished the Aral Sea by more than two-thirds of its original volume. This shrinkage of the sea, along with enormous amounts of chemical pesticides and fertilizers applied for agricultural development, has poisoned the sea, leading to a profound loss of biodiversity. ‘Its waters formerly supported 24 species of fish, but now supports none, and its 6,000 fishermen are unemployed’ (McNeely et al. 1995: 745). The sediment of the Aral Sea from its dried up seabed is swept by strong north wind, carrying off tens of million tons of sand and agrochemical dust each year over to the lands of the Amu Darya delta, which have now become sterile.

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With the universal acceptance of the doctrine of development, agricultural modernization became universal too. In the 1960s, development economics began to consider peasants and small farms as potential capital-generators. As Escobar observed, Since the mid-1960s, economists studying small farmers had not ceased to emphasize that the same backward peasants they had discounted in previous decades would behave like good and decent capitalist farmers if they were provided with necessary conditions for doing so. Economists discovered, to their pleasant surprise and with the help of economic anthropologists, that peasants behaved rationally; given their constraints, they optimized their options, minimized risks, and utilized resources efficiently. (Escobar 1995: 157–58)

Accordingly, the development theory placed its emphasis on increasing food production as the crucial means to achieving prosperity. This emphasis ensued from both the Malthusian fear of hunger and the logic of industrial expansion to create and capture the global food market. Agricultural modernization to achieve self-sufficiency in food grain production was seen ‘as necessary in the face of decreasing shipments of U.S. surplus grain and in order to quell what was seen as teeming social unrest in the countryside’ (Escobar 1995: 127). Agricultural modernization involved not only introduction of new technology, seeds and marketing rearrangements in which multinational companies were to control the agricultural market, but abolition of traditional agricultural practices. Because Third World poverty was – and still is – the chief concern of development economics supported by international aid agencies, most professional economists claim that high food crop production is the solution to poverty and food scarcity. The state has always shown food availability deficit (FAD) as the cause for hunger7, so that the issue of resource distribution and entitlement to resource get obfuscated (Sen, 1981). Increasing crop production seemed therefore to be the solution to FAD. In the brouhaha of unprecedented food production in South Asia, farmers were instigated to abandon their traditional indigenous crop varieties, which they had saved for centuries, in favour of the new ‘miracle seeds,’ while no heed was paid to the warnings sounded by a few scientists who were concerned about the impending harm from the institutional enthusiasm over the Green Revolution.

4.2.2.2 Mechanics of the Green Revolution Agricultural modernization essentially consisted of and entailed industrial production of agrochemical ‘inputs’ that were designed to replace the traditional methods of endogenous materials and methods, and dissipate traditional farming practices. In the 1960s, the modernization agenda also included improved seeds. The Rockefeller and Ford foundations established two permanent

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research stations for the development of high-yielding cereals, the International Rice Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) in Mexico. Agricultural research was focussed on developing crop lines that could be grown more than once a year. Photoperiod-insensitive rice germ lines, for example, were developed to facilitate intensive wet paddy cultivation. The new varieties of wheat and rice have spread more widely, more quickly, than any other technological innovation in the history of agriculture in the South. The most ostensible consequence of this vigorous stress on agricultural modernization was the Green Revolution, which has favoured the rich, capitalist farmers and marginalized impoverished peasants. The Green Revolution has sidelined all traditional foods that used to be produced and consumed primarily by peasants. Emphasis on commercial crops has benefited rich farmers who were able to industrialize their means of production – tractors, modern seeds, costly agrochemicals. Commercial crops are primarily intended for sale on market for either urban consumption (rice and wheat), industrial consumption (jute, cotton, or sugarcane), luxury consumption (soybeans, mushrooms), or export (flowers, tea or coffee). The Green Revolution has compelled rich farmers and landowners to sow more and more farms to the ‘miracle seeds’ to increase ‘productivity’ of the land. In Escobar’s (1995: 127) analysis, ‘Rice, produced by capitalists, has had the highest growth rate in a number of Latin American countries, whereas peasant foods have systematically had the lowest rates of growth.’ The term ‘Green Revolution’ was first used by William Gaud in his speech to the Society for International Development in March 1968, in which he posed the possibility of forestalling a red political revolution with recourse to a green technical revolution leading to prosperity in the developing countries. In December 1969, the US Congress incorporated the Green Revolution as a major component in its foreign policy, which ensured bright market prospects to the pesticide, fertilizer, seed and tractor industries of the US. Soon the World Bank and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) launched the Green Revolution as the silver bullet for the problem of world poverty and hunger, and all the developing countries adopted the Green Revolution agenda by involving ministries, universities, research institutions, extension services and, of course, by providing a system of subsidies – perverse incentives – to agrochemicals and new seeds. Before long, the political and commercial intent and content of the Green Revolution proved effective in sidelining more politically contentious issues of land reform and resource distribution. The political influence of the rich farmer-industrialist-politician nexus has been a major political determinant of cereal growth under the Green Revolution.

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‘Minor cereals’ like the large diversity of millets hardly received either research attention or price support by the government. The better availability of, and access to, credit, irrigation, technology and extension services have invariably benefited rich farmers growing elite crops. For instance, rice benefited from research in the best centres, was protected from cheaper imports, and enjoyed access to credit and support prices; at the same time, the production of wheat – a peasant crop in Colombia – stagnated due to cheaper imports allowed by the government via food aid. In Mexico, by contrast, wheat, a capitalist crop, enjoyed measures similar to those of rice in Colombia. It is not a coincidence that wheat in Mexico and rice in Colombia were the miracle stories of the green revolution. (Escobar 1995: 127)

In South Asia, the Green Revolution package included import of HYVs of rice and wheat (from IRRI in the Philippines and CIMMYT in Mexico, respectively) that required irrigation pumps, diesel, fertilizers and pesticides. In riparian areas, embankments were also constructed to stop overflow of nutrient-rich river water. Import of pump sets, fertilizers and pesticides opened a new free market for MNCs from the North to manufacture and sell their products in the South. Huge amounts of state subsidy were given to the agrochemical industry in order to provide incentive for agricultural growth. Governments continue to dole out such subsidies, which are not given to farmers as extra money to buy the materials, but are remitted wholly to the bank accounts of the firms to keep the price affordable by farmers. Agricultural subsidies therefore serve as a means to providing further subsidy to industry.

4.2.2.3 Achievements of the Green Revolution The singular achievement of the Green Revolution, it is officially claimed, is to have averted the threat of mass hunger. India is posed as the prize case in point: it has grown self-sufficient in food production, owing to a wondrous increase in the production of major cereals. In a conducive policy atmosphere, the combination of the ‘miracle seeds’ and agrochemicals of the Green Revolution worked miracle: they escalated both the productivity of the soil and the yield potential of vital crops. In the following sections we will examine this claim in the light of recent data on the contribution of different causal factors behind the boost of production of major cereals in India. A. Growth in cereal production The rise in cereal food grain production in South Asia, since the mid-1960s, is conventionally ascribed to the apparent success of the Green Revolution. The introduction of new ‘miracle’ HYV seeds and intensive use of agrochemicals supplied to the

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farmer at subsidized price, and intensification of food grain cultivation, are the most conspicuous, and widely acknowledged reasons. However, there are reasons to suspect that this description is too simplistic to take note of a number of important factors contributing to the growth in cereal production. In a self-congratulatory euphoria, development economists and agronomists seem to systematically ignore several other factors. There is a difference between deliberate deception by suppression of data and ignorance, but the result is just the same: dissemination and perpetuation of wrong facts. In the first place, the HYV crops, which essentially are high input-responsive varieties (Shiva 1991), appear to have not really contributed to high productivity. When productivity is defined as yield per unit of water input, for example, the so-called HYV crops are significantly less productive than most indigenous varieties (Evans 1993; Deb, 2005). Given the inaccessibility of relevant empirical data, which is a chronic problem with Indian governmental documents, it is difficult to quantitatively establish the validity of the claimed contribution of the HYV seeds to the production boost. Nevertheless, an ample body of evidence exists to indicate that whenever there is a shortage of inputs – lack of irrigation water, shortage of fertilizers – due to drought, social problems, or disruption of supply network, ‘modern [HYV] crops typically show a reduction in yield that is greater and covers wider areas, compared with folk varieties’ (Cleveland et al. 1994: 743). Also, in optimal farming conditions, some folk varieties may have lower mean yields than HYV, but higher mean yield in marginal environments to which the folk varieties are specifically adapted (ibid.). For rice, edapho-climatic constraints include saline soil, dry upland and seasonally-inundated lowland, where no HYV can be successfully grown, while a large number of folk varieties are adapted to these conditions (Cleveland et al. 1994; Deb 2005). In view of the fact that drought and seasonal flood are the most chronic problems that beset most Indian farmlands, and the fact that irrigation water is the most crucial limiting factor to agricultural production throughout the country, it is difficult to believe that HYV crops were able to produce more than the aggregate of folk crop varieties, to any significant extent. Unfortunately, no comparative field data are available to prove that a land sown to HYV crops yielded higher in successive years than if it were sown to folk varieties; nor can it be disproved from the available statistics that folk varieties could have produced food grains no less than HYV, given the marginal soil and environmental conditions that prevail in much of South Asian farms. A crucial contributing factor that is often neglected in accounts of the increase in cereal production is the amount of land brought under intensive cereal cultivation. Taking India’s land use statistics as our frame of reference, 5.3 million

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hectares of woodland (about 7 percent of the total area) is estimated to have been reclaimed over the past 50 years for agriculture, river valley projects, mining, industries, townships, roads, and for power transmission lines. Among these, agriculture accounts for 60 percent of the forest area thus reclaimed till the 1990s (TERI 1998). As a rule, all this growth of land brought under cultivation was sown to cereals. Over the period 1949 to 1979, the compound growth rate for cultivable land under rice was 1.01 percent, while that for rice production was 2.60 percent. The rate of growth of land for all cereals was 0.96 percent, and that of cereal production was 3.02 percent. The compound rate of yield shows a gloomier picture: 1.57 percent for rice and 1.73 percent for all cereals (Jain 1985: 16). The cultivable land area increased in every decade, albeit at a declining pace. Between 1950 and 1976, agriculture accounted for the loss of ca. 2.507 million ha of forestlands (Gadgil and Guha 1992: 196). Not only were non-croplands brought under the plough, but croplands sown to diverse local crops were also brought under rice and wheat monocultures. In Punjab, the heartland of success of the Green Revolution, the area under rice has increased from 227,000 ha in 1960–61 to 2,250,000 ha in 1999–2000, a ten-fold increase. The area under wheat recorded a three-fold increase – from 1,400,000 ha in 1960–61 to 3,300,000 ha in 1999–2000. Conversely, the area under pulses in the same period decreased ten-fold – from 903,000 ha to 69,000 ha (Shiva 2001: 46). This pattern of successive increase in land area under major cereals led to rising production of rice and wheat over decades following 1950 (Figure 8). In addition to the spatial increase in land area under cultivation, there has been a temporal increase in land area. Previously, on account of the lack of irrigation facility, most of the dry land farms were rain fed, and used to be sown to one cereal crop a year. With improved irrigation – either by canal or by tube wells and pumps, at whatever costs – many of those farms are now sown to two to three crops a year. Between 1950 and 1965, the area of land that are sown to crops more than once a year increased by about 5 million hectares. Between 1965 and 1980s, this area increased by about 16 million ha. The country’s average cropping intensity increased from 115 percent in 1960–61 to 125 percent in 1983–84. In Punjab and Haryana, the cropping intensity increased to 165 percent and 148 percent, respectively, in 1982–83 (Randhawa and Abrol 1990: 439). To understand the extent of the invisible ‘temporal’ addition of cropland area by intensification of cereal cultivation, let the amount of cropland prior to crop intensification be x. After intensification by two crops a year, the effective area under cereal production is doubled (2x), although the physical area (x) under crop (called the ‘net crop area’) remains the same. The effective land area under cultivation is called ‘gross crop area’, which is simply the net crop area multiplied

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Figure 8. Increases in land under cultivation, irrigation coverage and production of wheat (top) and rice (bottom). Wheat

75 60 45 30

2000-01

1995-96

1990-91

1985-86

1980-81

1975-76

1970-71

1965-66

1960-61

0

1955-56

15 1950-51

Area/ Production/ Irrigation

90

Year Crop Area (million ha)

Production (million MT)

% Irrigation Coverage

75 60 45 30

2000-01

1995-96

1990-91

1985-86

1980-81

1975-76

1970-71

1965-66

1960-61

0

1955-56

15 1950-51

Area/ Production/ Irrigation

Rice 90

Year Crop Area (million ha)

Production (million MT)

% Irrigation Coverage

Source: GOI 2001.

by the intensity, or how many times the net crop area is sown to crops. Considering the fact that every spatial increase in land area is accompanied by temporal doubling or trebling of a large proportion of that land area, the gross crop area increases at a much faster rate. Thus, an additional land area y brought under cultivation to the previous x will not result in x + y, but 2x + y or even 3x + y (when crop intensity i = 3 in the previous year’s cropland). When the fresh cropland y is also intensified, the gross area becomes i1 x + i2 y, where i1 is the crop intensity in the previously cultivated net cropland and i2 is the intensity for the fresh

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Figure 9. The Power Function Relationship of Production (P) of Rice and Wheat with Expansion of Cropland Area (A) Rice

Wheat

80 Production (million MT)

Production (million MT)

100 80 60 40 20

60 40 20 0

0 20

30

40

Crop Area (million ha)

50

0

10

20

30

Crop Area (million ha)

P = c A2+ z where z = 1.65 for rice and 0.4 for wheat, and c = 00005 for rice and 0.022 for wheat. Source: Data adopted from GOI 2001.

Note:

cropland. With a regular crop intensity of 2 or more, a successive increase in cropland area resulting from conversion of non-farm lands is expected to boost crop production several-fold. This partly explains the power function relationship between geographical land area under cultivation and cereal productivity (Figure 9). However, to attribute the increase in food production exclusively to increase in the amount of land under cultivation would be as misleading as the official practice of giving the exclusive credit to the efficiency of modern HYV seeds. Surely, the rapid increase in gross crop area brought under cereals was necessary, but not sufficient reason for the rise in crop production. There are two other simple, but often ignored, reasons for the boost in production. Extension of irrigation has been a key factor for the temporal increase in land area for cultivation. The greater the proportion of the farmland under irrigation, the higher the crop output. It is common knowledge that dry land crop productivity is significantly lower than irrigated lands or medium lands with adequate soil moisture. Irrigation from tube wells and pumps has rendered most rain fed farms cultivable for at least another additional crop. Water-demanding cereals are expected to be more productive when water stress is reduced. The geographical area of agricultural land under irrigation has expanded from 32 percent in 1970 to 43 percent in 1990. The majority of this increase has come from increases in water extracted from groundwater supplies, and has resulted in the falling water tables over a wide geographical area (see point D below).

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Intensification of cereal cultivation has been another significant factor for cereal yield increase. Farms that had traditionally produced local varieties of rice, oilseeds, millets, corn, pulses and vegetables, were all brought under the Green Revolution to produce two or three crops of HYV rice or wheat every year. Irrigation extension has played a great role in facilitating intensification of rice and wheat cultivation. Dry uplands, where farmers used to grow millets, corn and drought-tolerant local rice varieties, were converted into rice-producing farms by groundwater irrigation (see point B below). This extension and intensification of cereal cultivation contributed a great deal to stepping up the production of rice and wheat, while the production of other types of food crops slowed down. Thus, an increase in the irrigated proportion of total cropland area has direct and highly significant effect on cereal production (Figure 10). This effect is more pronounced for wheat than for rice, mainly because wheat requires less water than rice: addition of a little water is enough to favour wheat production over rice production. Thus, the roles of (a) cropland area expansion, (b) extension of irrigation, and (c) cereal crop intensification have been decisive in the spectacular growth of cereal production. However, the roles of crop intensification and irrigation overlap with another significant factor, namely, (d) replacement of other crops with cereals. In Punjab, while the net crop area under rice increased ten-fold, and that under wheat increased three-fold between 1960–61 and 1999–2000, the area under pulses in the same period decreased ten-fold – from 903,000 ha to 69,000

Figure 10. Regression of Production of Rice and Wheat against Proportion of Irrigation Coverage Wheat

Rice

80 Production (million MT)

Production (million MT)

100 80 60 40 20

60 40 20 0

0 0

20

40

% Irrigation Coverage

60

0

50 % Irrigation Coverage

Note: The slope is 3.44 for rice, and 0.99 for wheat. Also see Figure 8. Source: Data adopted from GOI 2001.

100

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ha. The area under maize went down from 327,000 ha in 1966–67 to 185,000 ha in 1999–2000; the crop area under oilseeds and millets also decreased (Shiva 2001: 46). Thus, the performance of the ‘miracle seeds’ of the Green Revolution appears not-so spectacular. In fact, no HYVs have yet been developed that could withstand inundation, drought or salinity – the three principal limiting factors of crop production in marginal lands. Considering the fact that about 30 percent of India’s crop production is contributed by dryland farms where HYVs cannot fare well, the role of folk crop varieties in the country’s food security becomes obvious. The failure of HYVs in marginal environments has been more than offset by the overall increase in crop production due to the concerted effects of the four causal factors discussed above. Moreover, although the overall HYV cereal output has increased on irrigated farms, it is experiencing larger and larger variations about the mean trend (Pearce 1998: 47). A series of studies have shown that the coefficient of variation of output is higher for HYV crops than traditional crops (Hazell 1989). Yield instability seems to be inherent in HYV crops because genetic uniformity makes these crops vulnerable to stochastic environmental fluctuations and ecological stresses. The development doctrine dichotomises the world into two hierarchically counterpoised entities, of which the inferior term, the Other, is systematically made remote and insignificant. Thus, while the elite crops (rice in Colombia, wheat in Mexico, and both in South Asia) have received the focal attention from Green Revolution institutions, there has been a steady decline in both production and productivity of ‘minor’ cereals or coarse grains (millets and maize) and pulses. There has seldom been any governmental impetus for growing these minor crops, especially those locally adapted and traditionally grown. Fewer and fewer farmers are growing them on less and less farm area, because the Green Revolution boyscouts and agents have persuaded them, under the ‘Grow More Food’, ‘Food For All’ and related campaign heads, to grow more and more elite cereals at the negligence of all other subsistence crops. Nevertheless, after the initial ‘miracle’ of spectacularly high production, the yield curves for both rice and wheat show a decline in subsequent decades. The yield data of the recent few years are particularly revealing: the output of rice and wheat for the period 2002–2003 has significantly decreased from that of four to five years earlier (Figure 11). Incremental rates of growth in production of all crops reveal an overall decelerating trend; the rates for coarse grains and pulses never registered any rise in the past, and have now dipped further (Figure 12). The contribution of growth in food production to development, however, has remained illusory because the Green Revolution constituted a model of dissipative underdevelopment, where

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204 Figure 11. Recent Trend of Major Cereals Yield in India 90

Yield (million Ton)

60

30

0 19971998

19981999

19992000

20002001

20012002

20022003

Rice

82.5

86

89.4

86.3

79.76

78.64

Wheat

66.3

71.2

75.5

68.4

71.81

69.32

Source: The Hindu Survey of Indian Agriculture 2004.

Figure 12. Annual Growth in Foodgrain Production (percent per annum compounded)

7 5 3

1980

-99 1990

-90

0 1970 -8

1960

-70

-1

0

1

1950 -6

% Annual Growth Rate

9

Decades

Rice

Wheat

Coarse cereals

Pulses

Source: APEDA 2000.

production enhancement did not entail improved entitlement and freedom of the poor. A close inspection of the fate of the calculated ‘surplus’ over the past decades reveals that growth has engendered inequity and pauperisation of peasants. The system of food grain collection served to enrich the mediating traders who,

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despite the government-regulated price ceilings, controlled the market supply of the food grains, while the real economic benefit of food production remained inaccessible to the poor. Thus, […] the surpluses of rice and wheat that seemed to appear after the record harvests in 1986 and 1989 were illusory, although the government had insufficient space in its famine-reserve warehouses to store all the grain the farmers wanted to sell. As Professor L.S. Venkataraman of the Institute of Social and Economic Change in Bangalore told me, the excess only arose because the people who needed it could not afford to buy. (Douthwaite 1999: 250)

B. Non-cereal crop decline While the growth of cereal production has taken place at the cost of other food crops, the compound rate of growth has been increasingly slower ever since the onset of the Green Revolution, despite accretion of land under cultivation (Figure 12). Over the period 1949–79, the compound rate of growth for land under pulses and oilseeds was 0.41 percent and 1.27 percent, while the rate of growth of pulses and oilseeds production 0.31 percent and 2.16 percent, respectively. The scenario appears miserable when the compound rate of yield increase is considered: 0.09 percent and 0.52 percent respectively (Jain 1985: 16). In spite of the fact that like lentils and beans comprise an essential ingredient of the everyday Indian diet, pulses yield has considerably decreased with the increase in cereal production. Although the pulses production has marginally increased over the past few years, the 2001 FAO records show that India occupies the 98th position in the world production of pulses. India is not alone in showing this decline in production of pulses: Production of pulses all over the South has markedly declined over the past decades (Conway 1997). Moreover, production of oilseeds, millets and various vegetables which served to supplement the diet of the rural poor, has significantly decreased, as a result of emphasis on cereal crops. Crops like buckwheat and pearl millet, as well as the local dryland rice land races are fast disappearing from farms. This sordid fact seldom draws attention in the leap-forward development story. On the macro-economic scale, import of oilseeds and pulses has increased alongside the savings made from an arrested import of cereals. The increased expenditure on non-cereal food export, however, is not discussed in the official literature on the boons from the Green Revolution. This paradox of cereal output growth and fiscal loss is also reflected in the micro-economy of the farm: the Green Revolution farmer household now has to buy oil, vegetables and pulses from the market – items which were produced earlier on the farm itself. With the

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diversity of the crops sacrificed for the surplus of cereals, household expenditure of procurement of foods escalated. The decline in the overall production of noncereal crops resulted in a rise of their price, which in turn caused an increasing loss of household income and savings made from the surplus of cereals produced on Green Revolution farms (Deb 2000, 2005). With the decline in production of coarse grains, pulses and vegetables, the standard nutrition budget in the diet of South Asians and Africans in the countryside has become deficient. According to government figures, the per-capita availability of pulses in India plummeted from 70.3 grams to 36.2 grams per day between 1956 and 1987 (Douthwaite 1999: 250). C. Decline in soil fertility The initial decade of euphoria over the success of the Green Revolution has been replaced by concern over the slowing down of returns and of escalating input costs. The quantity as well as frequency of chemical use in farming has been increasing every cropping season, and yet the soil has to be replenished by more chemicals, while the total crop output is decreasing (Conway 1997). The loss of soil fertility is the result of a complex process set up by the use of synthetic fertilizers, which easily get dissolved in the irrigated water and leach out, in contrast with organic manures that slowly release nutrients over a long time. The application of urea and other fertilizers also has a deleterious effect on the soil organisms like the nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Fertilizers with high C:N ratio result in immobilization of other nutrients into soil microbial biomass (Hendrix et al. 1990: 648) and earthworms – a fact that is easily demonstrable in the farm as well as in vitro, but ignored by agricultural extension workers. The reduction in the populations of critical soil organisms from the cyclical applications of fertilizers and herbicides interrupts the biological processes of nutrient recycling in soil, and results in soil compaction. Conversely, this may lead to an increase in the rate of de-nitrification by conversion of soil nitrates into nitrous oxides and gaseous nitrogen. Reduced organic decomposition of crop residues by soil organisms, in combination with leaching of inorganic nutrients, leads to gradual reduction in the loam, and proportionate increase in the sandy part of the farm soil. The increased sandiness of the soil enhances soil erosion, which is a serious factor in soil degradation, including nutrient loss (Miller and Larson 1990: 558). Unneeded, excess amounts of nutrients are often applied to the farm, because first, soil tests are often not performed, or if performed, the results are not clear to the farmers, and second, agrochemical firm representatives, who often advise

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farmers as agricultural experts in rural South Asia, tend to promote an excess sale of nutrient supplements which are unnecessary. In the USA, doses of fertilizer recommended by certain soil testing laboratories were found to be higher than needed for maximum crop yield (King 1990: 99). Another factor of overuse of fertilizers is that farmers, again prompted by ignorant extension workers as well as soil chemists paid by agrochemical companies, tend to overestimate their yield targets, and want to achieve these impractical targets by applying more fertilizers than optimal. A third factor of overuse of chemicals is that farmers, with their complete dependency on chemical fertilizers, do not take account of the available nitrogen pools in the farm soil contributed by cover crops, soil organic matter, and the residue of the previous crop. Because of the crop plant’s physiological limits of nutrients uptake, much of the dissolved nitrogen and phosphorus available in the soil as inorganic salts are not utilized, and are lost by runoff, leaching and de-nitrification. For example, Gambrell et al. (1975) showed that the annual nitrogen uptake by maize in coastal plain of North Carolina remains constant at 92 kg per ha, regardless of the excess amount of fertilizers applied to farms, while about 14 percent of the nitrogen applied is lost to runoff and erosion. In farms with good drainage, the ca. 29 percent of the nitrogen is leached out. The loss of a large proportion of soluble nutrients by mineralization, leaching and runoff is facilitated by the altered physical composition and structural properties of the soil. In Gujarat, known as the chemical capital of India, the continuous use of fertilizers has resulted in loss of soil fertility and decline in farm output to the extent of 60 to 80 percent over the past few decades (Kaushik 1997). The productivity of intensive rice-wheat systems of the Punjab has already shown signs of serious decline associated with loss of soil quality (Nambiar 1994). D. Groundwater depletion Apart from this directly quantifiable impact of agrochemicals on national economy, the range of unaccounted effects has been too large to ignore. The high water demand for HYV crops makes it imperative on farmers to draw ground water by sinking shallow wells and tube wells, especially in areas not benefited by either regular rainfall or canal irrigation. In 1947, there were more than 3.5 million wells; by 1997, there were more than three times as many, and these caused a drastic drop of water tables. This sets in a vicious cycle of resource depletion in all the villages, especially in low-rainfall zones. As the water table declines, more of the dug wells dry up; investment in dug wells along with pump sets becomes

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fruitless. Farmers then resort to constructing bore wells or tube wells to draw water from deeper layers, which causes further decline of water level. The Green Revolution thus spurred a phenomenal increase in privately-owned shallow tube wells, from about 1000 in 1947 to about 360 000 in 1968–69 to 6 million in 1997. Wells irrigated a third of the net irrigated area in 1965–66 but by 1993, private tube wells and pump sets irrigate areas as large as 40 million hectare, compared to the combined irrigated area of all major irrigation projects placed at 26 million hectare (Shah 1993). When all sources of irrigation (including medium and small irrigation projects) are counted, private wells contributed over half of the total in 1997 (TERI 1998). A large number of poor farmers who cannot bore deeper wells are thus deprived of irrigation, and survive on a ‘meagre and uncertain income through agricultural labour’ (Rao 1993). With the water table in the Punjab falling by 0.6 metres a year, farmers with shallow wells are forced to drill deeper (Brown 2001: 44). The water table plummets at a much faster rate in several areas of the Gangetic plains, where thousands of wells run dry and millions of new wells are drilled for agriculture. A handful of rich farmers, in places where sinking a tube well is prohibitively costly, use the opportunity to make money by selling water to neighbours (Shah 1993). The nation’s water budget, with increasing harvest and declining recharging, remains far from a situation of sustainability. The drop in water table and the associated water scarcity is not unique to India. A recent survey by Geological Environmental Monitoring Institute of Beijing in mid-August 2001 reported that the level of the water table under the North China Plain, which produces over half of China’s wheat and a third of its corn, has dropped by 2.9 metres in 2000. Overpumping has largely depleted the shallow aquifer, and farmers are forced to drill further down to the region’s deep aquifer, which, unfortunately, is not replenishable. Since 1965, the shallow water table under Beijing has fallen by some 59 metres. In several States of the USA, including Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, the irrigated area is slowly shrinking as the Ogallala aquifer is being depleted (Brown 2001: 43–45). E. Groundwater contamination In addition to depletion, contamination of ground water with toxic chemicals is a great problem that has enormous economic costs in terms of long-term environmental and human health effects. Pesticide residues contaminating groundwater is a widespread phenomenon in the North and South alike. Additionally, intensive Green Revolutionary cultivation of more than two crops a year has shifted agriculture from its traditional dependence on rainwater to an increasing

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dependence on irrigation, with a direct consequence that groundwater is pumped up in excess of the rate of recharging. Continuous withdrawal of groundwater interferes with complex geochemical processes to release arsenic from sedimentary pyrites and iron oxy-hydroxides into aquifers, leading to increasingly high levels of arsenic poisoning of groundwater in southern Bengal Basin (Chakraborti et al. 2001; Harvey et al. 2002). Over 42.7 million people in an area of 38,865 sq. km. in West Bengal and 93.5 million in 112,407 sq. km. area in Bangladesh are exposed to severe health risks including skin cancer from high levels of arsenic in drinking water drawn from hand tube wells (Mazumder et al. 2000; Chakraborti et al. 2001; also see West Bengal and Bangladesh Arsenic Crisis Information Centre website ). Today using filtered water from ponds and pools is the only cheap and safe option for people in the affected region. A significant proportion of agrochemicals used in the farm runs off into surface water or leaches into groundwater. The polluted surface water in rural South is extremely hazardous to humans, livestock and wildlife. Contamination of rivers, lakes and ground water by nitrates, heavy metals and organochlorine compounds is a major problem in many countries in the North as well, including France, the Netherlands and the United States. Evaporation of surface water not only concentrates the pesticide residues but also throws up the chemicals into the air. Rainwater containing high levels of pesticide residues have also been reported (e.g. Pearce and Mackenzie 1999). Pesticides that contaminate drinking water supplies and are harmful to humans and animals have been found in ground water in many countries (USDA 1991). Recent studies in India have reported contamination of packaged drinking water with significantly high levels of organochlorine and organophosphate pesticide residues and heavy metals (CERC 1998; CSE 2003a). High levels of pesticide residues have also been detected in soft drinks like Coke and Pepsi (CSE 2003b). F. Soil erosion and salinization The application of chemical fertilizers has surged in all types of farms. While yield has grown at a slow pace – from 522 kg per hectare in 1951 to 1,397 kg per hectare in 1993 – more than double in 40 years, fertilizer application increased an astonishing 10,570 percent – from less than 1 kg per hectare to 106.72 kg per hectare during the same period (Sharma 1996). In the last three decades, Indian consumption of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium fertilizer has grown at 9.5 percent annually, making India the fourth largest consumer in the world. The

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most recent data places India’s fertilizer consumption at an average of 69.66 kg/ha, although the inputs are much heavier in medium-sized farms. Directly linked to the use of fertilizers, problems of soil erosion, salinization, water logging, and successive depletion of the soil nutrients through leaching and waste are global phenomena (WRI 1997). Application of synthetic fertilizers results in compaction, loss of soil organisms, and loss of water retention capacity of soil, and leads to soil erosion. Soon, the soil turns dusty, and susceptible to erosion by wind and water activities. According to Narayana et al. (1983), soil erosion rates in India were 16.35 tonnes per hectare per year from agricultural lands. Salinity has become a problem wherever water of even relatively low salt content is used on shallow soils in arid regions and/or where the water table is near the root zone of crops. Tile drainage can remove the water and salts, but the disposal of the salts and other contaminants may negatively affect the environment depending upon where they are deposited. Temporary solutions include the use of salt-tolerant crops, low-volume irrigation, and various management techniques to minimize the effects of salts on crops. In the long-term, some farmland may need to be removed from cultivation. That would mean conversion of row cropland, production of drought-tolerant forages, the restoration of wildlife habitat or the use of agro-forestry to minimize the impacts of salinity and high water tables. However, any of these would lead to loss of farm output, and are therefore considered counter-productive. The metabolism of pesticides and herbicides in the soil is poorly studied. However, organochlorine and organophosphate pesticides are known to have adverse long-term effects on soil biota. These persistent organic compounds and heavy metals can contaminate crops and overall food production (UNEP 2001). In some mid-western States of USA, the contamination of groundwater by agricultural chemicals has recently prompted governmental efforts to reduce chemical and fertilizer applications. G. Crop contamination Possible crop contamination resulting from uncontrolled use of pesticides and fertilizers contaminated with heavy metals is of great concern. The production of pesticides had started in India in 1952 with the establishment of a plant for the production of BHC near Calcutta, and India is now the second largest manufacturer of pesticides in Asia after China and ranks 12th globally (Mathur 1999). In 1996–97 the demand for pesticides in terms of value was estimated to be around Rs. 22 billion (US$ 0.5 billion), which is about 2 percent of the total world market. There has been a steady growth in the production of technical

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grade pesticides in India, from 5,000 metric ton in 1958 to 102,240 metric ton in 1998. The pattern of pesticide usage in India is, however, different from that for the world in general. In India 76 percent of the pesticide used is insecticide, as against 44 percent globally. The use of herbicides and fungicides is correspondingly less widespread. Nevertheless, herbicide use has drastically increased in the country over the recent decades. From an annual application level of 200 metric ton (MT) in 1955, the extent of herbicide use reached 75000 MT in 1985. By 2000, the amount reached 200,000 MT (Sharma 2003: 15). In India, pesticides (including herbicides) are mainly used for cotton crops (45 percent), followed by paddy and wheat (Mathur 1999). Over the past few decades, the amount of pesticides applied to vegetable farms has increased several-fold. Potato and eggplant, for example, receive as many as 14 sprays of pesticides in a season in eastern Indian farms. Considering the post-harvest application of pesticides to control storage pests, the amount of pesticides used per unit of vegetable crop produced far exceeds that for cereals. A direct consequence of such generous use of pesticides and herbicides is contamination of food with toxic residues, which through bio-magnification, accumulate in human tissues. Illiterate farmers do not recognize the toxicity of the pesticides, and seldom use any gloves or masks while spraying these in farms. PCBs have been detected in fish, birds, sea mammals and humans, and are known to cause a new class of diseases (Cummins 1998; EPA 2002). A study of health impact of pesticides in India revealed that incidents of abortion in families of farmers exposed to farm pesticides was 26 percent, compared to 15 percent in non-exposed control population of similar age and socio-economic status; the incident of congenital defects was 3.0 percent compared to 0.1 percent in the control population (Rupa et al. 1991). Data of accumulation of organochlorine residues in blood samples in non-farming populations of major Indian cities (Table 4.1) indicate the acuteness of pesticide toxicity. In addition, pesticide residues have also been identified in food samples, foodstuff raw materials, drinking water and in air samples (Saiyed et al. 1999).

Table 4.1. Toxic Agrochemical Residues found in Human viscera samples from major cities in north India. City

Year

No.

Delhi Lucknow Ahmedabad

1984 1981 1992

340 25 31

DDT (ppm)

Note: Data represented as mean ±SE; ppm = parts per million. Source: Saiyed et al. 1999.

0.710±0.05 0.020±0.002 0.048±0.005

BHC (ppm) 0.490±0.05 0.022±0.002 0.148±0.008

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H. Air pollution Air pollution due to agricultural industrialization has various sources, including dust from tillage, traffic and harvest; pesticide drift from spraying; and nitrous oxide emissions from the use of nitrogen fertilizer (Feenstra et al. 1997). The use of nitrogenous fertilizers and pesticide spray contributes to creating ozone hole, in addition to causing severe health problems. Airborne pesticide residues have been recorded from a number of Indian cities (NIOH 1985: C1-C7), with unaccounted health costs to citizens. A notorious example of air pollution from agrochemicals is the sediments of the Aral Sea, which since 1960 received a massive flux of agrochemicals from the surrounding fields. After the Aral Sea has shrunk by over half its original size (due to draining of the Amu Darya and Sir Darya rivers), the exposed and dry sea bed is now swept by strong winds, which carry between 40 to 150 million tons of salt, sand and dust of pesticides and fertilizers each year to the formerly fertile lands of the Amu Darya delta, which has now become sterile (McNeely et al. 1995: 745).

I. Build-up of resistant pests and super weeds In view of the growing cost and inefficiency of pesticides in controlling pests, which are widely known to have evolved resistance, agricultural specialists now feel the need of putting a check on the use of agrochemicals (USDA 1991). By the mid1980s, over 450 insect species were recorded to have evolved resistance to one or more pesticides, and some 150 pathogenic fungi and bacteria became resistant to fungicides. Several pests have evolved resistance to organochlorine, organophosphate and pyrethroid pesticides (Conway 1997: 209–11). Creation of genetically engineered plants incorporating insecticidal toxin (like the Bt toxin) cannot avoid inheritance of pesticide-resistance among insect pests (Liu et al. 1999). Herbicide tolerant weeds have become a menace in agricultural farms in the USA, Australia and Asia. This problem is exacerbated by the recent introduction of genetically modified herbicide-tolerant (GMHT) crops, designed to enhance the sale of herbicides manufactured by the companies selling the GMHT crops. Cultivation of GMHT crops is likely to cause evolution of ‘super weeds’ through horizontal transfer of herbicide-tolerance genes (Snow et al. 1999; Conway 2000). Scientists in official positions, responsible for agricultural development, have eventually agreed, ‘there is… a need to make a reasonable assessment and to draft a strategy involving the judicious use of pesticides and the development of alternatives’ (Saiyed et al. 1999). The UN Food and Agriculture Organization has recommended the phasing out of synthetic pesticides and adopting integrated pest

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management (IPM), involving biological control methods and judicious crop management requiring lesser use of pesticides. Many proponents of agricultural development now consider pesticides to be counter-productive not so much due to the concern for human health or harm to wildlife, but because of the evidence of increasing heritable resistance to these pesticides among insect pest populations (USDA 1991; Conway 1997). The trained agricultural scientists and extension workers who taught farmers about the use of synthetic pesticides over the past four decades, now pass the buck of ‘injudicious use of pesticides’ on to farmers: The greedy and short-sighted farmers have been using too much toxic chemicals – in excess of what was recommended, and therefore it is the ignorant farmers rather than the chemicals that harm the environment. The agriculturists now feel that it is necessary that the use of pesticides in field conditions be ‘based on scientific knowledge and backed by technical expertise’ (Saiyed et al. 1999). This official urge to adopt more scientifically sound agricultural technology however fails to envisage the possibility of complete abandoning of chemical pesticides, and overlooks the sustainable alternatives to chemical agriculture. Rather, preoccupied with the belief in ‘technological fixes’ to the problem of productivity, many agriculturists look forward to more powerful toxins or more sophisticated technology like genetic engineering. Thus, new brands of insecticides, fungicides and herbicides are being brought into the market. GM crops incorporating transgenes (like the Bt genes from the soil bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis) that produce insect-killing compounds in the plant tissues are being introduced into the market as an alternative to chemical agriculture. However, target pest insect populations tend to develop resistance to Bt toxin (Huang et al. 1999; Liu et al. 1999), requiring further use of chemical pesticides8 that consequently leads to further environmental consequences. Techniques of IPM, involving biological control and traditional pest-control methods (using local plants with known pest-control properties) receive little credence in training courses for agricultural extension workers, who continue to advise farmers to use synthetic pesticides. J. Biodiversity erosion Green Revolution farming practices involving homogenization of the crop genetic base have eroded biodiversity in agro-ecosystems, including plant genetic resources, livestock, beneficial insects and soil organisms. Synthetic pesticides cause decline of both species diversity and abundance of spiders, bees, wasps, beetles, crickets, dragonflies and damselflies, thrips and earthworms. Alongside the build-up of resistance to pesticides in crop pests and pathogens, elimination

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of non-target organisms has been a major cause of agro-ecological concern. Rachel Carson’s 1961 classic Silent Spring on the effect of DDT causing eggshell thinning of birds of prey triggered a series of studies that have documented the role of pesticides in biodiversity erosion. Organochlorine and organophosphate pesticides enter the food chain and accumulate in higher organisms through a process called biomagnification, causing incurable health hazards and deaths. PCBs are known to have caused decline in fish and marine mammal populations (Cummins 1998). Chemical elimination of pollinators (bees, moths, butterflies), predators (spiders, ladybirds, mantids) and parasitoids (ichneumonid wasps) of crop pests and nutrient enhancers (soil organisms) has caused serious economic losses, jeopardizing productivity and food security, and leading to broader social costs. Equally alarming is the loss of biodiversity in natural habitats from the expansion of agricultural production to frontier areas. Elimination of soil organisms has led to severe loss of soil fertility in areas where intensive Green Revolution agriculture has been in practice. According to a report of the World Resources Institute, soil degradation has dramatically reduced crop productivity, with severe likely consequences for poor, heavily populated countries (Wood et al. 2000). As a consequence, agricultural lands face an enormous challenge to maintain the current food production levels over the next 20 years. An important aspect of agro-biodiversity is the crop genetic diversity, which is threatened by industrialization of agriculture. Folk crop varieties continue to disappear with the on-going transformation of indigenous cultures and their ecosystems (Feenstra et al. 1997; Fujisaka 1999). The modern practice of monoculture of selected crops has replaced the traditional multiple cropping practices, resulting in erosion of crop diversity (Deb 2005). Agricultural modernization has also eroded the genetic base of most cultivated crops – rice, wheat, maize, potato – through replacement with a handful of modern varieties (Fujisaka 1999). Whereas folk crop varieties can withstand a wide range of climatic and soil conditions, modern crop varieties tend to perish at small environmental variations like untimely rains. Crop landraces grown by traditional farmers continue to evolve genetically in response to human management and environmental changes. A large array of genes responsible for resistance to different pests and pathogens are found in many folk crop cultivars and their wild relatives. With the disappearance of folk varieties, the very genetic base for crop breeding and improvement is irretrievably lost. Fearing the loss of valuable genes, conservationists have launched efforts to collect and save folk crop seed samples for future use in ex situ gene banks (Jackson 1995).

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Erosion of crop genetic diversity has taken an awesome proportion in the case of the indica variety of rice. From an estimated 46,000 folk rice landraces cultivated in India till the late 1960s, no more than a few thousand are left. In West Bengal, a predominantly rice-growing State, over 5,600 landraces were grown till 1970, of which about 3,500 were sent to IRRI in the Philippines during the period 1975 to 1983 (Deb 2005). Today, most of these varieties have gone extinct; at most 400 folk landraces are now surviving on marginal farms of the State. An additional threat to folk crop genetic diversity from the recent introduction of GM crops is discussed below. K. Direct economic losses At lower input levels, the increased use of inorganic fertilizers has dramatic effects on crop yields. But with increasing amount of fertilizer applied, the growth and yield response of the crop diminishes exponentially, and eventually levels off, so that at a certain point, the cost of fertilizers equals the value of the increase in crop yield. This accounts for the decline in the incremental responses of crop yield to the increases in fertilizer use. For example, in India the average food grain production has decreased from 15 kg to 8 kg per kg of fertilizer use over the period 1975 to 1990 (Saxena 1998). Thus, the cost of fertilizer increases while the yield records a steady decline, resulting in a proportionate decline in the farm economic efficiency. Unnecessary applications of pesticides have also become uneconomical. In India, the cost of pesticides applied to control pests far exceeds the value of crop loss per unit area due to pest attack if no pesticides were used. The failure of chemicals to control the rice stem borer is a good instance. Farmers’ experience – that matches with the result of all on-farm experiments – is that no more than 30 kg of rice grains (costing about Rs. 160 at the current market price) per acre is lost to stem borer attack. With two (recommended) sprays of pesticides, the total cost (per acre) of the chemicals and labour exceeds Rs. 220. One may add to this figure the cost of the loss of beneficial insects, the cost of farm workers’ health, and the long-term cost of poisoning the environment. But even at this huge cost, pesticides fail to give total protection to the crop from the stem borer. The pesticides cannot reach the insect that has pupated inside cocoons. When the adult moths eclose from cocoons, days after the pesticidal spray, their natural enemies – the predatory wasps, ladybirds, mantids and spiders – are already eradicated. This enhances the chances of survival of these moths and of the eggs they lay in a predator-free environment. Thus the subsequent pest attack becomes more severe, requiring further spray of pesticides. Moreover, pests

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developing resistance to pesticides is indicative of failure of conventional pesticides to control the pests. This leads to either increased doses of application or use of a new range of pesticides. Since pests are known to continue to evolve resistance to chemicals (Conway 1997), the vicious cycle – of increasing dosage of pesticides, application of new brands of pesticides and pests developing resistance to new chemicals – continues, with spiralling ecological damages and monetary losses to the farmer. The inherent lack of yield stability of the HYV and hybrid crop varieties makes it imperative for the farmer to buy new batches of seeds every couple of years, often at a higher price. Moreover, the modern laboratory varieties are not adaptive to marginal lands and climatic vagaries; glossy new varieties come up almost every other year to bewilder the farmer, but soon prove to fare no better than earlier ones. Following the Green Revolution campaign for the past 40 years, farmers have now become accustomed to buying seeds, so the age-old dependence of farmsaved seeds has been replaced by a dependence on the market for seed supply. Retail shops for seeds and agrochemicals seem to be the only option left for farmers to procure seeds. Both State agriculture departments and MNCs have driven farmers to abandon indigenous crop landraces and to rely instead on external seed supply. As a consequence, the traditional practices of breeding, saving, and exchange of diverse crop seeds among farmers have become a thing of the past. The net result of abolition of customary seed saving and exchange practices is that folk crop varieties rapidly disappear from farmers’ accession. The farmers now have to incur a recurring annual expenditure to procure modern seeds, which lose their yield potential after a couple of generations of the crop. L. Social costs An important social impact of the Green Revolution is the growing economic rift between rich and poor farmers. The capital-intensive nature of the Green Revolution agriculture is geared to benefit only rich farmers. Because big farmers retain control over all infrastructure and credit, capital-intensive farming has been more successful in their farms than in small peasant farms. With the given economic advantage, large farms are able to invest capital in intensive production of cereals as well as cash crops like cotton and sugarcane. Unlike peasant farms producing basic wage foods for household subsistence, the large farms have shown, at least in the first decade, a heightened productivity. In spite of state subsidies, marginal (mostly tribal) farmers are unable to buy the package of costly inputs, consisting of HYV seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and pump sets.

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Unable to invest their paltry savings in these recurrent inputs, a large section of farmers, according to the law of the ‘Invisible Hand,’ have eventually become pauperised. Indeed, state policies have favoured enhancement of production and have concentrated the bulk of the public and private credit in large private farms. In doing so, they have contributed to the widening disparity of income distribution within the agricultural sector. So far, the response of the development lobby to these critiques has been to look away from the data sheets evidencing adverse social and environmental impacts. However, recent acknowledgement of these impacts by stalwarts of the Green revolution (e.g. Conway 1997; Swaminathan 2001) has allowed a gust of critical air into much of the technocratic space. The increasing costs of seeds and agrochemicals entail credit, which over the past 30 years has translated into permanent debt traps for many farmers, which they can hardly escape. This has compelled small farmers to sell off their lands and migrate into cities. Poor and marginal farmers have been dispossessed of their land. Farming has become a losing enterprise. The increasing cost of inputs and unpayable debts has resulted in the epidemic of farmers’ suicides – thousands of farmers have committed suicide in several States in the recent years (Shiva et al. 2000). That the Green Revolution has enhanced social inequality within the agricultural sector, by benefiting rich farmers, marginalizing the poor, and causing mass exodus of landless farmers to cities has been pointed out by several authors (e.g. de Janvry 1981; Shiva 1991; Escobar 1995). Health costs of intensified agriculture using synthetic fertilizers and pesticides appear to be incalculable. While no comprehensive study exists to estimate the extent of diseases and deaths of humans and livestock from pesticide poisoning in the Southern countries, a few Northern estimates are good indicators. Pimentel and colleagues (1992) estimated that health care costs arising from direct pesticide poisoning go up to US$ 787 million every year, and that the annual loss of crops and trees due to the use of pesticides is worth US$ 942 million. Damages to the environment, like soil erosion, groundwater contamination, elimination of fish, birds, pollinating insects, soil biota, and natural enemies of pests have a profound social cost, which is conservatively estimated at US$ 8123 million per year. Pretty et al. (2000) estimated the environmental and health costs of modern agricultural practices in the UK, for the year 1996 alone, at £ 2343 million. Indeed, such estimates are bound to underestimate the costs arising from the loss of environmental services of the various components of biodiversity. In pondering these data, one must bear in mind that any such cost/benefit analysis of the environmental goods and services constitutes ‘a procedure by which the higher is reduced to the level of the lower and the priceless

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is given a price’ (Schumacher 1974: 37). Every species that is lost is given a price tag, although at least some of them provide priceless (and unpriceable) services to the ecosystem and human economy. However, the objective of such studies is not to arrive at a precise valuation of the biosphere, but to give a common idea of how immeasurable the value of nature is, and what great harm developmentality has done to it.

4.3

Genetic Engineering in Agriculture: Another Green Revolution?

As if the Green Revolution was not enough to impoverish the soil and the farmer, MNCs have come up with a new technological fix for FAD – genetic engineering. The corporate propaganda upholds genetically modified (GM) crops as the harbinger of a Second Green Revolution, with a big promise of solving the problem of world hunger and malnutrition once and for all. GM crops are said to be able to grow crops in marginal conditions and boost crop yield several times over. Despite warnings of experts (e.g. Conway 2000) to moderate such tall claims, MNCs are going overboard with their advertisements of the products of the new technology. To acquire a comprehensive control over the entire agricultural production system, manufacturers of GM crops have pressured national governments in the South to create a policy and legal arrangements that would eliminate indigenous seeds, homogenize farm ecosystems, and impoverish crop genetic diversity, soil and the farmer. The Green Revolution smoothened the entry of MNCs into the agricultural sector of the South. The WTO regime, besides enhancing the corporate hold over natural resources, further empowered the MNCs to usurp the farmers’ sovereignty over seeds and undermine the sovereignty of national governments over biodiversity. The WTO regime engenders corporate monopoly over the primary material and ultimate means of food production – the seeds. The process of replacement of indigenous crop landraces by modern varieties has accelerated tremendously with the introduction of proprietary seeds into farms. Untested GM crop seeds manufactured and patented by giant MNCs have captured the seed market. The handful of proprietary GM crops are designed to replace the crop genetic diversity that is already dwindling. Because of the inherent instability of alien genes (‘transgenes’) from unrelated organisms inserted into GM crop genotypes, the likelihood of gene transmission from GM crop species to their wild relatives as well as unrelated organisms (technically called ‘horizontal gene transfer’) is greatly enhanced. Furthermore, the behaviour of transgenes and the functions of transgenic

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products are uncertain in the host organism, and may disrupt its physiological and ecological functions. Such gene exchanges may therefore jeopardise the existing crop genetic diversity to an unpredictable extent (Snow et al. 1999; Altieri 2001). A series of scientific studies have indicated that scientists’ warnings about gene flow from GM crops to traditional crops as well as their weedy relatives leading to unintended consequences are not paranoid imaginings. For example, transfer of the Bar gene from GM rice to non-GM red rice has already been documented (Wheeler et al. 2001), although rice is primarily self-pollinated. In the case of cross-pollinated crops like maize, long-distance gene transfer has been recorded in Mexico, where pollens from GM maize travelled 500 km to cause genetic pollution of traditional maize varieties (Quist and Chapela 2001). Substantial hybridization between GM oilseed rape and its weedy relatives have also been recorded (Halfhill et al. 2002). Chilcutt and Tabashnik (2004) found that low to moderate levels of Bt toxin were detectable in non-transgenic maize growing up to 31 metres away from the GM crop incorporating Bt genes. Similar transfer of herbicide resistance genes from GM herbicide tolerant (HT) rice to non-GM rice has also been demonstrated. Independent experiments in Italy have established gene flow from GMHT rice variety to adjacent non-GM cultivated rice (Messeguer et al. 2001) as well as to weedy rice (Messeguer et al. 2004). Many of the GM seeds are designed to assist the sale of a series of agrochemicals that the same seed company manufactures. For example, Monsanto’s “Roundup-Ready” crops are designed to promote the sale of its own glyphosate herbicide called Roundup. Consequent upon cultivation of GMHT crops, increasing application of herbicides is common experience (Benbrook 2003), leading to eradication of broadleaved plants, which serve as food and breeding habitat for numerous insects and birds. The application of herbicides, promoted by GMHT crops, directly causes depletion of broadleaved plant diversity and consequent reduction in various species of insects and birds (Watkinson et al. 2000; Bohan et al. 2005), Monsanto’s Roundup also has lethal effect on both terrestrial and aquatic frogs (Relyea 2005). GMHT crops are not the only GM crops that affect biodiversity. Crops that incorporate entomotoxin-producing genes are advertised as safe from pest insects without the need of pesticide use. However, such crops constantly produce insecticidal toxin in the entire plant body, and are capable of eliminating non-target insects. Bt crops, incorporating a toxin gene complex from the soil bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis, have been shown to kill off Monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) larvae (Losey et al 1999; Hansen and Obrycki 2000; Dively et al., 2004) and Black Swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes) larvae (Zangerl et al. 2001). Lethal

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effects of Bt toxin from GM crops on arthropod predators have also been documented (Harwood et al. 2005; Hilbeck and Schmidt 2006). Toxic root exudates from Bt crop plants containing persistent transgene products are known to affect soil microbial community (Saxena and Stozsky 2000), with adverse consequences for soil fertility. Despite a growing body of evidence of adverse ecological effects of GM crops, biotech corporations continue to promote their GM crop business with bold assurances that genetic engineering will (a) eliminate hunger, (b) eradicate malnutrition and (c) eliminate toxic agrochemical use. Mahyco-Monsanto sold 450gram packets of Bt-cotton seeds, each costing Rs. 1,600, including Rs. 1,200 as technology fee. The costly GM crop required additional expenditure on water, fertilizers and pesticides, and failed in most farms. Since 1998, the repeated failure of hybrid and GM crops supplied by Monsanto and associate firms in several States resulted in farmers’ suicides, recording about 300 cases in three years (Shiva et al. 2000). Giant seed companies sell the untested products of their ‘brave and brilliant’ biotechnology with promises of mammoth increase in crop production. However, this promise has proved everywhere to be vacuous, with enormous costs incurred by farmers. As The New Scientist (2004) reports, Monsanto’s showcase project to develop a genetically modified crop for Africa has failed. Three years of field trials have shown that GM sweet potatoes modified to resist a virus were no less vulnerable than ordinary varieties, and sometimes their yield was lower, according to the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute. Farmers in the South, allured into buying the new batch of ‘miracle seeds’, have paid a tremendously high price for their trust in the corporate lies. Cargill’s C-71 variety of pearl millet and Rallis’ 1001 rice failed in Karnataka; Monsanto’s Cargill hybrid 900 M maize seeds failed to germinate on farms of Bihar in 2002; Agriculture Ministers of the cotton growing States – Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Gujarat – publicly acknowledged the failure of MahycoMonsanto’s Bollgard cotton (Shiva et al. 2000; AgBioIndia 2003). Despite Monsanto’s assurance of no need of pesticides, farms in Andhra Pradesh sown to Bollgard cotton suffered from severe bollworm attack, which entailed enormous expenses toward pesticide spray, but to no avail. All this empirical evidence of corporate fraud notwithstanding, a majority of professional agriculturists remain bewitched by the MNC propaganda of genetic engineering as the means to food security. This faith in technological fix is a part of the ideology of industrial development that has submerged all bureaucratic, political and academic institutions. The doctrinaire belief in big technology that benefits big industry and big money submerges common sense and science. Thus, few professional scientists

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have questioned the scientific basis of Monsanto’s claim that its beta carotenefortified GM rice (called ‘Golden Rice’) was the answer to malnutrition from vitamin A deficiency (VAD) in South Asia. It took a handful of environmental activists to point out that one has to consume nine kg of cooked Golden Rice every day in order to avoid VAD, while mustard flower, kanta noté (Amaranthus spinosus) leaves, tender leaves of edible jute (Corchorus capsularis), drumstick (Moringa oleifera), red amaranth (Amaranthus gangeticus), kalmi (Ipomea reptans) and kachu (Amorphophalus antiquorum) have 150 to 480 times as much beta carotene as the Golden Rice of the same weight.9 In their enthusiasm to justify genetic engineering research, biotechnologists preferred to overlook the incomparably cheaper indigenous solutions to the VAD problem. This negligence of ‘little science’ of folk nutrition, folk agronomy and home garden ecology in favour of ‘mega science’ of genetic engineering is paradigmatic of state institutions that tend to institutionalise developmentality. The myth of eliminating, or even reducing chemical use by the adoption of GM crops is exploded by studies on GMHT crops. Herbicide use on Monsanto’s Roundup-Ready soybean acres in all farms sown to GMHT crops is gradually rising as a result of weed shifts, late-season weed escapes leading to a build up in weed seed banks, and the loss of susceptibility to glyphosate in some weed species. Benbrook has analyzed herbicide and insecticide use over eight years (1996–2003) on the three main GMHT crops in the US (soya, maize and cotton) and the two main GM Bt crops (maize and cotton). Between 2001–02 alone, on additional 73 million pounds work of chemicals were sprayed in the US as a result of GM crops than if non-GM varieties only were grown (Benbrook 2003). Meanwhile, herbicide use on non-GM crops has been falling steadily. During 2002–03, an average of 29 percent more herbicide was applied per acre on GMHT maize than on non-GM maize. Dr Benbrook concludes that GM ‘herbicide tolerant crops have increased pesticide use an estimated 70 million pounds over the last eight years.’

4.4

Neither Green nor Productive

A majority of professional economists announce from the pages of corporate newspapers that the height of the food grain stockpile would match Mount Abu. Unaware of the official statistics of food grain yield and stockpile in government storehouses, millions of poor people have been dying of endemic hunger in recent years. Starvation and undernutrition have become endemic in different parts of India – Kalahandi in Orissa, Shivpuri in Madhya Pradesh, Palamou in Bihar, Belpahari in West Bengal. While the starvation death figures keep State

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governments busy over fabricating politically safe definitions of starvation and malnutrition, thousands of farmers have committed suicide elsewhere because they were immersed in debt. They drowned in debt because their farms did not produce enough for subsistence – let alone profits. By poisoning the food chain and lowering the water table, the Green Revolution has destroyed the “green” components of the agricultural landscape in all countries. By aiding politicians, rich farmers and the chemical industry, it has undermined the food security of the poor. Its failure is most spectacular in Africa. Despite substantial rise in fertilizer use and HYV seeds, the per capita agricultural production of cassava, rice, wheat, sorghum and millet in African countries remained low or stagnant (Ezumah and Ezumah 1996). Consistently low yield of rice, millets and maize in Africa, in spite of widespread adoption of improved and hybrid varieties, have raised serious questions about the Green Revolution approach (Devries and Toeniessen 2001). In South Asia, too, at the end of the decade following the initial surge of rice and wheat production, the crop yield curve has bent downwards, cost of inputs has escalated, wealth accumulated in a few rich farms, while an increasing number of poor farmers have been losing their lands. There is hardly a better instance of a fanfare that began with gongs and ended in a whimper. The country’s food security, which was primarily the objective of the ‘revolution’ to strengthen, has been subverted. In spite of the self-congratulatory statistics of ‘self-sufficiency in food’, the Indian government is obliged to import edible oil, pulses, vegetables, and even cheap rice from South East Asia. A scrutiny of the production economics reveals that the Green Revolution formula was flawed in not taking into consideration the autonomy of the Black Box – the environment. The same flaws are repeated in the commercial drive for introduction of biotechnology in agriculture. Like its predecessor, the new technological fix considers the irretrievable loss of soil fertility, groundwater stock, crop genetic diversity, indigenous knowledge, and the farmer’s autonomy as the necessary price for a higher crop yield that is likely, but unsustainable. The preoccupation with short-term profit maximization continues to sacrifice the long-term productivity of soil and sustainability of production itself. The situation of agricultural development in the South is best articulated in the words of J.P. Madden, executive vice president of World Sustainable Agriculture Association, who recalled […]the story of the airplane pilot who announced to the passengers that he had some good news and some bad news. The bad news, he said, is that one of the crew members spilled his drink on the control panel, causing immediate and total failure of all navigational equipment. The good news is that because of a strong tail wind, the aircraft is traveling very fast, and should arrive wherever it

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is going ahead of schedule. Impressive increases in crop yields are often won at the expense of farm worker health, soil productivity, water quality and supply, biodiversity, natural habitats, and quality of life in rural communities. (Madden 1994: 705)

Notes 1.

The rural poor in the South thrive on numerous wild and uncultivated food plants to supplement their otherwise nutrient-deficient diet (Deb 1999; 2001a). These food plants that women gather from the wild are a major diet for the Tropical forest tribals. As Daman Singh (1996: 119) observed in Mizoram, ‘Wild fruits, shoots, stems, leaves, flowers, and roots from the forest provide a year round supply for the rural areas…. Unlike similar areas where rice is the major produce, the Mizos do not suffer from nutritional deficiencies.’ Much of this wild food plant diversity contains large quantities of beta carotene, which is adequate to meet the FAO-recommended daily requirement of an average adult person (700 micrograms for woman, 900 micrograms for man). To illustrate some common food plants from Asian and African homegardens, every 100g of Indian mustard (Brassica campestris) flower contains 16000 μg of beta carotene; kanta note (Amaranthus spinosus) leaves 10900 μg; tender leaves of edible jute (Corchorus capsularis) contains 10200 μg; drumstick (Moringa oleifera) leaves, 7500 μg; and red amaranth (Amaranthus gangeticus) leaves 5100 μg (Rodriguez-Amaya 1997, Table 4). Food plants that Asian villagers gather from the wild include kalmi (Ipomea reptans) and kachu (Amorphophalus antiquorum) that contain, respectively, 8300 μg and 8000 μg beta carotene per 100 g of leaves. In contrast, the beta carotene content of the uncooked Golden Rice is about 160 μg/100 g, or equivalently, 33 μg/ 100g in the cooked Golden Rice. Clearly, this technological quick-fix to vitamin A deficiency (VAD) can hardly supply more than 14 percent of the daily requirement of an average woman, at a daily consumption rate of 300g of rice. A second generation of Golden rice presumably contains a considerably higher level of beta carotene. However, mere availability of the right type or quantity of foodstuff cannot solve the VAD problem in the rural South, without addressing other social issues. For one, vitamin A in food is not absorbed in the gut unless the food contains some oil, or when gastro-enteric infections like diarrhoea and amoebic dysentery persists. This draws in the question of safe drinking water and other related issues.

2.

Mullen and Johnson (1990: 138) describe subculture as: ‘a category of people who share a sense of identification that is distinguishable from that of the culture as a whole. This shared sense of identification may result from a shared set of values, from a common history, or from similarity in sociodemographic attributes.’

3.

But do they know how edgy, how gutsy, how risky? … They have never sat in a classroom where the desks are arranged so that no student will be hurt by falling plaster. They have never had to say ‘Yes, Sir’ and ‘No, Sir’ as a police officer, dripping with sarcasm, asks, ‘Nigger, where’d you get the money for such a nice car?’ From a safe distance – as consumers – they can believe they are hip, hip being defined as what they see in their urban counterparts. (Kotlowitz 1999: 71)

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A semantic attempt of the Indian forest department to ease the acceptability of Acacia auriculiformis may be discerned in the popularization of its sanskritized name ‘akashmoni,’ originally christened by the famous Indian philosopher-poet Rabindranath Tagore (awarded Nobel Prize in 1914). Allusion to this Tagorean name did convey to many that the tree was an indigenous species.

5.

These varieties are capable of allocating a greater proportion of resources (chiefly nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus) to reproductive tissues (flowers and seeds) than to vegetative tissues for growth. Thus, after the plant has attained its characteristic height, any extra inputs of fertilizers would enhance plant growth in the traditional variety, whereas it would increase seed production in dwarf HYVs.

6.

Owing to the US-led trade embargo over the past few decades, Cuba is the only Socialist country that has been obliged to turn to zero-chemical agriculture, and thus has avoided the industrialization of agriculture. Cuban agriculture has a remarkably high productivity, and is the cleanest in the world.

7.

That surplus food production per se does not eradicate hunger is evident from recent records of endemic hunger in South Asia, where thousands starve at a time when food grains are rotting in government storehouses.

8.

In India, field trials of Bt cotton in at least four States of India during the period 20002002 resulted in increased pest attack and enormous crop loss, which drove hundreds of farmers to commit suicide (Shiva et al. 2000). In April 2003 an agriculture minister officially admitted in a TV interview that the episodes of farmers’ suicide in his State had been caused by the spectacular failure of Bt cotton. Soon afterwards, chief ministers of several Indian States appealed to the Parliamentary Committee to repeal permission of field trials of Bt cotton in their States (AgBioIndia 2003).

9.

See note 1.

C h a p t e r 5.1

5

Arguments for Alternatives

A Legacy of Questioning Progress

Search for an alternative paradigm for development began concomitantly with critiques of industrial development and questions on the nature of social progress. The basic tenets of these critiques originated in the 19th century radical political philosophies of Marxism, anarchism and Luddism. Radical thinkers as well as the Romantics understood that the Enlightenment’s promise of delivering humanity from fear, oppression and poverty had been foiled by capitalist development. The first voices of discord with the standard progressivism of the era came from Alfred Russell Wallace, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who were concerned about the ecological impacts of civilization. A pioneer of biogeography and co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection, Wallace expressed his concern for the vanishing species: It seems sad that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild, inhospitable regions, doomed for ages yet to come to hopeless barbarism; while on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant lands, and bring moral, intellectual and physical light into the recesses of these virgin forests, we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature so as to cause the disappearance and finally the extinction of these very beings whose wonderful structures and beauty he alone is fitted to appreciate and enjoy. This consideration must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man. (Wallace 1962: 340)

This seems to be one of the first articulations of the ecological concern for vanishing species. Of importance is Wallace’s critical view of Western civilization, 225

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which he avowed would disrupt the fine balance of nature and eradicate fascinating creatures living in the lands of ‘hopeless barbarism.’ Wallace was a Fabian socialist. His contemporary, Friedrich Engels, an eclectic thinker and collaborator with Marx, also saw that the Renaissance ideal of human domination of nature would eventually bear ‘unforeseen’ baneful results. Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. (Engels 1954: 180)

This viewpoint was echoed in Marx, despite his firm belief in progress of humanity through advances in scientific knowledge: At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force. (Marx 1856: 500)

Marx showed in his analysis of capitalism that technological progress notwithstanding, eradication of poverty would never be possible and squandering of nature would never be stopped until capitalism is overthrown, because the capitalist mode of production treats nature as its raw material and must maintain the poor as the reserve army of workers who must sell their labour for subsistence. The Luddites in this period observed that advancements of scientific knowledge did not serve the purpose of emancipating the masses from ignorance and poverty; instead, science and engineering were employed by capitalism to exploit the masses. They argued that science is always appropriated by industrial capitalism, and that therefore its application could never be value-neutral. Technology, they argued, is inevitably subservient to the political hegemony of the state, employed against the interest of the masses (Sale 1999). The Luddite image of modern science as exploitative and ultimately inimical to humanity had some influence in the contemporary popular view of science and was reflected in a major section of Victorian literature, epitomized in Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein. Victorian literature is suffused with the view that the rise of industry bore deleterious consequences for both humans and the quality of the natural environment. Writings of John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle represent what Murphy (2003: 80) calls ‘antimodern declinism’ – the view that the modern

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age is in decline compared to earlier times. This rhetoric of decline was the essence of the Victorian critique of capitalism, which they saw as detrimental to human values and civilization – a rhetoric that was reiterated a century later by the Frankfurt School. The Victorian Romantics, in particular, horrified at the social harms and the despoliation of the aesthetic quality of the landscape caused by industrialization, often repudiated the monstrous technological growth and called for a return to the relative environmental harmony, simplicity of country life and the rural and feudal social order (Barry 1999:138). The Romantics grieved over the loss of the classic ideals of natural harmony, beauty and spiritual progress as a consequence of capitalist development, marked by proliferation of factories, monetization of human relationships and pauperization of peasants. To the Victorian classicist, capitalist development was anti-humanist from its origin: ‘The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production’ (Marx 1887: 703). Industrial production entailed dehumanization of the worker, downgrading the human living condition: ‘Filth, this stagnation and putrefaction of man – the sewage of civilisation (speaking quite literally) – comes to be the element of life’ for the urban industrial worker, freed from feudal bondage (Marx, 1844: 110). Capitalist development brought the worker back to a historically primitive condition, ‘which is now, however, contaminated with the pestilential breath of civilisation’. The Promethean light of civilization ‘ceases to exist for the worker’ (Marx 1844: 110). The Enlightenment’s promise of human emancipation was betrayed. A prevailing sentiment against the modern market economy was that it had rendered every tenet of hitherto cherished human qualities, values and professions into a commodity – a sentiment equally shared by Shakespeare, Goethe and Marx.1 Paraphrasing lengthy passages from Shakespeare and Goethe.2 Marx expressed his deep disrespect for the money-centred view that capitalism had ushered in: Money, then, appears as this distorting power both against the individual and against the bonds of society, etc., which claim to be entities in themselves. It transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence, and intelligence into idiocy. Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds and confuses all things, it is the general confounding and confusing of all things – the world upside-down – the confounding and confusing of all natural and human qualities. (Marx 1844: 132)

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This powerful, if emotionally charged exegesis of the power of money calls for changing the state of the world overtaken by capitalist hegemony. The dismantling of the old social structure and withering of traditional ethos made the impression of ‘the world turned upside down’ on Marx and other thinkers of his time (Sheasby 1997). Indeed, industrial development entailed general betterment of health and financial conditions as a result of advances in medical science, cleaner water and sanitation, cheaper home lighting, faster transport, and greater availability of consumer goods. Nevertheless, social derangements like the erosion of familial peace, loosening of social bonds and security rooted in the previous agro-pastoral economy, and the deepened poverty for the uprooted peasants, were unacceptable to many in Europe.3 The characteristic of development that created wage labour was, as Marx identified, the servitude of the worker. ‘The advance consisted in a change of form of this servitude, in the transformation of feudal exploitation into capitalist exploitation’ (Marx 1887: 669). Capitalism was destroying ‘the health of the town labourer and the intellectual life of the rural labourer’ (Marx 1887: 474). Marx was not alone in his criticism of capitalism; some of his contemporaries also saw the Enlightenment’s promise of progress defeated in capitalist development that had led to an unequal and unhealthy development of the city and the country.4 Most evident was the growing general distress of the rural masses, who were robbed of ‘all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements’ (Marx 1887: 669), and crushed under the wheel of industrial progress. All the village commons were enclosed, and inhabitants of old villages were rooted out. The peasants were thus ‘first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the discipline necessary for the wage system’ (Marx 1887: 688). Wage-labour was a new social reality, and underpaid labour of women and children at the factory carved new grounds for social injustices. The evicted peasants who became beggars and vagabonds in cities were all resentful of the new social order. These uprooted masses yearned for a return to the lost security of traditional livelihoods, tranquillity of rural life and relative harmony and association with nature. They often resorted to disorganized violence to revolt against the new social order. The problem of the increasing number of the poor made it imperative for many European countries to pass legislation to help the poor and the unemployed. As Karl Polanyi (1947: 129) observed, ‘the Industrial Revolution was causing a social dislocation of stupendous proportions, and the problem of poverty was merely one aspect of this event’. The discontent of the masses with the new social order engendered by early capitalism was expressed in multifarious acts and symbols of protest. Just as peasant protests in 19th century Europe and

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in post-independence India against the state’s enclosure of forests for commercial working took the form of arson (Guha 1989: 186–89; and citations there), so the urban workers, led by Luddites, stormed factories and smashed the machinery to express their wrath and despair at the loss of their familiar rural world of relative stability, security and peace. Anarchists called the workers to break all social disciplines, while socialists and communists sought to organize them in unions to resist exploitation and prepare for a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. Alongside the critique of capitalism, imaginings of a more socially just social order beyond capitalism were articulated by a handful of visionaries in the 19th century. Such imaginings were drawn on the 18th century Utopian writings. Radical thinkers sketched out outlines of a future society that would emerge from the womb of capitalism. Among these visions of alternative society, Marxist political economy remains the most prominent and thorough. The singular feature that enables Marxism to have a lasting influence on the history of sociological and political thought is that it brought theory to the service of building a movement. Indeed, Marx and Engels ‘perceptively interwove basic analytical ideas with programmatic and organizational issues’ (Bookchin 1998). Marx emphasized that the utilitarian treatment of nature as a means of capitalist profit had resulted in ‘the estrangement [Entfremdung] of the conditions of production, which in their simplest forms are the natural elements themselves’ (Marx 1862: 345). The pith of his analysis of capitalism was to show how the capitalist mode of production dehumanized both nature and the human: the workers in industrial production are ‘mere means of production, not an end in themselves and not the aim of production’ (Marx 1862: 548). Thus capitalist economy engenders a separation of labour – the essential condition of human existence – from the ‘active existence’ of humans, ‘a separation which is completely posited only in the relation of wage labour and capital’ (Marx 1857: 489). Industrial growth also brings about destruction of soil fertility. ‘The more a country starts its development on the foundation of modern industry, …the more rapid is this process of destruction’5 (Marx 1887: 475). To Marx, private property was the basis of the capitalist mode of production and exploitation of workers and nature. The exploitative, anti-humanist characteristic of the institution of private property, as manifested in private land ownership, was inimical to human emancipation and worked against a ‘rational agriculture, the normal social utilisation of the soil’ (Marx 1894: 812). Burkett (1999) and Foster (2000) claim that the Marxist critique of capitalism’s degradation and squandering of nature for profit may be identified as containing the fundamental argument of the modern environmentalist critique. More significantly, the Marxian programme of revolution was grounded essentially on the vision of ending all forms of alienation of human labour from nature, abolishing private property

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and creating a responsible society in harmony with a ‘humanized nature’. His vision of an advanced, post-capitalist economy, in which the value of nature would transcend its instrumental value, is best captured in his famous passage: From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like bona patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition. (Marx 1894: 776)

This ecological imperative, to care for the earth and bequeath it to posterity “in an improved condition’ and the repudiation of the utilitarian degradation of nature mark the radical difference of the revolutionary humanism of Marx and Engels from the Enlightenment humanism (Sheasby 1997). This ecological consideration remained conspicuously absent from the subsequent political and economic thinking, although political and ideological oppositions to the capitalist mode of development often surfaced in the classicist literature as well as in Luddite and Socialist movements.

5.2

Golden Past, Doomed Future, Wise East

Modern environmentalist critique of industrial development has refined, and often reiterated, much of the early critique outlined above. The extravagant hopeful promises of the 19th century6 were shattered by the two world wars, Auschwitz and Hiroshima. From the 1940s onwards, the Enlightenment optimism that scientific advancements will promote a better understanding of the world, moral progress and general happiness was replaced with awe and suspicion that the Enlightenment project of human emancipation would lead to a universal doom for humanity and civilization. The atom bomb and the Cold War era it engendered held a reign of repressive terror. Both the Soviet totalitarianism and American McCarthyism curtailed citizens’ freedom and halted progress through international cooperation by sustaining the cold war limbo of suspended peace. A range of post-war fiction examined the predicament of the individual in authoritative societies exerting varying degrees of repression (Aldiss 1986: 243). This range includes George Orwell’s Animal Farm (published in 1945) and 1984 (1949), B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948), Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952), Evelyn Waugh’s Love Among the Ruins (1953), Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and Anhony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and The Wanting Seed, both published in 1962. The appropriation and abuse of scientific discoveries in the hands of authoritarian state powers continued to be instanced by the deployment and use of nuclear, chemical and

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biological weapons, and resulted in broad-scale environmental degradation as well as destruction of human lives. A number of influential thinkers, especially the Frankfurt School,7 argued that domination of nature transformed itself into oppression of humans in various forms; they discerned that human values and mass culture standards were fast declining, in spite of astounding technological progress (Brantlinger 1983). The technological promise of progress was most obvious in the USA, whose technological prowess appeared to have overtaken Europe. However, Adorno and co-workers showed that the decline of civilization was reflected in the mass culture and mob psychology, and that the popular stereotypes and conformist psychological complexes in the democratic citadel of America strikingly resembled those of Nazi Germany (Adorno et al. 1950). The American culture signified an extension of Eurocentrism, and increasingly became a model of what Bertram Gross (1973: 290) called ‘techno-urban fascism’, which operated under ‘the new conditions of cybernetic technology, electronic mass media, nationwide urbanism, and a new structure of world power.’ Indeed, technological advancements were remaking the world in surprising ways. The sixties in particular saw numerous scientific and technological developments: the invention of laser (1960), communications satellites (1962), supersonic aircraft (1963), the discovery of quasars (1964), unmanned landings on the Moon (1966), the first heart transplant (1967), the discovery of pulsars (1968) and finally, humans stepping on the Moon (1969). The world seemed to verge on a brave new world of great potentials, prosperity and progress. ‘Future Shock was just around the corner – Alvin Toffler was compiling notes’ (Aldiss 1986: 286). However, there remained a fear of technology going astray. People were reassured by the radio, X-ray and antibiotics and delighted by the television, lunar explorations and magnetic tapes, but scared by the bomb and other milestones of doom. By the 1970s the world had enough of science turned against humans: the hydrogen bomb, napalm, guided missiles, Agent Orange, biological warfare, persistent pesticides, Three Mile Island. The radical line of the environmentalist critique of the 1960s and 1970s implied that it was necessary to change the political order of the world in order to reverse the capitalist trend of plundering the soil and human labour – ‘the ultimate sources of all wealth’ (Marx 1887: 475). The socialist vision still remained a viable way toward a humane and peaceful future. Nevertheless, chronicles of how massive industrialization drives had also wreaked irreversible despoliation of the environment in the USSR and China indicated that a socialist restructuring of the world order would not suffice to ensure the integrity of the biosphere, long-term economic and social productivity and an equitable distribution of wealth and opportunities over generations. The modern critical ecological awareness that had crystallized in the 1960s and 1970s

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from an interweaving of various threads of neo-Marxism, eco-feminism, ecosocialism and ‘deep’ ecology pointed out that an ecological enlightenment is the prerequisite for the survival of Spaceship Earth. In addition, the accumulating evidence of baneful consequences of the misuse and abuse of science turned a section of the Western youth in the 1960s and onwards against Western science and rationality. Many resorted to different cults of Oriental religions and psychedelic drugs in search of peace, which appeared elusive in the Cold War climate. A Zeitgeist of a quest for alternative ideals and worldviews for a safe and sane living may be discerned in the popular literature of the 1960s and 1970s, a period that marked the Golden Age of science fiction. The immense popularity of science fiction literature and films based almost entirely on the imagined existence of extraterrestrial intelligent life8 reflected an inchoate search in the West for alternatives to the existing social and political state of the world. Alongside the germinal ecological movements taking force in the wake of The Silent Spring, a resurgence of Orientalism marked the contemporary need of the ‘post-scarcity society’ of the affluent West to locate a countervailing and reassuring Other. In spite of, or even because of, Western capitalist power and colonial oppression, the Eastern religious traditions projected the Other World, a wellspring of peace yet unspoilt by money and the market. ‘The Chinaman and Hindoo were the true Others’ (Inden 1986: 424). A similar Orientalist fervour arose in the 1960s with the (especially American youth’s) knowledge of Zen Buddhism, Taoism and Transcendental Meditation. The Romanticist ideas of Indian religious mysticism had already been reincarnated in the 19th century upon Europe’s discovery of the Vedanta and Buddhism. Schopenhauer was profusely influenced by the intuitive appeal of the Vedanta, which he saw as a counterbalance to Western rationalism. The American youth’s fascination with the Eastern traditions was a legacy of Thoreau’s Oriental scholarship and contempt of industrialism a century ago. The American counterculture took its roots in the 1950s, following Daiesetz Suzuki’s (1953) indictment of Genesis to be responsible for the Western urge for conquering nature. He claimed that in contrast with Christianity, Zen Buddhism offers a worldview of harmony and interconnectedness of all entities of nature. Zen substantially influenced the Beatnic revolution, and Gary Snyder’s brand of ‘Pop Zen’ that blended Zen with Native American cosmology made him a guru of counterculture. The upsurge of interest in Oriental religions coincided with Lynn White’s (1967) re-articulation of Suzuki’s critique of the Biblical worldview, and with E.F. Schumacher’s (1970, 1974) Buddhist economics with its emphasis on restrained consumerism. A sceptical attitude towards science and an embracing of religious credos as its substitute for a better living formed what Willis Harman calls a ‘quiet rebellion’,

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which took some cultish forms. One might see this new upsurge of spiritualism as reflecting a desire to escape from all social responsibility – in sharp contradistinction from the anti-pollution and peace activism, both of which clubbed into the ecology movement. Nevertheless, […] the growing interest in such areas as Eastern religious philosophies, yoga and meditation, channeling, near-death experiences, imagery approaches to healing and education, paranormal phenomena, etc. has made clear the public’s dissatisfaction with the scientists’ exclusive claim to valid truth-seeking. (Harman 1988: 22)

This search for alternatives to Western reliance on reason in general and to science in particular received tremendous support from contemporary neuropsychological research, which revealed that the brain’s left hemisphere was the seat of verbal thinking and mathematical aptitude, in contrast to the right hemisphere’s intuitive thinking and specialization in spatial perception and musical aptitude (Gazzaniga 1998; Ivry and Robertson 1998). This finding substantially contributed to consolidating the Zeitgeist, which Roger Sperry articulated in his influential paper on hemispheric dichotomy: The main theme to emerge… is that there appear to be two modes of thinking, verbal and non-verbal, represented rather separately in left and right hemispheres, respectively, and that our educational system, as well as science in general, tends to neglect the non-verbal form of intellect. What it comes down to is that modern society discriminates against the right hemisphere. (Sperry 1974: 18–19)

This profound message landed in the hotbed of Orientalism in the West. Eastern religious traditions, which in the West had appeared to be non- or even anti-rational, were now perceived as mines of peace and trans-rational wisdom. The intuitive and the ‘transcendental’ of the East were the precise antidote to the Western civilization constructed upon Left-brainism. The interest in the division of the human brain between thought and feeling, and in language and its limitations characterized much of the science fiction of the 1970s (Aldiss 1986:353). For those with an anti-science conviction, the quest for Eastern wisdom supplanted the Western pursuit of knowledge to dominate Nature. Hermann Hesse had captured this distinction between wisdom and knowledge in his famous novel Siddhartha: The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish… Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, be fortified with it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it… Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity. (Hesse 1922: 114)

Hesse’s conviction is exemplary here for two reasons. First, the novel is epigrammatic of the Western quest for a peaceful mental landscape that disappeared

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from the West after the First World War, and depicts the spiritual journey of its eponymous protégé to find Wisdom. Second, its allusion to the verbal incommunicability of wisdom anticipates the cerebral dichotomy of logic and intuition, a dichotomy which crystallized in the duality of the left and right hemispherical modes of thinking discovered half a century later. The split-brain research seemed to reveal that it was the logical, verbal, left brain as it were, or rather Left-brainism, that had kept the West away from true Enlightenment. This same repudiation of words, reason and Western science has continued into the following decades as a legacy of the Orientalist critique of the West. In the ‘post-modern’ era, this legacy finds the most poignant and exquisite expression in Andrei Tarkovsky’s last film The Sacrifice, in which Christian faith, pre-Columbian European worldview, witchcraft, Gandhi and Japanese folklore – all are invoked to salvage humanity from the ineluctable apocalypse that science has brought about (Deb 1990). This doomsday perception, confirmed and reconfirmed in an expanding body of evidence of environmental consequences of development, spilled over into the mass media. To many, this apocalyptic landscape of development brought home the vacuity of the promise of progress, the immanence of the existential threat and the urgent need to formulate survival strategies. E.F. Schumacher, an economist renowned for his dissidence from the standard view of capitalist development, called for ‘a new reorientation of science and technology towards the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and beautiful,’ towards what he termed the ‘economics of permanence’ (Schumacher 1970, cited in Guha 2000: 76). He prognosticated the growth of capitalism as a denial of Wisdom, which he found in Buddhism (Schumacher 1974). In Frankfurt School’s view, contemporary signs of progress were seen as retrogression to barbarism – a view that Brantlinger (1983) identifies as a version of ‘negative classicism’.9 A prominent premise of all classicism is that society at some point in the distant past was ideal. Marxism for instance holds that exploitation of humans by humans began with the end of an imagined primitive communism at the dawn of human civilization. In this sense, the Victorian rhetoric of ‘antimodern declinism’, as Murphy (2003) calls it, is also a form of negative classicism. However, while Marxism is optimistic about the emancipatory prospect of scientific and economic progress, negative classicism is patently pessimistic, and holds that progress will lead to the irretrievable downfall of Western civilization. This pessimism is the reverse side of Orietntalism of the 1960s and the 1970s. Based on the Green writings, it constructs the ‘ecologically noble savage’ of an environmentalist Orientalism, in which traditional indigenous societies are nearegalitarian and peaceful, living in harmony with nature (Porritt and Winner 1988). The intuitive wisdom of traditional ecological prudence of indigenous

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societies appears to both surpass and transcend the West’s overtly scientific understanding of nature. The ecological ethic of these indigenous societies is missing from the Western worldview. In this tribal ecological ethic lies the hope of redemption of nature and human civilization from the pitfall of Western ‘objective’ worldview. Tribal people not only ‘view the natural world as a living and vital being, but they also believe in an ethical reciprocity between humans, other creatures, and nature’ (Callicott and Ames 1989: 23). This ‘tribal’ animistic cosmology is alien and opposed to the Western worldview, based on the European interpretation of the Bible, which is extremely anthropocentric. Since God created the natural world only to serve human desires, destruction of nonhuman world was not a sin. St. Thomas Aquinas argued that since animals were neither rational nor immoral, they did not count in the divine equation of salvation. It follows that killing animals is not a sin – unless the animal belonged to another human. In the Augustinian interpretation, Biblical verses that contained injunctions against cruelty toward animals were either allegories of human suffering, or meant to prevent cruelty among humans (Marangudakis 2001: 252–53). This anthropocentric cosmology of Western Christianity sanctioned human’s exploitation of the environment without any moral implications. Pagan theologies based on the deification of rocks, trees and animals were judged enemies to Christianity. In particular, ‘the Dominican Order, primarily responsible for the Holy Inquisition operations, identified its enemies by investigating naturalistic beliefs and symbols’ (Marangudakis 2001: 253). In contrast, indigenous peoples are held to respect nature and life ‘in a way that is difficult for Judeo-Christians to understand’ (Oelschlaeger 1994: 176). The wise natives of the East and their mysterious customs easily translate as the ecologically significant ‘Other.’ The noble savages of the East comprise a proper antidote to the Western machines, which have pushed humans away from peace and harmony of the pre-industrial past: With so many machines let loose around us, even if no real monsters rise from Tokyo Bay, our ‘brave new world’ seems ever more fearful, and the ancient wish for a Garden of Eden innocence becomes poignant nostalgia for a time before we knew so much. (Rabkin 1983: 4)

The image of the noble savage was etched by ethnographic accounts of forest tribes from the East. Verrier Elwin’s (1958: 27) description of the tribal ethos conveyed a salvaging message for the West: There are many elements in the Gond ethos which should be conserved – their simplicity and freedom, their love of children, the position of their women, their independence of spirit (no silly ducking observants these!), their freedom

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from many of the usual oriental inhibitions. I think that the primitive has a real message for our sophisticated modern world which is once again threatened with disintegration as a result of its passion for possessions and its lack of love. (Elwin 1958: 27)

This West’s ‘nostalgia’ for the happy pre-industrial past full of harmony and peace was reinvigorated in the 1980s by the public perception of the insecurity of the Western civilization. The discovery of ozone holes, the fate of Love Canal, the Exxon Valdez oil slick, Chernobyl and Bhopal genocides – all added to the list of warning symptoms of the end of techno-industrial civilization. The search for alternatives has continued, albeit less explicitly as social movements than it was in the previous decades. The edifice of the East as the citadel of wisdom and the image of the ecologically noble savage are often constructed in the ecological literature. Ecological history of non-industrial societies has identified the economic and ideological colonization of the East by the West as the prime cause for destroying forests and wildlife in the South. As Callicott and Ames (1989: 280) have affirmed, ‘All Asian environmental ills… are either caused by Western technology… or aggravated by it.’ Gadgil and coworkers (Gadgil and Guha 1992; Gadgil and Malhotra 1983) have gone to the extent of indicating that traditional Indian society had designed the caste system to ensure conservation through diversification of, and restricted access to, natural resources. Tribal societies appeared so attractive as a model of human existence in harmony with nature because it is linked to the Western idea of nature in a state of imagined innocence. The West came to perceive both the wilderness and the savage people as a window to the tranquil antiquity of humankind (see Section 1.1.1).

5.3

Quest for Alternatives

The Communist-led liberation struggles of the 1960s in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and the Frankfurt School’s critique of both capitalism and Nazism inspired in the 1970s an intellectual movement to seek a post-industrial society in which human emancipation from ignorance, oppression and exploitation would be the prime goal – the Enlightenment goal which industrial development had failed to bring to fruition. The School’s immanent critique of modern industrial civilization was based on the observation that in spite of the fact that the market was choked with gadgets catering to consumerism, social equity and happiness remained elusive. The School contended that in conformity with Marx’s prognostication, alienation of workers from their means of occupation had deepened, and the moral standard had declined with capitalism’s progress.

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Alongside the triumph of science and the fantasies of human salvation it heralded in the 1960s, signs of inequity, dissatisfaction and unhappiness were becoming increasingly evident. In spite of the phenomenal rise of GNP in the US and its gradual dominance of the world market in the post-World War decades, there lurked a general unhappiness associated with affluence. The unprecedented post-World War II economic boom failed to satisfy all the wants of all the Americans. Over decades after the War, most Americans “report a decline rather than an increase in happiness” (Oelschlaeger 1994: 113). Philosophical critiques of modern technology and capitalist growth by Herbert Marcuse and Lewis Mumford gave a strong impetus to the search for alternatives. From the 1960s onwards, Green political thinking adopted the radical sociological critique of consumerism: the affluent lifestyle was to be shunned for a more socially just society. The Western affluence was not a sign of progress because it was the fruit of exploitation of both nature and the poor. In light of Frankfurt School’s critique of the Enlightenment project and its distrust of the parameters of progress, many authors tended to replace the Enlightenment perspective with what may be called an ecological perspective. Mumford’s (1970: 413) call for reorienting the technoindustrial value system was characteristic of the emergent Green ideology: ‘Nothing less than a profound reorientation of our vaunted technological way of life will save this planet from becoming a lifeless desert.’ Following the publication of the Club of Rome’s report (Meadows et al. 1972), the subliminal mass awareness of the destruction of nature along the road to economic growth and affluence burst into a widespread perception of an impending environmental apocalypse. What had remained within the arena of doomsday philosophies and Romantic repudiation of industrial capitalism, now jumped into the real world of statistical prose. The sudden transference of the public perception of ecological disasters from the realm of remote possibility to the here-and-now brought about a slow but steady change in the dominant Western perspective on nature and natural wealth. The Club’s claim that humankind is running into major ecological problems crystallized a growing consensus within the scientific community as well as among the general public. Of course, the search for alternatives did not always lead to counter-progressivist prospects and ecological values. As mentioned earlier, the genre of science fiction won a great size of readership, for suggesting boldly optimistic and comforting solutions to the existential predicament of humanity. Some science fantasy writers and scientists imagined a complete replacement of the biosphere itself by a kind of technosphere or a system of devices providing man with food, water, oxygen and other necessary means of subsistence. This imagination represents an unfailing faith in the capability of science and technology to take over the role of

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nature and solve all problems of human existence. Indeed, if technology removes natural constraints by substituting nature itself, techno-industrial growth can be infinitely sustainable. Clearly, this vision is a bold extension of the Baconian paradigm of the supremacy of reason over nature. Another extreme version of the extension of this paradigm is the proposed colonization of the moon, Mars and other planets. One may discern in this imagining a project for revival and continuation of Europe’s history of colonization of the Wild East that had entailed progress for Europe. While the dream of the impossible might have been a reason for the popularity of fantasy writers, such speculations were never seriously considered in scientific circles, however, because of the impossibility of human existence in a completely sterile environment – whether on an entirely sterilized and mechanized Earth or on a lifeless planet. More than just impossibility, at a deeper level of analysis, such imaginations reflected an escapism, in that they pushed the world’s problems back one notch. As the Soviet biologist Kamshilov (1974: 236) sneered, ‘How can one believe that people who prove incapable of existing on their own planet will really adapt to life on another one?’ Thinking of mundane solutions along ecological values has been more fruitful. The hitherto ignored ontological practicality of global environmental research findings helped crystallize the neo-ontological implications of the continuing abuse of nature. The enormous technological advances and the unprecedented span of capitalist modernization of nations have been unable to conceal the ominous data on ozone holes in the stratosphere, polluted water, diminishing species diversity, vanishing forests, expanding numbers of development refugees, depleting resources, intensified nuclear threats, and lost opportunities for posterity. An expanding body of environmentalist critique of the prevalent paradigm of economic development stood up to warn that unless extra-monetary values of nature and society are nourished and natural resources conserved, the entire edifice of the global economy is doomed to collapse. The ecological view of the world – in which the extremely complex architecture of the web of life and its processes, ubiquitously operative in the whole of nature including humans – has heralded a change in the popular perception of nature, with great political and moral implications. As Tim Bender voiced it, There is no longer any doubt that our age of affluence based upon depletion of our planet’s non-renewable energy and material resources is at an end and that MAJOR changes must be made in every aspect of our lives. Our ability to develop a culture that can endure beyond our own lifetimes depends upon our coming to a new understanding of what is desirable for a harmonious and sustainable relationship with the systems that support our lives. (Bender 1986: 304–5)

Over the past few decades, ideas about a more environmentally and socially responsible mode of development – sustainable development – have crossed the

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boundaries of eco-activism and academic discussion into the parlance of policymakers. This has necessitated a frame-shift in global development policy, which acknowledged and institutionalized the search for an alternative paradigm of development. Nevertheless, despite all philosophical oppositions to the prevalent concept of development, and the deepening popular understanding of the value of nature, the ‘standard view’ of economic growth has remained the dominant ideology of development. As Marx noted, the ideas, values, laws and philosophies that dominate the society represent the ideology, and serve the interest, of the dominant classes. The standard view has always considered the persistent poverty, deepening perception of insecurity and degradation of the social milieu as ‘a necessary “price” to be paid for the new capitalist social order’ (Barry 1999: 137), and for development, by implication. Nevertheless, events of the late 1960s and 1970s unfolded a scenario depicting a global search for alternatives. In this period of rebellion and nonconformity, the opposition to the established social values and norms of development received a boost on account of a series of agricultural research findings that showed the possibility of viable alternatives to industrialized agriculture. Evidence of an increasing number of insect pests developing resistance to pesticides was a decisive factor in drawing attention to natural control of pests by their natural enemies. Carson’s classic, The Silent Spring (1962) was the harbinger of a reassessment of the trend of modern development in general, and agricultural industrialization in particular. This book, more than anything else, brought under scrutiny the application of chemical technology, and helped draw focus on the necessity to search for alternatives. Growing concern with health and environmental hazards, as posed by the use of chemicals, shaped the impetus for research in biological control of pests. This search for alternatives, in fact, did not stop at agriculture; it went on to include alternative energy modules, alternative housing materials, as well as alternative familial arrangements, all of which constituted an alternative lifestyle as a challenge to the mainstream idea and practices of development. All these ventures into the envisaged alternative pattern of development tend to hold the capitalist social order responsible for resource depletion and social inequity. In particular, commodification of natural wealth, widening inequality in resource distribution and consumerism are identified by most environmentalists10 as the major factors responsible for squandering natural capital. As an ostensible alternative, eco-activists demanded state regulation of industrial production processes, and sought to promulgate an anti-consumerist outlook to minimize anthropogenic impact on the earth’s resources. Notable among these efforts in search of alternatives is a fresh reassessment of the Marxian perspective on

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capitalist growth – a perspective that fell out of favour in the 1980s and 1990s, following Glasnost and subsequent discoveries of numerous facets of corruption, environmental crimes and human rights violation in socialist countries. A recent analysis of linkages between the dominant capitalist mode of growth and environmental degradation is redolent of Marxian political economic analysis, which shows that the capitalist logic of market expansion is oblivious to human values and environmental health. The left-wing environmentalist critique of the neoclassical growth and neoliberal market expansion explicitly reinstates this Marxian perspective. Thus, while discussing environmental implications of consumerism, White (2002) reiterates what Marx said of the capitalist mode of production and consumption: Built into the logic and dynamics of capitalism is the imperative to expand. Increasing labor’s production of surplus value – the source of profit – demands constant changes in the way labor is exploited and in the things that can be transformed from simple use-values (objects of need) into exchange-values (commodities produced purely for exchange). (White 2002: 85)

Although not commonplace, the usage of such explicitly Marxian terms in environmental criticism of the capitalist doctrine of growth marks a significant departure from the mainstream norm of silencing out the Marxian voice from the environmental discourse. In addition to enriching the discourse, the Marxian perspective serves to open an important vista to responsible development.

5.4

The Emergence of Environmental Ethics

The Western construction of nature as a counterpoint of civilization and its disharmony called for preservation of nature’s balance, beauty and grandeur. In Europe, the idea of conservation had followed the utilitarianism of German forestry – only as a means to sustain the supply of useful materials for industry. German forestry principles and experts were exported to Europe’s colonies to create reserve forests for production of timber and other valuable commercial forest products for the prosperity of the empire. However, conservation took on a different hue in the 19th century USA, where Thoreau supplied the ethical and aesthetic bases of conservationism, which is a 20th century phenomenon. At this point it is futile to indulge in splitting – chronologically or by schools of thought – the overall Western construction of nature into such clusters as the Romantic imagination of the idyllic and innocent nature, the Social Darwinian view of savage nature fraught with ruthless struggle for existence – ‘Nature red in tooth and claw’ in Tennyson’s poem – and the classical ecological idea of balance of nature. All of these are facets of the Western imagination of nature. Nature’s

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stability, harmony and wisdom appear to countervail the uncertainty of industrial society, disarray of modern social life and shortsightedness of human actions. The call for going ‘Back to Nature’ seems to be a universal syndrome in reaction to the atrocities of industrial modernity against nature, human cultures and traditional value systems. It not only embodies nostalgia for the imagined past but also an unwillingness to accept the inherent uncertainties of what Beck (1992) has called the ‘risk society’. Because the costs of the environmental risks are spread across the entire society (exposure to industrial toxics and car emissions can cause cancer in the rich as well as the poor), the environmental problems in this risk society become a populist issue. Refusal to live with the risks leads to the populist urge of restoring the pristine, risk-free ‘natural’ state of the environment. Living in harmony with nature has thus been the key idea of the ‘land ethic’ in America, the environmental movements and the indigenous land rights movements. The programmatic call of all environmental conservation movements is: ‘Back to Nature.’ However, this ‘back to nature’ call as a metaphor has also been employed in nationalist politics as well as the New Right. Love of untouched wilderness has often, if inconsistently and sporadically, been woven into the fabric of nationalist thought. Nationalist movements in Europe systematically deployed the idioms of love of the beauty of untrammelled montane and sylvan landscapes. A most notorious (although by no means the most typical) example consists of the ‘Green Nazis’, who sought to create numerous nature reserves to restore the pristine German tribal landscape. McNeill lists many other similar threads of nature-loving nationalism: Similar equations of national identity with rural righteousness, the sanctity of (our) land, and nature preservation cropped up wherever cities and industrialization spread. Russian populism before 1917; Russian (not Soviet) nationalism after 1917; western Canada’s Social Credit movement; D. H. Lawrence’s nature worship; the best-selling and Nobel prize-winning Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun; the intellectual hodge-podge underlying Mediterranean fascism and Japanese militarism; Mao’s peasant populism; and all manner of back-to-the-land, antimodern currents – all these reflected political and cultural revulsion at urban and industrial transformations. (McNeill 2000: 329)

A large section of the German Nazi leadership supported ecologically sound land planning, organic farming, campaigned against smoking, enforced anti-vivisectionist laws, and passed ordinances to protect habitats of wildlife. Persuaded by Alwin Seifert’s11 ecological arguments against reclamation of wetlands, Hitler withdrew moorland drainage programmes (Bramwell 1989: 198). Nazi Germany was the first country in Europe to have kept nature reserves and to have instituted a forestry system to include mixed plantation of broadleaved deciduous species

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with conifers (Bramwell 1989:199). Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s representative of the Third Reich, had supported ecological ideas and promoted biodynamic agriculture. Ecological ideas found no conflict with Nazi nationalism, until the wartime need of increasing food production eventually thwarted organic agriculture after 1942.12 The conventional thinking about nature as a place for solace, as moral teacher, or an antidote to disintegrative modernity, began to change into a new kind of environmental awareness in the post-war period. Pioneer actions by leading scientific figures like Julian Huxley in Britain and Fairfield Osborn in USA elicited germination of a global awareness of the need to conserve nature. Huxley, a famous biologist and the first director of UNESCO, helped establish a UN organization concerned with nature conservation, the International Union for the Protection of Nature (IUPN), later re-christened IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources). Osborn, director of the New York Zoological Park, founded the Conservation Foundation in USA and wrote Our Plundered Planet (1948) and Limits of the Earth (1953), full of scientific information and articulated in a global ecological perspective. The establishment of the largest international conservation NGO World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in 1961 gave this awareness a more professional footing in terms of fundraising, media publicity and influencing policy. However, the Western public awareness of the intimate connections of ecological principles with human life and lifestyles took shape only after the publication of Rachel Carson’s classic The Silent Spring in 1962, which was a forceful critique of the belief in technological fixes and exposed the severe ecological damage done to the world by industrial growth. The combination of the philosophical critique of Western techno-urban civilization, beat poetry and peace marches made environmentalism in the North ‘a broad movement of social and political opposition’ (Jamison 1996: 228). Hence, environmental activism has sometimes incorporated doctrinal vegetarianism, Gandhism, Luddism, alternative lifestyles, and has received collateral supports from feminists, gay activists and indigenous peoples’ rights activists. Born of the legacy of critical social thinking, a global environmental awareness took shape in the North in the 1960s. In the US, this awareness was brought to a head by writers like Joseph Krutch, NGOs like the National Audubon Society, Wilderness Society and Sierra Club, and through Ansel Adam’s nature photography (Fox 1985). By re-invoking the conservationist writings of Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, George Perkins Marsh and John Muir, a strong conservation movement crystallized in the US, which led to the passage of laws to protect vast nature reserves as national parks. The US environmental regulatory agency, EPA, was founded to control industrial activities and protect nature, and served

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to legitimize environmental issues as a major field of public policy. It accordingly shaped the character of the mainstream US environmentalism that relied on government ‘command and control’ through policy and regulatory action. This perception of the need for a political will and regulatory action became pervasive in the 1960s in the Northern environmentalism, which soon took a significant place in electoral agenda. In the late 1960s, New Zealand’s Values Party was born to usher the green issues into electoral politics. Subsequently, explicitly green parties sprang up in a few European countries. Europe also pioneered ‘a consensual politics of environmental moderation’ in which governments, labour unions and industry forged green production agreements (McNeill 2000: 352). The 1970s saw the beginning of the rise of environmental professionalism in the USA. Public interest groups like the Natural Resource Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund were founded ‘on the belief that scientific and legal expertise could solve environmental problems’ (Shutkin 2000: 110). Older NGOs like the Sierra Club (established in 1892), the Wilderness Society and National Audubon Society, founded in mid1900s, changed their organizational structures in the 1970s to orient their activism increasingly towards professionalism, environmental law and policy. Lobbying of these professional environmentalists resulted in the enactment of a series of new environmental laws and policies in the early 1970s – the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and Clean Air Act in 1970, the Clean Water Act13 and Federal Fungicide, Insecticide and Rodenticide Act in 1972. Environmental research to inform the public, environmental activists and policy makers was initiated in 1974 by the Worldwatch Institute, followed by World Resources Institute, both based in Washington, DC. ‘Flip sides of the same coin, government and public interest environmentalists, in the spirit of their preservationist and conservationist forebears, came to shape the [environmental] movement in last three decades of the twentieth century’ (Shutkin 2000: 99) – not only in the North but also in the South. In some European countries, the movement culminated in the entry of the Green party into their parliaments. The ‘ecology movement’ to conserve nature spread rapidly across the industrialized countries. By the early 1970s, the government of almost every industrialized country opened a department to address environmental problems and strengthened legislations to control environmental pollution and species loss. The international body of research in conservation biology, supported by IUCN and the worldwide network of WWF, served to consolidate the hitherto loosely organized international conservation awareness. The birth of a series of activist NGOs like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Earth First and Nature Conservancy in the 1970s and afterwards drew public attention to critical environmental issues. The

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professional skill of these NGOs in translating technical information into public concern was, as Jamison (1996) points out, the key factor for the growth of mass awareness of the environmental problems. Involvement of influential scientists in the Northern movements for environmental protection resulted in the Stockholm Conference on the Environment in 1972, following which the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) was created to institutionalize the global environmental concern and to enlist international cooperation in formulating and implementing conservation policies. Environmentalism in the South became visible in the creation of numerous wildlife sanctuaries that reflected the urban elite’s fascination with conservation of charismatic mega fauna. The Southern conservationist movements owe, at least in their initial years, to the American conservationism propounded by Gifford Pinchot, who advocated conservation of wilderness for the economic benefits and ‘welfare of this generation first, and afterwards, the welfare of the generations to follow’ (Pinchot 1910: 45). Steeped in progressive ideology, Pinchot’s conservationism was pivoted on a commitment to managerial science, economic efficiency and public administration. This produced a model of conservation that was ‘decidedly top-down and professional’ (Shutkin 2000: 95), a model that was imported and emulated in the South. In India, for example, WWF-India launched Project Tiger in 1973, which was allotted a huge amount of governmental funding. The mainstream Southern environmental awareness focused almost solely on forest and wildlife, which the elite believed was endangered by the ecosystem people. Throughout the South, mainstream conservationists have argued for conservation of natural habitats of wildlife, with little care for the ecosystem people who have maintained those very habitats for centuries. In the standard conservationist thinking, ecosystem people who subsist on local biodiversity are assumed to be responsible for wildlife extinction, and are posited as the enemy to wildlife and wild lands. All over India, the management of [nature] parks has sharply posited the interests of poor tribals who have traditionally lived there against those of wilderness lovers and urban pleasure seekers who wish to keep parks ‘free of human interference’ – that is, free of other humans. Everywhere, Indian wildlifers have ganged up behind the Forest Department to evict the tribals and rehabilitate them far outside the forests. (Guha 1997: 106)

Elite environmentalism has also been concerned with the increasing population of the developing countries. The neo-Malthusian argument that the burgeoning population of the poor countries is a fundamental impediment to their development was strongly put forward by the World Bank, which urged Southern governments to adopt policies to control their population growth. In the 1970s, all the Southern governments adopted population policies. The government of India

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even ran a programme of coercive sterilization of the poor in Delhi in the 1970s. Several environmentalists saw the expanding numbers of the poor as the chief cause of pollution and deforestation (see Section 3.2.2). In spite of the ideological dominance of elite conservationism that excludes ecosystem people, the Southern environmentalism has come to be distinguished by the ecosystem people’s understanding of environmental problems on their own terms and their resistance to commercial plunder of nature. Colonial as well as post-colonial development projects have elicited resistance from the ecosystem peoples, whenever they perceived their resource base to be either denied or destroyed (Gadgil and Guha 1995). Because the question of livelihood security for these ecosystem people is intertwined with the question of environmental integrity, different grassroots movements opposing industrial expropriation of the commons always converge on environmentalism. This subaltern environmentalism takes a different track from the Northern conservationism, and consists of grassroots struggles to stake claims over communal resources. These struggles sometimes take militant forms of protest against commercial enterprises. To the Westernized elite in the South, environmentalism meant preservation of ecosystems intact for purely scientific and recreational purposes, whereas impoverished villagers fought against the enclosure of wild lands, and against abolition of their customary rights over the commons. In the North as well as in the South, a common ground of environmentalism has been protection of nature from commercial plundering. In the US, NGOs like the Sierra Club, Audubon Society, Earth First and Nature Conservancy forced legislators to keep old growth forests and wetlands out of the reach of loggers, ranchers and real estate developers. In the 1970s, Lois Gibbs organized a strong fight against the polluting industries that poisoned her working-class neighbourhood in Love Canal, New York. Concerned Citizens in Action, founded in 1979 by school teacher Penny Newman in Los Angeles, launched a comprehensive campaign to clean up the Stringfellow Acid Company’s effluent pits. In Mexico, Chiapas mounted a resistance to deforestation and commercialization of natural resources. In Canada, Australia and Amazonia, indigenous groups increasingly linked their movements for right to self-determination to environmental conservation. In India, forest villagers sought to reclaim their ancient customary user rights over the forest that had been wrested by the state forest department to facilitate commercial harvest of forest products. Thus, grassroots environmentalism, what Martinez-Alier (1990) calls ‘environmentalism of the poor’ has taken roots in the North as well as the South. The traditional resource management ethic is appearing as a significant component of the indigenous land rights movements in the South, which are akin to

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the land rights movements in Canada, USA and Australia, where White settlers exterminated and marginalized indigenous peoples. In the South, secessionist demands for separate tribal states, along with demands for regaining rights over the commons are accreting strength. Major environmental movements that focus simultaneously on environmental and social justice, involve indigenous land rights: the Narmada Bachao Andolan in India (Baviskar 2001), the Zapatista rebellion in Mexico (Harvey 1998), and the the Ogoni people’s movement in Nigeria (Monshipouri et al. 2003), to mention only the most prominent ones. In such movements, the indigenous land rights issue constitutes a strong component of the critique of various development projects on human rights grounds, which subsumes environmental equity concerns. All these movements, and the rich discourse they have engendered, pose the vision of civic democracy as the poignant force and paradigm to subvert the hegemony of development. The Chipko movement of the Garhwal Himalaya in northern India marked a watershed in the history of environmental movements in the entire South. The name of the movement owes to the act of embracing (chipko). This unique form of non-violent resistance to state enclosure and commercialization of the forest was born in 1973 when villagers of Garhwal resolved to embrace trees even if the contractor’s axes would kill them. The movement foiled the forest department’s attempt to fell trees for commercial extraction of timber. On 26 March 1974, women of Reni village embraced forest trees to save them from the axes of timber contractor’s men. The idiom of protest and grassroots resistance to state’s enclosure of the commons strongly impressed the emerging environmentalist elite and the ecosystem people alike. Pressures from numerous civil society activists and academics supporting the movement compelled the government to change the mode of departmental forestry operation. Chipko became a symbol of grassroots environmentalism of the poor and of non-violent resistance to commercialization of natural resources. Similar grassroots movements sprouted in different parts of the country, like the Appiko in Karnataka. In 1983, Appiko activists resisted the forest department’s felling of forest trees and popularized the deforestation campaign by street plays, folk songs and dances, and public demonstrations. Several grassroots movements highlighted both ecological and social consequences of major development projects like the Tehri dam and Narmada dam projects, and expressed the ecosystem people’s concern for ecological damages from development projects. Their empirical understanding of deforestation causing soil erosion and consequently landslides, for example, invoked admiration and support from a number of scientists. An increasing number of academics joined different campaigns for nature conservation and lent support to the grassroots environmentalism. Participation of

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academics proved decisive in repealing a proposed river dam project in Kerala’s Silent Valley, a unique ecosystem housing numerous endemic flora and fauna. In 1976, a local NGO, Kerala Shastra Sahitya Parishad, took up a mass campaign to lay bare the fallacies of the proposed project, and succeeded in enjoining support from local villagers, scientists and elite NGOs like Bombay Natural History Society and WWF-India. Such movements served to expose the unscientific basis of commercially-motivated state development projects, and demanded scientific studies of environmental and social impacts of development projects. A holistic critique of development projects emerged from this environmentalism, which linked the ecological, seismic and epidemiological risks of these projects with the social and economic problems of development refugees. The environmental campaigns by activists like Sundarlal Bahuguna, Baba Amte and Medha Patkar translated sophisticated arguments for conservation and social equity into a dialogue with policy makers and the laity. Following Chipko, Southern environmentalist movements may thus be classified into two salient rubrics: (a) endogenous resistance of village communities to eco-destructive development projects with wide social repercussions (Zapatista rebellion in Mexico, the Ogoni people’s movement against petro-violence in Nigeria, farmers’ resistance to industrial shrimp farming in Southern Thailand, traditional fishers’ movement against mechanized fishing industry in Kerala, India) and (b) movements initiated or catalyzed by NGOs or activist groups (Silent Valley march in Kerala, movement against Narmada Valley Project in west and central India). Over years of attrition with the standard view of development, these movements have given forth to an environmental ethic that challenges the official philosophy, agenda and mode of conservation. This ethic is based essentially on the recognition of intra- and inter-generational equity in terms of availability of resources and opportunities of livelihood of ecosystem peoples. The environmental ethic has expanded the very notions of ‘resources’ and ‘livelihood’ to include, respectively, the values of natural objects beyond the economic use value, and innovative uses of resources to provide subsistence, security and leisure. What Merchant (1980) has called ‘ecological ethic’ is evident in the traditional societies of the South. Research in ecological history of India has identified many unique manifestations of the heritage of a pervasive ecological ethic. The Digambar sect of Jainism is an extreme example of this ethic. In order to minimize their adverse impacts on the world, Digambar monks go naked, eat fruits and vegetables only after they have fallen on the ground, gently sweep their path before stepping ahead lest they tread on unseen insects, and wear masks lest their breathing might kill invisible creatures floating in the air.

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Still closer-to-earth, the Bishnoi community of Rajasthan and Haryana represents traditional societies as perfect custodians of nature. This community is so named (bishnoi = twenty-nine) because it obeys 29 commandments propounded by the sect’s founder saint Bhagwan Jammeswar (1451–1536). These commandments include strict prohibition on cutting the khejri tree (Prosopis cineraria) and on killing the black buck (Antelope cervircapra). The Bishnoi principles of conduct have strengthened social bonds among members of the sect, ensured the community’s food security in times of dearth (‘maintain a community grain stock from regular contributions from all members’), maintained individual health (‘refrain from narcotics, alcohol and gambling’), and conserved local biodiversity. Centuries before Chipko, the Bishnois sacrificed their lives to protect trees on several occasions. A major incident took place in 1730, when 363 Bishnois in a Jodhpur village were killed in their attempt to prevent a band of soldiers from cutting down khejri trees to fuel a kiln for the king’s palace (Deb et al. 1995: 29). This strong sentiment regarding khejri becomes meaningful in the light of the fact that the tree is extremely useful to humans as well as herbivore mammals for survival in the western Indian deserts. It appears that Jammeswar’s commandments have ensured survival of the nomads in the desert zone by imposing a discipline of compassion for the local biota and cooperation among the sect’s members. The rediscovery of the ecological ethic within indigenous traditions has posited governments in the South as myopic exploiters of the natural wealth as opposed to the prudent ecosystem peoples. It has also consolidated the Northern image of the (Oriental) ‘eco-noble savage’. The model of ecological prudence of pre-industrial indigenous societies is what unites the Northern and Southern environmentalism in their articulation of alternatives to the standard view of development. The early environmental ethic focused on the utilitarian grounds for ecological prudence: the Bishnoi protected the khejri, because they had realized it was the most important source of supplementary food for themselves and fodder for their cattle; Indian tribes worshipped the banyan tree (Ficus bengalensis) and the bo tree (Ficus religiosa) because they had somehow identified these fig trees as keystone species, linked to numerous other life forms. Indian traditional farmers used to protect the owl and the mongoose because they knew these animals were excellent agents of pest control. With a growing understanding of the existence value of natural objects, the environmental ethic has now come to encompass both use and non-use values of biodiversity (Spadoni and Deb 2005). This new ethic, implicit in most environmental movements since the 1970s, has also come to encompass indigenous people’s rights over their own resource base, social justice and inter-generational equity in terms of availability and distribution of environmental resources.

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By the end of the 1970s, a well-formed ecological ethic found clear expression in the articulation of the World Conservation Strategy, which was formed by an active collaboration of IUCN, UNEP and WWF. This collaborative effort generated, in 1980, the formulation of World Conservation Strategy, which became the launching pad of the discourse of sustainable development that has taken place ever since. Institutional attempts to cope with global environmental change made it clear that far-reaching transformations of the global economic and political systems were necessary to maintain the integrity of the environment and improve the quality of people’s lives. The impetus of the professional wrap of the environmental movement that began in the 1970s propelled worldwide environmental awareness in the subsequent decades. The urge to maintain humanity’s progress with an alternative programme of development eventually gave forth in the 1980s to a new discourse of sustainability. Research by environmental groups like WRI, Worldwatch Institute, Pesticide Action Network, WWF and others informed and underpinned much of the centerstage discussion at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 (Brown 2001: 166). The German Green Party became a part of a coalition government in 1998, and some of its members also held important ministries (McNeill 2000: 352). On the academic front, an increasing number of economists have became interested in envisioning models of sustainable development. Despite the opposition from the Establishment, an increasing number of people are becoming aware of the importance of environment in economy and looking for sustainable options of development. The concept of sustainable development has a long, chequered history, which has brought out a number of contradictions and challenges. The epistemological ground and history of the concept of sustainability are traced in the following chapter.

Notes 1. This sense of the loss of classic ideals and values is what groups Marx and the Romantics – in Brantlinger’s (1983) analysis – as ‘classicists’. Whereas Marx sought to replace the ‘inverted world’ and re-establish the lost social ontology in harmony with a ‘humanized nature’ (Sheasby 1997), the Frankfurt School depicted a thread of ‘negative classicism’ in that the classic ideals had been lost for good. 2. Marx quotes at length excerpts from Shakespeare and Goethe in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 to stress his point: Shakespeare in Timon of Athens: Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold? No, Gods, I am no idle votarist! ... Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair, Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant....

Beyond Developmentality

250 Why, this Will lug your priests and servants from your sides, Pluck stout men’s pillows from below their heads: This yellow slave Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed; …. ….

Shakespeare excellently depicts the real nature of money. To understand him, let us begin, first of all, by expounding the passage from Goethe. That which is for me through the medium of money – that for which I can pay (i.e., which money can buy) – that am I myself, the possessor of the money. The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. Money’s properties are my – the possessor’s – properties and essential powers. Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness – its deterrent power – is nullified by money. I, according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honoured, and hence its possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good. Money, besides, saves me the trouble of being dishonest: I am therefore presumed honest. I am brainless, but money is the real brain of all things and how then should its possessor be brainless? Besides, he can buy clever people for himself, and is he who has a power over the clever not more clever than the clever? Do not I, who thanks to money am capable of all that the human heart longs for, possess all human capacities? Does not my money, therefore, transform all my incapacities into their contrary? (Marx 1844: 129–30) 3. Examining contemporary European demographic and industrial growth statistics, Marx concluded, The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and, therefore, also the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. … But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to its torment of labour. The more extensive, finally… the reserve army, the greater is the official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. (Marx 1887: 603; emphasis in original) 4. In The Capital, Marx (1887: 474) cited David Urquhart (1855: 119) as condemning capitalism for the division between the city’s new rich and the rural peasant: You divide the people into two hostile camps of clownish boors and emasculated dwarfs. Good Heavens! A nation divided into agriculture and commercial interests, calling itself sane; nay, styling itself enlightened and civilised, not only in spite of, but in consequence of this monstrous and unnatural division.

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5. Marx drew extensively on contemporary agricultural research findings to emphasize the destructive side of industrialized agriculture, and showed how industrialization had resulted in depletion of both soil fertility and labour-power: ‘The same blind eagerness for plunder that in the one case exhausted the soil, had, in the other, torn up by the roots the living force of the nation’ (p. 229). Capitalist development spelt disaster to the productive forces of nature in industry as well as agriculture: […] all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country starts its development on the foundation of modern industry, …. the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the labourer. (Marx 1887: 474–75) 6. see note 5. 7. Influential authors like Robert Nisbet, Amaury de Riencourt, Pitirim Sorokin, I. Robert Sinai, Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee criticized various aspects of capitalism and deplored ‘the Romanization of Western society.’ They concluded that the history of Western civilization was repetitive of the history of Greek and Roman Empires. The similarity of ancient Greece to modern Europe and of ancient Rome to modern America was implicit throughout these writings (see references in Brantlinger 1983), which predicted the imminent downfall of the modern Western techno-urban culture. Frankfurt school theorists, particularly Horkheimer and Adorno, proclaimed that contemporary culture was leading to decadence and irrationality, as evidenced in their analysis of mass culture generated by the mass media. ‘The curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression.’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1972: 36). They conceded that Bacon’s vision of scientific knowledge leading to ‘the dissolution of dominion’ was a noble one, but argued that ‘in the face of such a possibility, and in the service of the present age, enlightenment becomes wholesale deception of the masses’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1972: 42). With their experience of the contemporary terror of Nazism and the chaos of Second World War, they surmised that ‘the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1972: 3). 8. The sale of millions of copies of Erich von Daniken’s writings (and their translations into several languages) all the world over – promulgating the belief that intelligent extraterrestrials would visit the earth to rescue humanity from the crises of civilization – is an index of the Zeitgeist. Another index is the immense popularity of sci-fi films in the late 1960s and 1970s – 2001: The Space Odyssey, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and so on. The Star Wars made all-time box office record. The TV serial Star Trek ran for a year, before it was made into a motion picture in 1979. 9. Brantlinger (1983) describes negative classicism as a legacy of the 19th century ‘decadent movement,’ which developed as a ‘defensive response to the democratization and industrialization – that is, the ‘massification’ – of culture’ (Brantlinger 1983: 19). It locates the ideal form of society in remote antiquity (classicism), and perceives deca-

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Beyond Developmentality dence in contemporary society, a decadence that is irredeemable. Thus, for Adorno and Horkheimer (1972), […] the only possibility of liberation in The Dialectic of Enlightenment is associated with the remote past, at the back of civilization itself, beyond the division of labor, beyond even those primitive societies which do not yet know the practice of human sacrifice. … Of course they know that this road back into the past is closed. They are lashed. We are all lashed, to the mast of civilization. (Brantlinger 1983: 245–46) This pessimism contrasts with positive classicism (like Marxism), which holds the optimism that progress will ultimately end oppression and bring happiness to all humanity.

10. I say ‘most’, because industrial and commercial interests have put on stage certain schools of environmentalism that also speak of sustainability and conservation of nature, while upholding private property rights and the free market. I shall deal with these schools in Section 8.1.4. 11. Alwin Seifert’s pioneer ideas of landscape protection remain forgotten in the history of environmentalism. Except Anna Bramwell’s brief treatment of his work, no major publication mentions his contribution to conservation of soil and wild lands. Recent environmental history publications (e.g. Guha 2000; Guha and Martinez-Alier 1997) remember Patrick Geddes and Lewis Mumford as pioneer ecological thinkers, but never mention Seifert, who was an architect with a vision to ‘embed motorways organically into the landscape’ (Bramwell 1989: 198), waged a campaign against the practice of monoculture in forestry and agriculture, argued against draining of wetlands, opposed chemical agriculture as unsuitable to modern era (because agrochemicals were both poisonous and costly), and upheld an early version of what is today called the biocentric ethic. 12. This later hostility of the regime to ecological ideas was a result of Hess’s escape to Britain: all who followed Hess’s ideas were suspect in the eyes of the Gestapo (Bramwell 1989: 205, 270). 13

As if to highlight the urgent need to curb industrial pollution levels, the Cuyahoga river in Cleveland, Ohio caught fire in 1977. This incident was immediately perceived as a national shame, which led to the passage of the US Water Pollution Control (Clean Water) Act in 1972.

C h a p t e r 6.1

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Search for Sustainability

Development of an Epistemology

The search for a paradigmatic alternative to the mainstream economic idioms of development, which began in the 1970s, has found an axiological basis in the growing scientific understanding of the ecological principles of biological communities and the environmental consequences of development. The concept of sustainability, developed and contemplated upon over decades following the lead of the World Conservation Strategy (IUCN, UNEP and WWF 1980), is multifaceted. Looking beyond the conservation goal to ensure continuance of the human use of the biosphere, the sustainability movement aims to establish a global society in which economic and ecological systems are integrated and all benefits thereof equitably distributed across time and space. With this conceptual goal of social and environmental justice, a comprehensive theory of sustainability has evolved and gained clarity in Green texts. Nevertheless, the practical way forward to attaining sustainability is not clear-cut. This is not because the idea itself has any methodological lacuna or ethical weakness, but because it is empirically difficult to test. Most problems of the environmental damage that the programme of sustainability movement seeks to prevent – species extinction, habitat loss, resource exhaustion and global pollution – are of a scale that is historically unprecedented, and therefore no time-tested model of alternative to the neoclassical economy may be proffered as the road to sustainability. The terms ‘sustainability’ and ‘sustainable development’ are often interchangeably used in the literature (Kane 1999); both are used to imply improvement in a 253

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dynamic process without exhausting the resource base. However, there is a broad difference between interpretations of the terms by economists and natural scientists – a difference that contributes to the controversy over connotations of development and has enriched the sustainability discourse. The different interpretations of the sustainability concept have their roots in the fundamental principle of managing natural resources: to manage the resources in such a manner that they remain viable (sustainable) over an indefinitely long period of time. Of direct consequence is the realization that sustained availability of natural resources would ensure sustainability of the economics based on them. It has been common knowledge in resource management practices that unless the rate of extraction of a natural resource is less than the rate of its natural renewal, the resource will soon get exhausted. However, experiences of unexpected declines in renewable resources have taught economists the fundamental lesson that even renewable resources, conventionally assumed to be infinitely renewable, are in reality finite, and must be tapped with ecological prudence. The need for regulated, sustainable exploitation of the resources became evident in the 19th century for ensuring a continual flow of timber and revenue for the empire. European foresters like Dietrich Brandis, the first head of the Indian Forest Department who founded in the 1850s a ‘scientific’ silvicultural system in India, spoke about sustainable extraction of timber. About the same time, early American conservationists like Aldo Leopold and Gifford Pinchot, also spoke about similar sustainable extraction of forest resources, for the benefit of civilization, and were concerned about the continuing ecological services obtained from nature, apart from the direct economic utility of the resources. Both the father of Indian forestry and the fathers of American conservationism recommended exclusion of the native people from the forest, lest their destructive foraging activities vitiate the ‘scientific forestry’ operations. The problem of ascertaining a sustainable resource harvest principle was understood to lie in the realm of scientific expertise beyond the reach of native traditions. The sustainability problem assumed enormous proportions in the resource economic discourse when the environmental impacts of anthropogenic activities became widely recognized, and the limits of the earth’s ability to withstand these impacts were investigated (Kane 1999). In particular, the Club of Rome’s study, Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972), painted a foreboding picture of an impending global apocalypse due to the physical-ecological limits of the earth’s resources, and became instrumental in building up the world political-economic consciousness about the serious consequences of squandering nature’s capital by an uncontrolled growth of industrialization. Many of the Club’s doomsday predictions have proved wrong – most notably the one regarding human population far

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exceeding the earth’s carrying capacity in two or three decades – but a singular achievement of its campaign is that it brought about a broad public realization of the eco-physical limits to Earth’s resources1. In view of these limits, the unsustainability of the current techno-economic system has become evident: Of course, chemical-based agriculture, which depends on the limited resource of petroleum which is rapidly eroding our topsoil, is not sustainable. Of course, fossil-fuel-based transportation and energy systems are not sustainable. Of course, an economy that annually pours billions of tons of pollutants into the air, land and sea is not sustainable. (Coleman 1994: 106)

Environmental considerations in resource use policy and politics have become formally accepted and woven into the professional economic discourse. Because the ecological dynamics of natural species populations, communities and ecosystems are discovered through tools of formal science and described as objective reality, the ecological argument wields considerably greater explanatory power than any anti-scientific postulates. It also mounts a stronger argument than any political or moral philosophy that seeks to find viable political and moral alternatives to the prevailing ideological hegemony. The scientific rigour of ecological and environmental research findings of the ecological consequences of economic growth has brought about a partial reorientation of economic theory, which now has to make space for environmental health and equity. The risk of a global ecological catastrophe is acknowledged in influential policy documents that use technical jargons like ecosystem stability and resilience, albeit in popular language. The World Watch Institute has discussed the problem of dismantling the complex structure of natural ecosystems: As systems are simplified and their webs become disconnected, they become more brittle and vulnerable to catastrophic, irreversible decline. From global climate change and the breakdown of the ozone layer to the biodiversity deficit, the collapse of fisheries, frequent outbreaks of red tides, and increasingly severe floods and droughts, there is now ample evidence that the biosphere is becoming less resilient. (Abramovitz 1997: 108)

Faced with this new scientific evidence, neo-classical economics has had to accommodate the values related to environmental costs of development within its supposedly value-free, objective mantle. The increasing recognition of the ontological primacy of environmental entities crucial to economic activities has led to the acceptance of an environmental ethos that has necessitated alteration or at least modification of certain key assumptions of mainstream economic theory, and accentuated the search for alternative modes of economic analysis. The green intellectual movements over the past four decades have posited an ecological value system, incorporating long-term consideration of social as well as

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economic benefits to humans in place of the short-term profit orientation of the modern economic development paradigm, or the economistic value system. Hayward (1994) identifies three salient imperatives of the ecological value system: (a) overcome anthropocentric prejudice, (b) recognize intrinsic value in beings other than humans and (c) live in harmony with nature. The first two principles constitute a moral position that repudiates the Enlightenment ideology as ‘anthropocentric chauvinism or speciesism,’ in which the Universe exists for humans to use freely because they alone have Reason and are therefore superior to the rest of the world. The ecological value system does not deny distinctiveness of specifically human faculties but argues that this specificity does not automatically translate into superiority. Once this epistemological shift is achieved, the correlated anthropocentric view of the worth of natural elements, conceived in terms of their economic use values, is also changed. In prevalent economic thinking, forests, lakes, grasslands, trees and birds are all resources whose values are determined by humans in terms of their usefulness to themselves. This commercial perspective of nature has been extended recently to claims of proprietary rights over cell lines, strands of DNA and even the life processes. Thus, nature’s value is quantified only in terms of imputed costs and benefits. This one-dimensional perspective on nature calls forth the management student’s view of manipulation bent on maximizing economic benefits. However, when the ecological imperatives are considered, then that constitutes a new perspective, in which nature has value in itself, independently of its economic utility (Hayward 1994: 12). The third principle that Hayward has mentioned regarding natural harmony is linked to the idea that the order found in natural ecosystems is more stable than any order that humans have so far made, and that economics needs to be harmonized with natural ecological order to deliver social equity and peace. Rifkin (1987: 199) reiterates this idea in his call for ‘re-establishing a temporal communion with natural biological and physical rhythms and in coexisting in harmony with the cycles, seasons and periodicities of the larger earth organism.’ This injunction to live in harmony with nature is based on the principal assumption that harmony is a state of nature. The notion of natural harmony, or balance, was forged by early ecologists, who believed that once the composite of abiotic factors of the environment or species composition of an ecosystem is changed, the intrinsic balance of the system will be disrupted, resulting in a drastic change in the ecosystem structure and function. Until recently, ecological literature has considered wild ecosystems, unperturbed by humans, as the evidence of the balance of nature, because these ecosystems have evolved over ages, and therefore are stable. The notion of intrinsic proclivity of natural systems to remain at a homeostatic equilibrium finds a robust expression in the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates

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Technical Discussion 7

that all organisms on Earth comprise ‘a single living entity, capable of manipulating the Earth’s atmosphere to suit its overall needs’ (Lovelock 1982: 9). Thus, Earth is a giant ecosystem that is inherently stable, and stability, in the sense of homoeostasis, is the property of the entire planet. The concept of stability is epitomized by the mathematical notion of Lyapunov stability (see Technical Discussion 7), in which individual species populations do not change over time, and are resilient to perturbations as long as they are not catastrophic. Human activities – farming, mining, felling of forests or ranching – necessarily disrupt the natural order of things in the ecosystems. Human-made ecosystems are therefore supposed to be unstable – or at least less stable than ‘natural ecosystems.’ When ecologists tried to explain why this was so, Elton’s (1934) dictum ‘complexity begets stability’ seemed to be most pertinent: natural systems are more stable because they are more complex than human-made systems. An old forest is thus considered to be more stable than a regularly managed tree farm, and a pisciculture pond less stable than a natural lake. This concept of stability of natural ecosystems lingers in the debate over whether ‘complexity

Stability and Resilience of Ecosystems Stability is the propensity of a system to attain or retain an equilibrium condition of steady state or stable oscillation. Systems of high stability resist departure from the original stable condition and, if the perturbation is small enough, tend to return to it. The population size of a species, at any given moment in nature, is determined by its previous size as well as environmental factors, such as temperature, food availability, predator density, disease agents, and so on, which determines the birth and death rates of the members of the population. If the overall birth rate exceeds (due to greater availability of food or mates, for example) the overall death rate, the population expands in size, whereas when the reverse occurs (due to greater predation pressure or environmental toxicity, for example), the result is population decline. When the population reaches equilibrium, it will not change in size, because the overall birth rate and death rate will be equal. Lyapunov stability of a population is defined as the steady-state condition, i.e., when the rate of change in the population size is zero: dN/dt = f (N) = 0.

(eqn. 6.1)

For an ecosystem, comprised by many species, stability is attained when all the component species populations have reached equilibrium sizes, so that the populations become stable (Figure 13) or show stable fluctuations (Figure 14). continued...

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continued... Stability of a biological community is measured by calculating the eigenvalues of the community interaction matrix, which is a composite of all interspecific interactions – competition, predation, mutualism, parasitism – among the component species. There will be n eigenvalues for n species composing the community. Eigenvalues of a complex system may be complex numbers, with real and imaginary parts, or even purely imaginary numbers like −1. Roughly speaking, if all these eigenvalues are negative, and are numbers with nonzero real parts, then the whole community is defined to be stable (Svirezhev and Logofet 1983). Pimm (1984, 1993) identified resistance as an important component of stability. It is a measure of the magnitude of change in response to a perturbation. More resistant systems change less in response to a particular intensity of perturbation than do less resistant systems. Models show that ecosystems with greater species diversity are likely to be more resistant to perturbation. Another important aspect of system stability is resilience, which is the ability of a system to return to the equilibrium condition following a perturbation. Resilience is measured as the inverse of the characteristic return time (RT) of the system: RT = – 1/ λtmax

(eqn. 6.2)

where λtmax is the largest eigenvalue of the community interaction matrix (Pimm 1984, 2002). Eigenvalues of the community matrix must be negative in order for the system to be stable, and therefore RT always has a positive value. Systems with higher resilience (that is, shorter RT) return faster to equilibrium than those with lower resilience (longer RT). However, a system may have more than one stable state, so that the system tends to flip from one equilibrium point to another, depending on the degree and nature of exogenous perturbations or internal dynamic processes. A useful imagery is that of a ball rolling across hills and valleys representing different stability domains. Small perturbations can flip the ball across small hills into a neighbouring valley of equilibrium, but sufficiently large perturbations are required to push the ball out of a deep valley of equilibrium into a farther stability domain across high hills.

begets stability.’ Computer simulations of complex ecosystems seemed to conclude that, while systems with greater species diversity were more stable, those with greater structural complexity were less stable but more resilient than simpler systems (Pimm 2002). Long-term field experiments have empirically validated the theoretical contention that species-rich ecosystems are more productive and resilient than simpler ecosystems (Hector et al. 1999; Tilman 1999, Tilman et al. 2006). Theoretical considerations of ecosystem stability seem to have reinforced the Western ideology espousing human-nature dichotomy, and engendered profound

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resource management policy implications. Environmental sustainability is mainly a matter of biodiversity conservation and ecosystem resilience in the face of anthropogenic perturbations. All human activities are considered to be exogenous perturbations that would disrupt the stability of natural ecosystems, unless some management system is consciously designed to minimize the effects. Pristine old growth forests, believed to have evolved following natural laws of ecological succession, are prime examples of ‘virgin’ nature, untrammelled by human touch. This Romantic view of nature is perfectly accommodated in the Western view of wilderness as distinct from human civilization. The biblically sanctioned role of humans to subjugate nature has fortified the Baconian programme of managerial manipulation of nature. Maintaining tree farms and forests by application of scientific forestry techniques has been considered in conventional forestry programmes and precepts to be an enlightened means of utilizing nature and enhancing the economy. According to the European forestry science, uncontrolled logging is deleterious to the unmanaged forest ecosystem, but scientific plantation and rotational harvest mimic the natural process of regeneration and make the best possible use of wild vegetational composition. Thus, conventional forestry assumes that damages to the forest ecosystem are redressed by silvicultural plantation of selected valuable trees. Conventional forestry thus undertook to eliminate all ‘minor species’ such as the herbs and climbers that seem to compete with the ‘major species’ of commercial value, so as to enhance both the ecological and, of course, economic value of the forest. In contrast, traditional hunter-gatherers, shifting cultivators and graziers have been assumed to spell disaster to natural forests and grasslands, because their traditional use of natural ecosystems lacked scientific understanding. Scientific management of wild lands therefore involved exclusion of these native ecosystem people and their ‘savage’ management practices. These perceptions and management practices often lead to what Holling (1986) calls ‘surprises’: Surprises occur when causes turn out to be sharply different than was conceived, when behaviors are profoundly unexpected, and when actions produce a result opposite to that intended - in short, when perceived reality departs qualitatively from experience. (Holling 1986: 294)

Surprises in the ecological context occur in two ways. Firstly, a theoretical aspect of the modern ecological paradigm suddenly appears incomplete, requiring additional data, finer resolution or new insights. Generalizations about ecosystem structures, based on food web data from different parts of the world is a good recent example: in the 1970s and 1980s, a number of structural properties of food webs, including food chain length, the proportions of species occupying

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different levels within the food chain and links between these levels, appeared to be scale-invariant. However, refined and more rigorously collected food web data, published in the 1990s indicated that most of these properties are, as a rule, scale dependent (Deb 1995). In particular, the food linkages among different species within the food web appear to become increasingly complex with increasing system size, and the level of complexity of ecosystems now appears more unwieldy than was previously conceived by food web theorists (Deb 1997; Martinez 2000). Another example of this first category of surprise involves the very theoretical assumption of stability of natural ecosystems. Recent studies indicate that communities are not static over time; instability prevails in all natural systems. The perception of community stability or conversely, variability, depends on temporal and spatial scales, the level of taxonomic resolution, and the choice of variables to measure variability (Bengtsson et al. 1997; Botkin 1990; Pimm 1991). The degree of community variability would vary with habitat stability and interactions among species in the community (Gaston 1994; Bengtsson et al. 1997). For instance, low rates of population turnover and habitat stability generate relatively stable British woodland bird communities on a temporal scale of about 20 years, but variability increases with longer periods of observation (Bengtsson et al. 1997). It is also recognized that stability is not necessary for species coexistence and persistence in natural communities (e.g. van Baalen and Sabelis 1999). With the rise of what many call non-equilibrium ecology, ecologists have virtually abandoned the ‘balance of nature’ idea, although it persists in wild land management lingo and all conservation legislations (Pickett et al. 1992; Pimm 1991; Simmons 1999). Natural communities are no longer considered to tend to evolve toward stability, nor are climax forests considered to exemplify a balance among species abundances. Thus, in non-equilibrium ecology, forests do not evolve toward a stable ‘climax’ condition as has been supposed in classical ecological theory. This recognition of non-equilibrium dynamics of ecological communities seems to engender a great shift in perspective on population equilibrium and environmental carrying capacity (see Technical Discussions 7 and 8). The significance of non-equilibrium ecology in providing an important insight into the real-life ecological processes as opposed to that surmised from theoretical models based on biased assumptions about nature will be discussed in section 7.1. This also heralds a significant change in forest and wild land management principles – a change that constitutes another category of surprise. The second category of surprise often occurs in the outcome of the management practices based on assumptions of superiority of modern technical knowledge regarding nature and natural resources. An instance of such surprises – in the sense of results ‘opposite to that intended’ – is that successful suppression of

Technical Discussion 8

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Environmental Carrying Capacity and Population Dynamics When a population reaches its equilibrium, its size tends to remain either constant or fluctuate with stable cycles over an indefinite period of time. The population size at which this equilibrium is attained depicts an asymptote (K). The growth of a single population is modelled by ecologists using logistic equations. Logistic growth equations (developed by Pierre-Francois Verhulst in 1838 and then by Raymond Pearl and Lowell Reed in 1920) are qualitatively different from the Malthusian growth equation (see Technical Discussion 5, eqn. 3.1) in that the population growth is limited by an upper limit or asymptote (K). One such equation is: Nt+1 = Nt exp [r (1 – Nt /K)]

(eqn. 6.3)

where the intrinsic rate of population growth is denoted by r. The asymptote K is called the ‘carrying capacity’ of the environment, set by levels of nutrients and other resources available to the population. K specifies the maximum population that can be sustained in a particular environment. While the intrinsic growth rate in eqn. 3.3 is exp[r], it is exp[r (1 – Nt /K)] in the logistic pattern of growth. Clearly, this latter growth depends on the value of Nt or the population density of the preceding generation – which is why the logistic model is also called ‘density dependent growth’ model. Note that setting Nt /K = 0 turns the eqn. 6.3 into eqn. 3.3.) Following the logistic equation, the population will eventually stabilize at K regardless of the initial size (N0). Figure 13 shows that with N0 = 5 as well as with N0 = 130, the population size reaches K = 100 with r = 1.2.

Figure 13. Logistic Population Growth (r = 1.2 and K = 100).

Population size (N)

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continued... The population oscillates around the same K when r ≥ 2 (Svirezhev and Logofet 1983: 20). At r = 2, the population shows a stable 2-cycle oscillation around K (Figure 14). Figure 14. Stable Oscillation of Population (r = 2 and K = 100)

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When another species is added to this single-species scenario, the growth pattern of each affects the other through the nature of their ecological interaction – competition, predation, parasitism or mutualism. Growth profiles of a prey and a predator species are shown in Figure 15. Although the demographic parameters for the prey species are the same as in Figure 13, its population density attains a new equilibrium value N*≈ 11 in the presence of the predator population, which also stabilizes at abot 8 (Figure 15). Figure 15. Logistic Growth of a Prey Population, and Prey-dependent Growth of a Predator Population2 16

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8 Predator 4

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Values of r and K are same as in Figure 13.

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continued... Of importance to note is that any change in the value of K will alter the rise of the population growth curve, regardless of the presence of predators, competitors, parasites, mutualists or food organisms in the ecosystem. Although K is assumed to hold constant in most population models, in real life situations it is often subject to change under the influence of various environmental factors. Thus, most natural species populations show fluctuations over time. If K for a population changes, say, every 50 time-units, while r remains constant at 1.5, the growth profile of that population (in the absence of any inter-specific interactions) will look as shown in Figure 16. Figure 16. Logistic Growth of a Single Species Population

Population size (N)

180 150 120 90 60 30 0 0

50

100

150

200

time (t)

Note:

Single spe cies population following eqn. 6.3. K abruptly changes at t = 51, 101, 151 and 201. Values of with r and K are same as in Figure 13.

Clearly, any snapshot observation of the population at a given time would only indicate a part of the demographic history. If the observation is made at say t = 30, the population will appear to be stable at K = 100, whereas at t = 100, it will appear to lead to extinction. Because the simple logistic growth model is not adequate to capture the exogenous mechanisms of change in K, reference to a supposedly constant carrying capacity of an ecosystem in management decisions will be misleading. Furthermore, in real life situations, the presence of other species interacting with the species under observation may also lead to miscalculation of K. For example, if the predator population in Figure 15 is observed without recognizing the existence of its prey, it is easy to surmise that the predator population is governed by a logistic equation with K ≈ 8. That conclusion will obviously be mistaken, because the predator population is crucially influenced by the existing prey population size, predation rate and natural mortality (these are considered in Lotka-Volterra equations to model two-species prey-predator systems). To ascertain the true carrying capacity of multiple-species ecosystems would t more complicated models. With the currently available mathematical tools, it is just impossible to determine the exact value of K for each species in a complex speciose ecosystem, such as a tropical pond or forest.

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natural forest fires in the US national parks has resulted in accumulation of fuel, enhancing the risk of unprecedented fire outbreaks (Holling 1986), such as the prolonged burning of the Yosemite forest in 1996. Boreal forest management has now focussed on aiding natural fire rather than its suppression. The major change in natural resource management perspective consists of the acknowledgement of the conducive role of ecosystem people in persistence of ecosystems. Modern ecology has amassed evidence that the belief in the deleterious impact of indigenous peoples on wildlife and ‘natural’ ecosystems has poor empirical grounds and is misleading. Conventional conservation efforts, with the objective to maintain the ‘natural’ condition of forests and grasslands by excluding indigenous peoples from natural habitats and abolishing traditional use of the natural ecosystems, have now lost grounds. Recent studies provide evidence of age-old management practices enhancing biodiversity of many hitherto-considered ‘pristine’ forests. For instance, prehistoric Inca agroforestry has resulted in today’s biodiversity and physiognomy of the Amazonian rainforest, universally imagined as pristine and virgin (Gòmez-Pompa and Kaus 1992). There is no evidence that the influence of Mayan agroforestry in the past has been destabilizing to the forest; instead, the archeobotanical evidence indicates it has enhanced the species richness and persistence of the forest ecosystem over millennia. Another glaring instance of surprise in the conventional wild land management regime is the choking of the wetland of Keoladeo National Park in western India, following a ban instituted in 1980 by the forest department on the livestock grazing in the sanctuary, a ban based on the principle of excluding ecosystem peoples – in this case the local villagers – from the wetland that harbours over 350 bird species. Soon after the ban, the reeds and grasses, which had been kept under control by buffalo grazing, overgrew and choked the wetlands, disrupting the breeding and nesting habitats for different migratory birds (Gadgil and Guha 1995). Thus, removal of the ecosystem people proved to be destabilizing to the very ecosystem which the conservation experts and forest department sought to protect. An important message that emerges from these surprises is that the rhetoric of stability is gratuitous in ecological discourse. What matters in nature is not stability, but long term persistence of species populations, communities and ecosystems. Economic benefits can be derived from nature on a continuous basis if natural capital persists, or remains sustainable. If sustained economic benefits derive from direct consumptive uses of natural capital (as food, medicines, and materials for artefacts), species populations must be conserved. If the benefits include indirect services (like greenhouse gas absorption, oxygen production) that are too unlikely to be replaced with human capital, communities as well as species populations must be conserved. If recreational and aesthetic services are

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also included, ecosystems and landscapes ought to be conserved. If species populations, constituting the renewable resource stock, persist over a sufficiently long period of time, it matters less for the economy if they fluctuate than if they disappear. Economic sustainability crucially depends on the ecological persistence of the components of biodiversity – that is, ecological sustainability. Because stability appears unlikely to be the natural state of natural systems, the school of environmentalism that adheres to the rhetoric of sustainability to imply either returning to the natural state of affairs or maintaining stability of the resource stock thus appears to have a weak conceptual base. With the displacement of the concept of stability from a central place in ecological and resource management theory, much of the rigour of standard ecological explanations of ‘natural ecosystems’ appears to be misplaced (Botkin 1990). Equally misplaced are studies that rely on a static concept of ‘carrying capacity’ linked to that of stability (see Technical Discussion 5). The assumptions that human activities are inherently disruptive of the stability of natural ecosystems, and that growth in human and livestock populations would exceed the carrying capacity of ecosystems have been proved wrong by recent studies on traditional management of the African savanna (Bryant 1998; Fairhead and Leach 1998). It now appears that populations of herbivores and the savanna grasses are interlocked in a co-evolutionary game. While a cumulative mass of evidence from Amazonia, Africa and South and South East Asia indicate that traditional indigenous socio-economic and natural resource management institutions and processes have maintained plasticity and resilience of the ecosystems, the legacy of colonial forestry and wilderness management continues to operate on the entrenched belief that local people and their TEK have nothing to offer in terms of conservation. Moreover, ‘their way of life is viewed as inimical to wildlife conservation’ (Kothari et al. 1995: 191). Especially revealing is the imperialist agenda of a group of Northern biologists, represented by Daniel Janzen, who believes that biologists, as ‘representatives of the natural world,’ have the authority, competence and mandate to determine how the tropical forests should be managed (Janzen 1987: 305–6). This imposition of authority and stance of knowing all that is relevant and good for the tropical ecosystems betokens the ecological guise of Western imperialism. In the words of Ramachandra Guha, This is an ecologically updated version of the White Men’s Burden, where the biologist, rather than the civil servant or military official, knows that it is in the native’s true interest to abandon his home and hearth and leave the field and forest clear for the new rulers of his domain. (Guha 1997: 104)

Guha also cites Raymond Bonner’s ridicule of the import of ‘the four Northern C’s’ into Africa – Christianity, commerce, civilization, and recently, conservation – all with the intent of bringing light into the Dark Continent. Western conservation

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experts and agencies have been instrumental in enclosing Africa’s wild lands and prohibiting native traditional subsistence activities like hunting and pastoralism. These technical experts ignore the local knowledge base and assume that the ecosystem people know almost nothing about management of their natural resources. ‘These modern secular missionaries were convinced that without the white man’s guidance, the Africans would go astray’ (Bonner 1993: 65). The hubristic assumptions of modern conservation experts regarding the local people’s knowledge and concern are now being challenged by recent studies revealing that ecosystem peoples have an adequate ecological knowledge base for effective management of the local resources. A growing body of evidence of persistence of ecosystems – until recently managed by pre-industrial human societies – indicate that species and ecosystems have co-evolved with humans in response to resource management practices over the millennia.3 Until the adoption of modern technology and market-oriented worldview, human societies were largely capable of fine-tuning their survival strategies to the ecosystem of which they are a part. A multitude of pre-industrial societies are known to subsist over centuries upon their immediate environments, through employment of lowimpact technology conducive to co-evolution of different species in the ecosystem, without exhausting their resource base. I shall put aside the ethnography, ideologies and polemics regarding these ‘ecosystem people’ (and essentialist attempts at positing them as the Other for the West) until the subsequent section. The point relevant to the issue of stability-sustainability nexus is clear: first, stability may not be a necessary criterion for sustainability of a species to be harvested, and second, human interference until recently has not always been disruptive of the persistence of natural ecosystems. A sustainable resource is that which is maintained over an indefinitely long period of time without an apparent risk of collapsing. Sustainability is ensured by the minimal adverse impacts of both production and consumption mechanisms on the environment and social health. It therefore requires environmentally destructive modes of production and consumption to be converted into environmentally sound ones. If the repercussions of technology are low-scale, nonexhaustive and short-term, exploitation of the resource base is kept limited, and the fruits of exploiting nature are equitably distributed in society, sustainability is not difficult to achieve. This set of conditions for sustainability has been taken up by all modern environmental activists, including those who oppose ‘big science’ and technological developments, and those who believe in technological fixes to any environmental damage, no matter how great. The new environmental consciousness demands sustainable living, based on eco-friendly consumption patterns involving the re-use and recycling of materials and the avoidance of

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ecologically destructive life styles on the one hand, and eco-friendly production on the other. The critique of modernity repudiate the capitalist mode of production as well as rampant consumerism as inherently unsustainable, and posit antimodernist alternatives ideals, ranging from the eco-harmonious mode of living found in primal indigenous traditions (Berkes 1999; Callicott 1983; Gadgil and Guha 1992), to the Buddhist doctrine of Right Livelihood and the interconnectedness of all beings (Macy 1991; Schumacher 1974), to Social Ecology’s ideal of decentralized ecological ‘affinity groups’ of free individuals, poised against hierarchy, capitalism and the exploitative state (Bookchin 1980, 1992). The global discourse on the environmental, social and economic repercussions of profligate management of natural resources highlights the need for a sustainable mode of resource extraction and use. Worldwide conservationist movements contributed to the growth of this awareness. In response, the new expertise of ‘environmental economics’ was born into the folds of mainstream professional economics, which had traditionally ignored the cost of environmental degradation while calculating the cost of production of commodities. Attempts to value the different elements of biodiversity and assess the cost of polluting the environment characterize the new econometrics. Professional economics now tend to pay increasing attention to the dynamics of the natural world, with a view to understanding how production and consumption activities impinge on it. While the principal destructiveness of capitalist mode of production ensues from the profligate use of the natural resource base and disregard for human health, ethos and social well-being, critics also ascribe the unsustainability of the industrial mode of production to the existing gender, class and ethnic discriminations accentuated by capitalism. Anti-modernist critiques, especially eco-Marxist, eco-feminist and ‘social ecology’ schools, identify capitalism and hierarchy as the key sources of all social pathologies, including environmental malaise. Hierarchical thinking is characterized by anthropocentrism (man is superior to all other creatures and nature), Eurocentrism (Europe is superior to the rest of the world), and androcentrism (men are superior to women), which has been the basis of industrial despoliation of nature, domination of people by some in power, and patriarchal exploitation of women by men. While deep ecology locates the anthropocentric ‘speciesism’ as the underlying cause of global environmental degradation, eco-feminism identifies the culturally embedded masculine gender attitude, which reinforces the idea of Nature as feminine object, open for subjugation and exploitation. The agenda of eco-feminism is to resolve the contradiction between production and reproduction. In contrast, the sustainability movement attempts to resolve the contradiction between production and ecology by making production ecologically sustainable.

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The greatest outcome of the global sustainability discourse is the articulation of an ecocentric worldview, which is an ideological orientation to express sensitivity to different types and scales of impacts of current economic activities on the future states of nature and society. Sustainability explicitly requires protection of ecosystem components and ecological processes, which form the context of human life and cultural diversity. But sustainability cannot be achieved by mere slowing down of the processes of accumulation that always maintain inequalities and injustices. The ecocentric worldview is based on the realization that a complete reversal of the current trends of development is necessary to make the economy sustainable. On the empirical ground, the sustainability movement has elicited and strengthened regulations and sanctions for cleaner production – through appropriate treatment of industrial effluents and emissions before release into the environment, prohibition on synthesis and use of toxic materials, and replacement of non-renewable energy sources with renewable ones. Indeed, the degree of success of such legislative measures to control pollution and environmental degradation varies in different countries with different social and political levels of environmental awareness. The movement also seems to have been somewhat successful in promulgating an environmentally responsible consumption ethic. Over the past two decades, the concept of sustainable living has created a new generation of eco-conscious consumers – especially in the West – who are willing to live basically on a subsistence level. This minority of consumers who strive to live a Thoreauvian ‘slow life’ bereft of most modern gadgets should not be confused with the wealthy health-conscious Green consumers who can afford to liberally spend on ‘organic’ foods and cosmetics. Green consumerism itself, with its demand for biodegradable organic products has significantly contributed to the empirical viability of sustainable production, and entails a coterie of eco-conscious producers, and has become a fashion trend that has caught on with a growing section of the Southern consumers.

6.2

Ecological Prudence and Sustainability

As Ivan Illich (1990) says, in order to find an alternative language, one must return to the past. Indeed, much insight into the possibilities of alternatives has been gained from studies of past societies. Studies in indigenous societies and customary resource use norms held over centuries seem to reveal that key resources on which these societies thrive seldom reach critically low levels. Pre-industrial technology and traditional ecological knowledge of the indigenous societies appear to ensure maintenance of an adequate stock of resources to allow for long-term harvest and

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use (Deb and Malhotra 2001; Deb 2007). The pattern of resource harvest by indigenous hunter-gatherer-shifting cultivators seems to be harmonized to natural cycles of regeneration of the stock of natural resources, particularly the local biota, which is periodically given adequate time and space to replenish itself – unless, that is, interrupted by forces of modernity, especially the market economy. Pre-industrial societies generally valued life in a broad sense that shaped a Weltanscahuung in which humans were an integral part of nature. This organic cosmology, repeatedly encountered in almost all known indigenous cultures around the world, has been, and continues to be, undermined by Western science and market-oriented culture (Merchant 1980; Nelson 1993). Numerous indigenous peoples and their cultures were annihilated by European colonial expansion, most notably in the Americas (Stannard 1993; Spence 1999), Australia and New Zealand (Elder 1999). The existing indigenous societies that survive with their pre-industrial level of technology still retain an ‘ecological ethic’ that is essentially based on an understanding of the interconnectedness of all life forms. The bestknown expression of this ethic is attributed to Chief Seattle: Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.4

This understanding engenders and fosters a general love and respect for life and life forms – what Ed Wilson (1993), following Fromm (1973), termed biophilia, which permeates across all indigenous cultures. Some authors contend that the understanding of interconnectedness of all creatures, and the biophilia it engenders, […] tend to be motivated by sentiments of affinity and reciprocal obligation rather than by ecological or moralistic values typical of modern rationalizations for protecting nature. For most hunter-gatherers, moderation and respect for the natural world derive from a profound emotional and spiritual identification with the living world, unrelated to a calculated empiricism or a particular desire to prevent pain being inflicted on other creatures. The typical hunter-gatherer assumes that avoidance of excessive harm to nonhuman animals is as logical as preventing similar behavior from befalling one’s own family, village, or tribe. (Kellert 1996: 152)

This contention that primal hunter-gatherers had biophilia ingrained in their social psychology is an example of a trend of romanticizing indigenous cultures, in a drive to oppose modern economic rationality. Thus Nelson (1993: 212) would have us believe that most hunter-gatherers assume that ‘they should never take more than they need, or waste what has been given to them.’ Such essentialization of the ‘Noble Savage’ ignores the historical records of indigenous societies laying waste to wildlife and wild lands. While wasteful hunting and gratuitous exploitation

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of resources seldom take place in traditional hunter-gatherer societies, continual hunting by indigenous peoples have at places resulted in species extinction in the past. Furthermore, indigenous societies often evince callous, cruel and myopic attitude toward natural resources after industrialization. But this fact poses problem for the Wilsonian biophilia as an innate human predisposition. If ‘exploitative values associated with contemporary marketplace economics, modern technology and commercialism’ are capable of replacing the tribal values and traditional ‘feelings of intimacy and kinship with nature’ (Kellert 1996: 151), the Wilsonian rhetoric of biophilia biologically inherent in indigenous populations tends to become footloose. The rhetoric is particularly weak in the Wilsonian concept of an innate biophilia that is ‘hereditary, and hence part of ultimate human nature’ (Wilson 1993: 31), ‘associated with human competitive advantage and genetic fitness’ (Kellert 1993: 21). This concept of the innate biophilia is logically opposed to Fromm’s (1973: 365–66) original concept of biophilia (and its opposite, ‘necrophilia’) that is contingent upon cultural experience and exposure for full expression: if biophilia is not properly nurtured by culture, the individual develops what Fromm calls ‘necrophilia.’ Nabhan and St. Antoine (1993: 233) reiterate this position by identifying ‘three requisite conditions for the expression of biophlia’: the existence of a diversity of life forms, hands-on experience of life forms and a living tradition of folklore of plants and animals. The demise of all these in modern techno-urban society ‘may help explain why the genes for biophilia now have fewer environmental triggers to stimulate their full expression among contemporary cultures compared to those in the past’ (Nabhan and St. Antoine 1993: 233). This strong cultural dependence of biophilia, an innate trait, constitutes a paradox, which Wilson sought to resolve, unconvincingly, by postulating gene-culture co-evolution as ‘a plausible explanation’ (Wilson 1993: 32–33). Wilson (1993) and Ulrich (1993) refer to the seemingly ubiquitous aversion to snake,5 which they propose should indicate the existence of biophilia as well: ‘empirical evidence of genetic role in biophobia provides a springboard for the next advancing theoretical notions concerning biophilia’ (Ulrich 1993: 74). However, while an evolutionary genetic basis of biophobia is surmised from its cross-cultural prevalence, that for biophilia is inferred from studies showing aesthetic preference of wild landscapes over urban landscapes. In spite of the strong cultural dependence of biophilia for its expression, Wilson believes in the existence of genes for, and genetic fitness of, biophilia! To invoke a genetic basis for biophilia is both logically unnecessary and methodologically flawed. If constant first-hand experience engenders and fosters a sentiment of love and care for the natural world in members of indigenous

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societies, and if that caring attitude has any conservation consequences, it matters little if people have any putative innate predisposition for love of life. It seems more logically coherent instead to contend that the ‘sentiments of affinity and reciprocal obligation’ are likely to have been built on an intimate knowledge of the local environment, on which indigenous societies used to depend for survival. If experiences of crashes of prey populations, and temporal correlations between prey scarcity and overkill get reconfirmed over generations, different forms of restraint on overkill are likely to be adopted by the close-knit society of huntergatherers, and the restraint might then be ritualized. Any such restraint acceded by the society would be based on an inchoate appreciation of the value (in this case, use value) of the prey species. Linked to this is the fact of cultural semiotics that the appreciation of both use value and non-use value of specific elements of biodiversity is often expressed in awe and respect for them. The objects of respect were often held ‘sacred’ in indigenous cultures. Many of the sacred species and habitats in India turn out to be important resource items or even keystone species without any direct human uses (Deb and Malhotra 2001; Spadoni and Deb 2005). Thus, biophilia reflected in resource use norms of pre-industrial societies seems to have been elicited by a prior appreciation of the value of the natural world, rather than the other way around. Although Kellert (1996) denies its existence, a certain degree of a ‘calculated empiricism’ underlies, at least on a ‘collective subconscious’ level, certain forms of customary restraint on exhaustive employment of technology in pre-industrial societies. Calculated empiricism seems evident in elaborate hunting ethics in particular. Customary taboos of indigenous societies on hunting pregnant does and nestlings, and closed seasons of hunting and fishing are more likely to have been consciously designed to protect important life history stages of the prey animals, than to be incidental expression of a profound love and respect for the deer and fish populations. Instances of traditional cultural practices related to natural resource use indicate that empirical evidence of adverse consequences of resource depletion – experiences of resource crunch following profligate modes of resource use – seem to have enriched the ecological knowledge base of the ancient hunter-gatherer-shifting cultivator societies, and fine-tuned their socio-cultural behaviours to environmental vagaries and the population dynamics of the local biota. This traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), founded on empirical and intuitive understandings of natural processes and interconnections, has been essential for pre-industrial societies, with limited scope of technology, to cope with uncertainties in food availability, and continue to serve as efficient mechanisms to protect the natural resource base on which the traditional economy of these societies depends (Altieri

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1987; Deb and Malhotra 2001; Gadgil and Guha 1992; Spadoni and Deb 2005). While some cultural practices inconsequential to resource conservation might have been shaped by what Boyd and Richerson (1985: 259–260) call ‘run-away cultural evolution,’ and many such practices have only incidental conservation consequences, there are numerous traditional practices that seem to have been guided by an empirical understanding of the dynamics of natural communities and ecological processes (Deb and Ghosh 1999; Deb and Malhotra 2001). Guided by past experiences of ecosystem behaviour, indigenous societies devised various socio-cultural mechanisms to restrain wasteful resource use modes. Biophilia is the ethical basis of these ‘ecologically prudent’ behaviours. Biophilia reinforced the cultural institutions to protect important elements of the landscape as sacred groves, sacred ponds and sacred species. The semiotic significance of biophilia is reflected in good and evil omens and folklores related to life forms. Every indigenous society has a list of good and evil omens, which reflect the semiotic significance of biophilia in its culture. For example, the Santal consider as good omens the sighting of footprints of cattle, tiger, and leopard during a marriage ceremony. Likewise, the sighting of cattle, fox, and mango are auspicious signs to the Munda. Ill omens for the Santal include the sight of a headload of fuelwood, and for the Munda, that of the felling of a tree. Ill omens in the Hindu culture include the sighting of a hunted turtle, and of cut fuelwood… (Deb and Malhotra 2001: 721)

Such omens essentially convey that the presence of a variety of life forms around people is a sign for ‘good living,’ whereas acts of destruction of nature are bad for human life. ‘Omens, auguries, and related myths may thus be described as a “syntactical” extension of the biophilous “semantic” structure’ (Deb and Malhotra 2001: 723). This semantic structure underlies the TEK of the indigenous society, and reinforces its cultural practices to empirically conserve the resource base (Figure 17). Distinctly positive conservation consequences of the institution of sacred groves and ponds, protection of certain prey species considered ‘sacred,’ several hunting ethics, closed seasons for hunting and fishing, and ritual domestication of species (Deb and Malhotra 2001) indicate that TEK can contribute to sustain the natural resource base. There exists a body of critique of ethnoecological studies purporting to show a causal relationship between TEK and sustainable resource use. Critics of TEK argue that many traditional customs have deleterious effects on local resources: the huntergatherer community called Malasar of south India do not seem to care for the longterm availability of tubers while gathering them from the forest (Daniels and Vencatesan 1995). Furthermore, many of the customary behaviours of indigenous societies have been responsible for the extinction of a large number of species in the

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Figure 17. Conservation Consequences of Biophilous Ethic in Indigenous Cultures.

Ethos RESPECT FOR N AT U R E

Institutions Sacred Species

Ritual Uses of Species

Customary Harvesting Quotas

Food Culture

Myths & Totems

Omens & Auguries

Sacred Habitats

LITURGY

Conservation Implications SPECIES PROTECTION

H A B I TAT PROTECTION

Source: Modified from Deb and Malhotra (2001).

prehistoric past, a fact instanced by native North American tribes hunting the American bison to extinction and the New Zealand aboriginals exterminating the moa prior to European colonization. The point of the argument is that TEK is a post-hoc, neo-romantic construction of the modern ecology movement, which seeks to find a normative standard for interpreting the world in accord with the new ecological worldview; this ideological construction of TEK thus serves to rejuvenate the Western construction of the ‘noble savage’ (Redford 1991; Buege 1996), whom the civilized West ought to be modest enough to appreciate and admire. Such critiques serve well to question the objectivity of some of the recent writings that tend to characterize all pre-industrial social behaviors and institutions – including the caste system in India (e.g. Gadgil 1985; Gadgil and Malhotra 1983) – as governed by a profound ecological wisdom to ensure sustainable resource use. However, such critiques seem to throw away the baby

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with the bathwater, as they rely on a binary logic to find the truth – a paramount fallacy of Western deterministic science: if TEK is true, all traditional behaviours ought to conform to ecological prudence, or else TEK is not a factual entity. The fallacy of this argument is identical to the one that marked the historic controversy over the nature of light (particle or wave) in that it denies the possibility of the existence of dual reality. Just as the corpuscular vs wave theory debate ignored the possibility of the dual nature of light, the denial – in principle – to grant TEK objective ontological recognition seems to overlook the complexity of cultural dynamics, and a whole range of possibilities, which includes, for instance, a)

the fact that relevant ecological knowledge of a particular life form may not be available to a particular society simply because the society in question might never have had an experience of the ecological properties of that species; for example, the society might never have experienced local extinction of the species due to overharvesting;

b) the fact that past behaviours conducive to protecting a life form, as well as behaviours of null-consequence – with no appreciable consequences on the species’ survival – may prove to be detrimental under changed circumstances; and vice versa; c)

the fact that a behaviour, or a class of behaviours, of a society might evolve for purely non-utilitarian reasons, or for certain cultural reasons (religious beliefs, for instance) remotely relevant, or even irrelevant to the economics of resource use.

This understanding is in contrast with Brouwer’s (1998) proposition that ‘true tradition’ consists of a proven set of ancient and original customs, conventions and routines that must be passed over generations relatively unchanged. In the cultural evolutionary perspective discussed above, traditional customs, conventions or routines are not TEK unless the behaviour has at least some indirect ecological consequences, and unless the knowledge is handed down to future generations by tradition. This recognition entails two logical implications. Firstly, TEK of a society may include a common behaviour that traditionally had positive or no conservation implications, although that same behaviour may currently prove to be beneficial or detrimental to a resource item. There is evidence that indigenous groups demonstrating no apparent conservation ethic under traditional conditions become conservationists as they adjust to the novel political and economic environment (Vickers 1994). Conversely, many traditional cultural factors like religious perceptions, belief systems and ‘run-away’ cultural evolution of a social trait (or traits)

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might, under modern social and economic forces, result in behaviours with adverse or no conservation consequences, and thus do not contribute to the repertoire of TEK of a society. For instance, the introduction of firearms and steel traps to the boreal forest Algonquians of south western Canada in the early 1800s by European fur traders resulted in extermination of wild animals. Having acquired both the superior technology and the motive for killing more animals for trade with European settlers, the Algonquians intensified their hunting spree, leading to severe reduction in animal populations, which the hunters attributed to spiritual reasons. They believed that animals killed by hunters spontaneously regenerated after death. This faulty perception about the prey population thus cannot constitute Algonquian TEK, because until the advent of Western technology and the incentive to exhaust their resources, the Algonquians’ fatalistic belief systems were inconsequential to their traditional lifestyle and prey availability. The belief in regenerativity of the hunted animals did not impact their traditional hunting technology or prey mortality. ‘Only after Western contact they became maladaptive’ (Burke 2001: 460), and overhunting drove the prey populations to local extinction. Secondly, the TEK-repertoire of a society may not include an item of knowledge that another society’s TEK-repertoire might include because of different experiences of resource use. The banana flower is an important food and a delicacy in West Bengal, unlike in most parts of India (Deb 2001 a). However, harvesting of the flower seems to have little effect on the banana tree populations in West Bengal. In contrast, the Naga food culture in northeast India has an adverse impact on resident bird populations. Upon Christianization, abandonment of traditional Naga cultural-religious restrictions on hunting has led to an indiscriminate hunting of birds. As a result, bird sighting is a rare experience in Nagaland and Manipur. Thus, different socio-cultural behaviours may have negative, neutral, or positive conservation consequences, depending on the historical context in which the behaviour is generated and preserved. Positive conservation consequences are sometimes likely to be incidental. However, the positive effects might also have been designed by tradition based on past experiences. Traditional societies continue to observe certain cultural behaviours that have demonstrably positive conservation consequences – incidental or otherwise (Deb and Malhotra 2001). Such behaviours are often informed by a traditional knowledge of local biota and their ecological functions and economic uses. In light of this new recognition of the efficiency of pre-industrial and nonWestern modes of resource use norms, models of economic progress that international development agencies impose on the poor countries appear spurious. Current research in resource use policy and environmental ethics increasingly

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deals with the environment and biodiversity issues. A growing awareness of the need for change in the dominant resource use modes in favour of sustainability seems to be percolating from the academic research compartments into the political and legal institutions. A consensus that appears to have emerged today is that achieving sustainability would require substantial changes in human lifestyles and behaviours (Proops and Wilkinson 2000). Another important consensus is that ecosystem people living in close proximity to nature and away from industrial modernity do want to conserve their resources. People living in a given locality, generation after generation, are apt to devise various socio-cultural mechanisms to moderate resource harvesting efforts in order to improve the harvests in the long run (McNeely et al. 1995: 731). However, under the pale of the market economy, the traditional ecological prudence begins to show signs of erosion. Thus, in the wake of development, modernization of indigenous societies in much of Asia, Latin America and Africa has brought about rapid destruction of the natural resources, which they had maintained over centuries. Prudent resource management and protection of biodiversity by local communities seem to be an anathema to the market economy pivoted on private property. The general scheme of the European colonial rule throughout the period from the 18th to the 20th century was to replace community ownership with either private or state ownership of natural resources to maximize revenue generation for the empire. Thus, biodiversity conservation has seldom appeared to be a priority in colonial governance. There are just a few exceptions. A notable exception was the French colonial government in Mauritius, which passed an ordinance in 1769 stipulating ‘that 25 percent of all landholdings were to be kept as forest, particularly on steep mountain slopes, to prevent soil erosion; all denuded areas to be replaced; and all forests within 200 meters of water were to be protected’ (McNeely et al. 1995: 733).

6.3

Economic Efficiency vs Ecological Efficiency

Insofar as development is equated with industrial growth, or general economic growth (with rise in per capita income or greater availability of consumer goods) that is predicated on exhaustive use of natural resources, sustainable development is a stultifying oxymoron: there can be no such thing as sustainable growth in a finite world, because it is thermodynamically impossible. Development could indeed be sustained if the rate of extraction of resources does not exceed that of their natural regeneration or replenishment – regeneration of a forest woodlot to the harvestable stage, or replenishment of soil nutrients by natural processes over a long period of time – but at the cost of efficiency, as measured by the present day,

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commercial cost-benefit arithmetic. This efficiency, as Drescher (1997: 58) discussed, could be an ‘industrial efficiency’: Industrial forestry, like industrial agriculture, defines efficiency as production per unit of “industrial” cost; in other words, the cost that is accounted for and paid for within the producing industry, without regard for the financial and social costs incurred in the greater human-made whirlpool called the economy, and without regard for the costs incurred outside this whirlpool altogether in the surrounding ecosystem.

On the other hand, it could also be Drescher’s slightly broader ‘economic efficiency’ which, because it includes the financial and social costs ignored in industrial efficiency, is apt to lead to an illusion of sustainability ‘up to the point at which the surrounding ecosystem costs become too great, causing the collapse of both ecosystem and the dependent economic spin within’ (Drescher 1997: 58–59). This economic efficiency may be described in another way. System X is more efficient than system Y if X produces more output per unit of input than Y does. However, the output is that which is economically desired (steel), plus the fall-out or by-products (sulphur oxides and ash) that are not recorded in production accounts. With high efficiency, the accumulation of by-product may result in the collapse of the production system itself. In order to sustain the system, production ought to be slow enough to allow for absorption, dissipation or neutralization of the undesired part of the output to a non-destructive level. Thus it appears that sustainability may be achieved only at the cost of efficiency. However, one may redefine efficiency, so that the two would be compatible. The new, and rational, definition must invoke the concept of maximizing use value and non-use value from each unit of resource with the minimum cost of input and the cost of impact on the environment. Thus, efficiency of a farming, forestry, or water harvesting system must be estimated in terms of the input costs (C) and the fallout costs (F). If the perceived benefit (B) exceeds these costs, that is, if B > (C + F), the system is efficient. In classical cost-benefit analyses, F is usually not counted, as discussed in Section 2.2. However, because any extraction for human economy has its mediate and immediate impact on the environment, the fallout cost is a direct function of resource harvest. Even if we assume that the net benefit is directly related to the amount of resource harvested (more resource extraction leading to more benefit – a conventional assumption of mainstream economics), the efficiency of the economy will depend on the rate of increase of the costs (C and F). If either C or F or both increase with extracted resource, efficiency will most likely decline. In the case of living resources (like a forest), the fallout cost is likely to increase exponentially with resource extraction. The reason is as follows: The destruction of a forest would entail much more loss than the additive loss of component trees, because the forest ecosystem has its ecological roles and functions that are more than the sum total of individual plants and animals living

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Technical Discussion 9

in the forest. This point is clear to biologists, but may need some elaboration to make economists visualize it. A tropical forest supports a multitude of species in its different niches, something which cannot be done by individual trees. Different physical components of the forest – rotting logs, tree holes, different layers of canopy, water holes, herbaceous undergrowth, leaf litter, and so on – comprise the motley micro-habitats that are occupied by different species associations, which contribute to the totality of the forest’s ecosystem functions and services. Even fragments of the forest provide less ecological services than does a large forest tract. Forest fragments in otherwise deforested areas may serve as sources for future tree populations, but seed dispersal may be limited. Moreover, tropical forest fragmentation kills the old growth trees (Laurance et al. 2000) that act as seed sources and habitat for different organisms. This problem is compounded, because seeds are less likely to germinate in forest fragments than in continuous forest (Bruna 1999). Finally, with the disappearance of different subsystems and habitats within the forest ecosystem, much of the value of as-yet unknown ecosystem functions (Loreau et al. 2001) will be lost forever. Thus, extraction of more trees will entail the additive loss of the value of individual trees, plus the loss of more and more ecological services of the forest. Hence, the fallout cost of forest destruction will far exceed the ensuing benefit from consumption of timber, and the economy will prove inefficient (see Technical Discussion 9).

Ecological Inefficiency of an Extractive Economy An economy is considered efficient if the perceived benefit (B) exceeds these costs, that is, if B > (C + F), where C is the visible cost of resource extraction and processing for manufacturing a commodity, and F is the (invisible) fallout cost of damages from resource extraction and manufacturing process. Let us assume here that C has a constant value, and F ≥ C (that is, the long-term, invisible environmental cost is never less than the extraction and manufacturing cost). To simplify the relationships, we introduce the variables bt = (Bt – Ct) and f = (Ft – Ct), so that the system remains efficient as long as bt > ft and bt > 0. The benefit bt is likely to be directly related to the amount of a finite resource R exploited. For simplicity’s sake, let us assume the relationship is linear, so that: bt = k R,

where k is a slope constant. This simply means that the more the extraction of a resource (like timber from a forest), the greater the economic benefit accrued to the firm or individual (and therefore, the greater the GNP figure). This assumption is

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what most economic analyses consider realistic. Conversely, the environmental cost of the depletion of biotic resources is likely to rise much faster. For example, removal of an assemblage of plants and animals from an ecosystem will entail the composite loss of all species, Assuming that each species had roughly the same environmental value, the additive environmental cost will linearly increase with incremental loss of species. In addition, the value of the lost services of the ecosystem will exceed the additive value of the component species. Thus, an increasing depletion of species from an ecosystem would imply loss of both ecological services of individual species and ecosystem functions of different species associations at a geometric rate. Also, the environmental debt is therefore likely to grow exponentially like compound interest. If we define F0 as the environmental cost of initial extraction (e.g. harvesting the first tree from a forest), this compounded rise in environmental debt may be conceived as: df/dR = F0 erR,

(eqn. 6.4)

where r is the imputed rate of growth of environmental cost over time. Integration of the equation yields: f = (F0/r) erR.

(eqn 6.5)

Benefit can in principle increase despite decline in efficiency; this is what happens in commercial industrial growth. The paper industry will grow with the extraction of more wood, with concomitant rise in environmental costs and risks, but the social benefits from more papers manufactured would also increase. However, under the conditions described above, efficiency begins to decline as f exceeds b after a certain point of resource extraction level, as shown in Figure 18. Sustainable harvest of resource can continue until the point where b – f = 0. Thereafter, resource harvest is no longer sustainable. With declining efficiency, long-term social benefits will also decline. Figure 18. Profiles of Benefit, Cost, and Efficiency of the Economy based on Natural Resource Extraction 400

2000

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Notwithstanding the limited scope of applicability to real life economy of natural resource use, this simple analysis reinstates what critiques of mainstream economic theory have been telling us about the inherent inefficiency of capitalist economy. The statistical conviction that at the current rate of consumption, the stock of fossil fuels may last for another 600 years (World Bank 1994), does not ensure sustainability of the economy so long as the cumulative environmental and social costs of pollution from the burning of coal and oil continue to be treated as ‘externalities.’ Once the effects of greenhouse gases are counted as ‘fallout costs,’ the fossil fuel-based economy turns out to be grossly inefficient, regardless of the fluctuations in oil price, rise in numbers of automobiles and improvement in drilling technology. An economy crucially dependent on fossil fuels – the non-renewable sources of energy – is necessarily unsustainable in the long run, unless new sources of energy that can be safely used are soon put to use. Apart from the benefit/cost ratio as discussed above, another definition of efficiency involves economic returns of resource uptake or use per unit effort or time spent foraging. This definition poses one of the conceptual difficulties in the standard economic theory to appreciate conservation strategy as an alternative to economic efficiency. Since optimality models (e.g. Stephens and Krebs 1986) indicate that optimal foraging strategies are more efficient than conservation strategies (short-term constraints for long-term sustainability of resources), it is assumed that either an individual is efficient in harvesting resources (i.e., maximizes return per unit of effort), or (s)he conserves resources for long-term sustainability. However, socio-cultural anthropological evidence shows that this assumption of mutual exclusivity of efficiency and conservation ignores the fact that […] in many areas of human endeavor economic efficiency is synonymous with sustained long-term production… Indeed, a strategy can be both environmentally friendly and economically rational, particularly where producers have more control over the resources they depend on than foragers. Under such conditions, conservation can be isomorphic with economic efficiency. (Ruttan and Borgerhoff Mulder 1999: 623)

That economic efficiency, defined as efficient uptake and use of resources, can indeed be isomorphic with resource conservation has been demonstrated by numerous instances of traditional, pre-industrial economies upholding ecological prudence. Conservation ethos in indigenous traditions has ensured resource availability across generations. These pre-industrial economies prove more efficient in terms of both environmental quality and inter-generational equity. ‘In the long run, we are all dead’ – says the economist, and hence long-term calculations hardly matter in growth considerations. However, long before we humans are all dead, the economy of growth itself will die, and we may not have

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enough resources left to survive. Even in the economist’s short-sighted vision, we are not going to perish in a half century, but that time horizon is enough for the growth economy to kill all our potential for any economically meaningful existence. If we are all short-sighted, can our economy grow indefinitely? Is sustainable growth possible even in principle?

6.4

Sustainable Development: A Panoply of Meanings

The concept of sustainable development was presented for the first time in the World Conservation Strategy (1980) in the context of defining conservation and its goal: […] the management of human use of the biosphere so that it may yield the greatest sustainable benefit to present generations while maintaining its potential to meet the needs and aspirations of future generations. Thus conservation is positive, embracing preservation, maintenance, sustainable utilization, restoration, and enhancement of the natural environment… (IUCN, UNEP & WWF 1980: Section 1.4)

The strategy further elaborated the ethos of conservation in clear anthropocentric terms, which has become the foundation stone of the sustainability concept: Conservation, like development, is for people; while development aims to achieve human goals largely through use of the biosphere, conservation aims to ensuring that such use can continue. Conservation’s concern for maintenance and sustainability is a rational response to the nature of living resources (renewability + destructibility) and also an ethical imperative, expressed in the belief that ‘we have not inherited the earth from our parents, we have borrowed it from our children.’ (IUCN, UNEP & WWF 1980: Section 1.6)

The first succinct articulation of the concept of sustainable development owes to the Brundtland Commission’s definition, which indicated that a major shift in the thinking about development had insidiously taken place over the past few decades: Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. (WCED 1987: 40)

This definition clearly drew upon the World Conservation Strategy’s urge to maintain the biosphere’s ‘potential to meet the needs and aspirations of future generations’. Operationally, the inter-generational equity consideration contained in the definition provides the concept of sustainability an easy handle: One simply needs to ask, ‘Will my children and grandchildren and later progeny be able to enjoy life at least as much as I have? Will they have at least the same range of life’s

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opportunities as I have?’ With the continuing trend of economic growth, the answer is patently negative, unless disparities in distribution of, and access to, resources and wealth – in national as well as international economies – are redressed. Nevertheless, the Brundtland Report also reflects the underlying standard view that sustained economic growth is necessary, at least in the poor countries, in order to reduce the existing inequitable distribution of the global wealth. The Report sought to locate the ‘limitations imposed by the present state of technology and social organization on environmental resources’ as the factors that constrain sustainable economic growth (WCED 1987: 8). This clearly ignores the more fundamental limits to growth – the ecological limits, which cannot be overcome by technological and political organizational ingenuity.6 While the fish catch per unit effort (CPU) has been dramatically enhanced by modern fishing technology, ‘the fish catch is limited not by fishing boats, but by the remaining population of fish in the sea’ (Daly 1995a: 50). The ultimate and absolute limit to sustained growth of CPU is the intrinsic rate of growth of fish population, which cannot be improved by further intensive fishing crafts and gear. It is indeed possible to enhance population growth of a fish species by hormonal inducement of early reproduction and high fecundity, but that growth of the target species population is likely to be achieved at the cost of natural populations of a plethora of other organisms in the aquatic system.7 Moreover, such systems are unsustainable, because they require constant external inputs to support the induced growth of the target species.

6.4.1 Weak Sustainability: Sustaining Industrial Growth Interpretations of sustainability are clearly polarized into two distinct epistemic categories. The school of interpretation that dominates discussions among economists of natural resources and environmental policy is what Pearce et al. (1993) calls ‘weak sustainability,’ and what Common and Perrings (1992) have termed ‘HartwickSolow sustainability’, in which economic growth is non-diminishing from generation to generation. In this interpretation, sustainability is a constraint on economic growth, because ‘any temporary decrease in welfare implies unsustainable development’ (Ayres et al. 2001: 157). This interpretation follows from Brundtland’s concept of sustainable development, which consists in ensuring present needs without compromising the needs of the future generations, and ‘that means disciplining our current consumption’ (Brundtland 1990: 171). This pattern of ‘disciplined development’ does not forbid economic growth, albeit it sanctions a slower rate of growth as a political principle predicated on an inter-generational responsibility. Brundtland has emphasized the quality of life criterion in development: ‘I do think it is possible

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to have economic growth, but at a lower and more steady rate; growth defined more in terms of quality of life than simply more and more material goods’ (Brundtland 1990: 172). This reorganized view of sustainable growth that includes qualitative growth is surely a departure from that reflected in her famous Report (WCED 1987), which emphasized on quantitative growth as an answer to economic inequalities and the environmental crisis. Despite her later view on sustainable growth, the belief that economic growth can be sustainable is dominant in the economic circle. The (original) Brundtland definition of sustainable development is predicated on the dismissal of ecological limits to growth, and hence contributes to the concept of weak sustainability. In this version of sustainability, growth is not inimical to the environment. Rather, growth is part of the solution to the environmental problem: growth would allow both the spreading of wealth and the undertaking of costly environmental management programmes. The degree of substitutability in relation to consumption of natural resources is crucially important in the discussion of sustainability, and distinguishes strong from weak views of sustainability. Consumption of any non-renewable natural resource by a generation of consumers (let’s say generation 0) reduces the stock of the resource R0, and this inexorably reduces the consumption possibilities of the next generation (generation 1). The only way to ensure that generation 1’s consumption does not decrease, the depleting non-renewable resource must be properly substituted by an increasing stock of man-made capital. Strong sustainability maintains that man-made capital can never substitute natural resources, and therefore sustainability is impossible unless resource depletion is completely stopped. In contrast, weak sustainability maintains that sustainability – and sustainable growth – is possible because resources are perfectly substitutable. The weak sustainability position is neo-classical economy’s attempt to address the environmental problem by incorporating environmental costs of production (internalizing some ‘externalities’) into the economic system. It considers market-based mechanisms as adequate for sustainable resource use, and more effective than bureaucratic command and control in protecting the environment (Beder 1993: 9). Following notations of Pearce (1994), we denote the marginal production of man-made capital as Fk and the marginal production of the resource as FR. Sustainability will be ensured if the marginal consumption of the first user generation (let’s say generation 0) must entail an extra investment in generation 0 in order to compensate for the forgone consumption opportunities of future generations: dC0 = d R0 [F0R – (F1R/ F1K)]

(eqn. 6.6)

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Paraphrasing Pearce (1994: 80), ‘sustainability is ensured if the change in consumption in period 0 equals the benefit from the use of the natural resource in 0 less the costs which equal the discounted value of the forgone future productivity of the resource.’ Now if only a tiny fraction of R is substitutable with manmade capital, then F1R >> F1K (strong sustainability criterion), and consequently, dC0 will be negative. If declining consumption implies unsustainability, any amount of depletion of non-renewable natural resources will lead to unsustainability. The ‘weak’ interpretation of sustainability underscores the obligation to continue growth of GNP, or more specifically, net national product (NNP), defined as GNP minus capital consumption. Thus, sustainability is subsumed under the neoclassical macroeconomic problem of maintaining a nation’s portfolio of capital at a constant level so as to facilitate the spread of wealth. In this view, GNP ‘includes natural capital, in principle, but it also allows for virtually unlimited substitution between human-made and natural capital’ (Ayres et al. 2001: 157). The profound commercial implication underpinning this substitutability argument is that no aspect of the environment is inviolate: substitution of the environmental goods with human-made goods will eventually render the damage to the environment inconsequential. The whole of the Amazonian rainforest can be removed ‘so long as the proceeds from this activity are reinvested to build up some other form of capital’ (Pearce et al. 1991: 1–2). A policy implication is that by instituting systems of incentives and disincentives, the market can prudently manage natural resources. Incentives such as tax relief for the ‘green’ producer, and disincentives such as subsidy cuts are assumed to redeem the value of the natural resources lost as a result of profligate resource use practices. Thus, according to this principle, taxes and levies on logging from a forest in excess of a stipulated quantity, or withdrawal of subsidies on agrochemicals and water, for example, are adequate to restore species populations exhausted and habitats expunged. Advocates of weak sustainability see ‘no need to change fundamentally what is meant by progress and economic development’ (Williams and Millington 2004: 101). Many proponents of weak sustainability advise that capitalist development must accommodate environmental concerns; they tend to advocate provision of better management agencies, better project appraisal using better EIA techniques, and economic incentives and disincentives like pollution taxes, while maintaining the overarching reliance on continuous industrial growth and resource exploitation. Weak sustainability models are a part of the ‘standard view,’ and may aptly be called ‘sustainable growth’ models, favoured by mainstream economists. These models show that economic growth begets improvement of the general living standard, supposed to be the measure of the quality of life. However, the tautology

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of this argument lies in the fact that both living standard and economic growth are defined with reference to each other: high calorie consumption and automobile use are indexes of both high living standard and GNP growth. More people owning cars surely indicates GNP growth, but also means more traffic congestion, more pollution, and less community life. Unless the quality of life is framed in, and confused with Western/ Northern living standard, basic needs of life (food, health, social security, freedom and happiness) are not necessarily contingent on high GNP. Despite considerably low GNP, Cuba occupies a much higher position in UNDP’s Human Development ranking than most Northern, industrially advanced nations. Indeed, it depends on how development is defined. If development is defined as a certain material standard of living based on the consumerism of centralized industrialization, Malaysia is indeed behind the United States, despite the fact that it was a British colony until the 1960s. But if development is defined as social civility and tolerance, then the United States, compared to Malaysia (a nation far younger than the United States), is a developing country. (Maser 1999: 182)

6.4.2 Strong Sustainability: Ecocentric Considerations In contrast, ‘strong sustainability’ focuses on the demands of development in order to reverse the process of depletion of natural resource stock (Williams and Millington 2004: 102). Advocates of strong sustainability advise changing the economic demands made on the earth by radically altering the view of ‘development,’ incorporating inter-generational equity of environmental goods and services in economy, and changing consumption patterns. Although there are various strands of strong sustainability position, the extreme strong end of the spectrum is composed of the Deep ecologists, who seek to replace the anthropocentric ethic of the current trend of development with a biocentric ethic. Just as there are inalienable human rights that need no justification, Deep ecologists argue that living nature has similar biotic rights to existence that need no justification in terms of its utility to humans (Eckersley 1992; Naess 1989). According to this view, sustainability is attainable only if every aspect of economy dependent on resource exhaustion is stopped, and every component of biodiversity conserved. This extremely ‘strong sustainability’ is unrealistic, however, chiefly because it assumes the possibility of satisfaction of all human social and economic needs without any type of natural resource use, including agriculture, forestry, fishery and even handicrafts using different components of biodiversity, that leads necessarily to some damage to the natural ecosystems. Because the very existence of human societies is crucially dependent on consumption of plants, animals and microbes, it is illogical to promulgate the idea of an economy of zero impact on the

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environment. Absolutely sustainable existence and growth of all natural resources in this ‘very strong sustainability’ sense would seem possible only after the extinction of humans from the biosphere. However, the notion of a softer version of ‘strong’ sustainability, as advocated by ecological economists, does not preclude any and all human economic activities, but restricts such activities within limits so that no species and no ecosystems become extinct. A softer version of strong sustainability requires that certain critical components of biodiversity, instead of every component of biodiversity, are always conserved. Beetles, dragonflies, bees, wasps and butterflies must be conserved, but mosquitoes may not be conserved. This version of strong sustainability prohibits squandering of the environmental assets that provide essential life support services or unique and irreplaceable services. ‘The ozone layer is an example of the first; the songbirds or coral reefs might be an example of the second’ (Ayres et al. 2001: 160). This version of sustainability demands that all the keystone species and ecosystems be protected from overharvest, commercial abuse and destruction. A related version that imposes a strong restraint on the weak sustainability criteria, is called by Endres and Radke (1999) ‘bounded weak sustainability’, which requires that a minimum amount of all key resource elements must be conserved. Sustainability in this version is conditioned by a utility function of the economy that ceases when an economic activity drives a species to a critical size (Xc), below which that species cannot survive (see Technical Discussion 10). This critical size of the stock of a living resource is called the minimum viable population. Thus, extraction of trees from a forest or fish from a lake must not exceed some biological upper limit, determined by the rate of renewal (in the case of renewable resources). This is similar to agro-ecosystems, where real output of crop per unit of natural resource input is narrowly bounded – cannot exceed some upper limit. When the resource is non-renewable, any positive rate of extraction will lead to depletion of the resource stock. The atmosphere, the ocean, and the landscape are examples of non-renewable resources, because even a small change in their composition would result in irreversible consequences to life on earth. Biodiversity is a non-renewable resource too, because once it is reduced through extinction of one or more species, it can never revert back to its original value. In contrast to the conventional assumption, a tropical old-growth forest is also a non-renewable resource, because removal of a large patch of vegetation from the forest would deplete the initial stock of the diverse ecosystem services, like carbon sequestration, recreation, regional water cycling, etc. In these cases, the only way to sustainability of resource consumption and utility is to maintain a positive stock forever.

Technical Discussion 10

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Minimum Viable Population The concept of the minimum viable population is as follows: Let the population size of a species at a given time t be Nt, the environmental carrying capacity, K, and the minimum (critical) size at which the population fails to grow, Nc > 0. The relationship between the population’s incremental growth g = N(t+1) – N(t) and the population size is given by g = 0 if N = Nc or N = 0 or N = K, g < 0 if N < Nc, or N > K, and g > 0 otherwise. This type of growth may be described by the simple difference equation: Nt+1 = Nt [1 + r {1 – (Nt - Nc)/K}] – Nc

(eqn. 6.7) N where r > 0 is the intrinsic rate of growth of N. Defining X = , this can be K rewritten as Xt+1 = Xt [1 + r (1 – Xt + Xc)] – Xc

(eqn. 6.8)

The equation describes Allee-type growth, in which g = 0 if X = 0, X = Xc or X = 1, g < 0 if X < Xc, or X > 1, and g > 0 if X > Xc A differential equation that reflects these conditions is dX/dt = r[(Xt – Xc) + | Xt – Xc |(1 – 2 Xt)]

(eqn. 6.9)

which is illustrated in Figure 19. The critical size of the resource stock Xc may also be likened to the intrinsic value of any natural resource, whose depletion would lead to the disappearance of the resource. Figure 19. Growth of a Species Population X(t) with r = 1.1 and Xc = 0.2, Below Which It Fails to Survive 0.36

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Technical Discussion 11

According to this view of sustainability, if a finite biotic resource consists of an economically important species population, the economic aspect of the biotic resource may be established, following Endres and Radke (1999), by the utility of the resource: a definite amount of social welfare ensues from the use of the resource stock. The utility of a resource is zero if the stock dwindles below a minimum viable size. Utility is generally assumed to be directly proportional to consumption, so a falling level of consumption from one generation to the next is expected to imply unsustainability. However, the utility may also become zero if a resource is overconsumed (regardless of the stock) beyond the consumer’s inherent physiological limits (see Technical Discussion 11). Thus, when a harvesting or consumption pattern leads to depletion of a renewable resource, or when a pathological degree of overconsumption leads to the

Resource Utility and Social Welfare Function In continuation with the Technical Discussion 10, let us assume that a resource population Xt is likely to replenish itself above a critical level Xc. Following Endres and Radke (1999), the utility U of the resource may be described as: U = w (Ct , Xt)

(eqn. 6.10)

where w is a time-invariant social welfare function, and Ct is aggregate consumption of products and services derived from X used at time t. If Ct = 0 and/or Xt = 0, then w(Ct , Xt) = 0. The latter possibility (Xt = 0) results when the resource stock is exhausted (as a result of h > r: see eqn. 2.3 in Technical Discussion 1). The former possibility (Ct = 0) occurs when harvesting of the resource pushes the available stock below the critical level (Xt ≤ Xc), or when access to the resource is closed, by some cultural or legal sanction, for example. Thus, any human activity that pushes Xt below Xc leads to zero social welfare, and consequently, zero economic benefit. Conversely, U>0

for all t

as long as Xt > Xc and Xt < 1 (that is, the resource amount harvested does not exceed the environmental carrying capacity). Nevertheless, an endless amount of a given resource does not warrant endless quantity of social welfare to be obtained from consumption of the resource. Consumption of a resource has welfare function, but endless consumption need not lead to boundless welfare. A dozen dishes of tasty food served on the table certainly has greater utility in terms of both nutrition and personal satisfaction than a scanty meal can have, but consumption of good food beyond a quantitative limit need not lead to greater health, comfort or satisfaction of the

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consumer. Rather, in extreme cases it may even lead to loss of some welfare: overconsumption of dietary protein and lipid for a long period causes a set of physical incapacities and physiological disorders that nullify benefits of a normal diet. Therefore, it is logical to think of a fraction of utility L ≥ 0 that may be lost owing to some physiological, ecological or social dysfunction caused by consumption above a certain threshold level. It can be shown that beyond a certain upper limit of consumption, marginal utility with respect & consumption will become negative. The relation between utility U and C, for the same level of availability of a resource is described in Figure 20. The level of consumption at which utility begins to decline is designated as Ce > 0. Increase in excess consumption beyond Ce eventually declines toward a point Cp, at which overconsumption becomes pathological in the sense of causing some disorders both at personal and social levels. The level of consumption at Ce may be called the takeoff phase of overconsumption. The utility takes a value of C (1 – L), where L = C eC|C – Ce) is the amount of utility that is lost due to overconsumption. The progressive decline in utility continues until overconsumption reaches a ‘pathological’ point Cp, where U becomes zero. Utility for higher levels of consumption beyond Cp is negative (Figure 20). Omitting the subscript t for brevity, the relationship may formally be put as: U > 0 if C > 0 Û < 0 if C > Ce U < 0 if C > Cp.

Figure 20. An Illustrative Relationship of the Function of Utility of a Resource with Its Consumption Level (expressed as fraction of all available resources) 0.3

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continued... where Û is the first derivative of U with respect to C. The Cp and Ce for different resources are different, depending on the differential physiological, ecological and social impacts of the resource items, regardless of their economic value. Thus, the Cp for tobacco is much greater than that for uranium. The notion of the fraction of lost utility L would help understand how the utility function of a resource could become negative. Consumption of tobacco gives some pleasure to habitual smokers, and to them tobacco has a utility. But this utility is always offset by a risk of cancer that is equivalent to the loss of some portion of the smoker’s welfare. Once the level of nicotine triggers the cellular oncogenic process in the smokers’ body, she contracts cancer, which negates all the utility of tobacco enjoyed by the individual, so that: L ≥ 1. Thus, at least for the individual, the aggregate utility of tobacco becomes zero or even negative, even though she may still enjoy the pleasure of smoking. The marginal utility function with respect to consumption then becomes negative.

loss of its utility, sustainability, as defined in terms of a sustained level of social welfare, is lost. The linkage of utility function to the minimum viable population size embodies a compromise between strong and weak versions of sustainability criteria: Xt is assumed to be partly substitutable with human resources, as long as Xt > Xc. Below the level of Xc, the species is irredeemably lost, and is unsubstitutable. Under these assumptions, the ‘bounded weak sustainability’ criterion includes the notions of weak sustainability and strong sustainability as special cases: Interpreting, at time t, for each component of natural wealth the actual stock level as critical would end in strong sustainability. Denying the existence of a critical stock level for any component of natural wealth would end in weak sustainability. (Endres and Radke 1999: 8)

It is now easy to define development as qualitative growth – continuous improvement of the quality of everyone’s life while maintaining all the services of the environment. This implies a norm of keeping economic activities within the local carrying capacity of the environment. In practical terms, that means substitution of mega dams with a series of ‘mini-hydel’ plants that do not disrupt the hydrobiological features of rivers; that means abolition of CFCs and HCFCs that destroy the ozone layer; that means replacement of chemical agriculture with biological farming techniques, abandoning nuclear power projects, developing alternatives to non-biodegradable plastics, and adopting ecological architectural principles in urban development policy. This notion of sustainable development is the field of convergence of a zero-growth economy based on zero rates of discount

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for vital resources (see below: eqn. 6.11), improving the quality of everyone’s life, equitable distribution of resources and benefits, and maintenance and fostering of cultural diversity. This requirement may be abstracted in and subsumed under Norton’s (1992: 106) description of sustainable development as: […] a relationship between dynamic human economic systems and larger, dynamic, but normally slower-changing ecological systems, such that (a) human life can continue indefinitely; (b) human individuals can flourish; (c) human cultures can develop; but in which (d) effects of human activities remain within bounds so as not to destroy the health/integrity of the environmental context of human activities.

Sustainable development is thus a comprehensive programme, based on a philosophy of ecological interconnectedness of beings, demanding action involving sustainable modes of production, equitable distribution of goods and services, and environmentally benign modes of consumption. Sustainable modes of production include sustainable agriculture, forestry and fishery that are likely to maintain local ecological integrity, and small-scale technology oriented to environmentally sound production of goods and commodities. Sustainable consumption includes a sustainable lifestyle oriented to resource consumption at the subsistence level, recycling of materials, and environmentally safe disposal of wastes. Sustainable development must also improve the quality of life of individuals, and ensure equity within and across generations. Because continuation of economic growth necessarily entails depletion of the stock of natural capital, and because industrial capitalism breeds social inequity, a steady-state or zero-growth economy is required to achieve true sustainability, where a constant stock of resources is maintained by keeping both consumption and maintenance throughput at a low level. Thus, sustainable development is characterized by a responsible resource use and distribution mode, which ensures survival of all organisms and fulfilment of the needs of future generations of people of the world. Sustainable economic development, as opposed to sustainable economic growth, is ‘development without growth beyond environmental carrying capacity, where development means qualitative improvement and growth means increase’ (Daly 1996: 9). In this interpretation of sustainability, a thread of the classical, pre-capitalist meaning of development as advancement or improvement is retained, while the conventional concept of economic development is refurbished by adding to it ecological, anthropological and ethical dimensions. This radical, if noiseless, displacement of the concept of development, from one-dimensional, short-term individual profit to multi-dimensional, long-term social welfare, construes a sort of paradigm shift. This new style of thinking changed the fundamental meaning

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of development by extricating it from the old matrix of axiomatic assumptions of classical and neo-classical economics; it introduced new pieces of information from a new discipline of the natural world, ecology, which seems to have enabled the new economics of natural resource use to resolve at least some of the challenges that the old paradigm was unable to meet. Full credit for this shift in the semantics of development must go to the global ecology movements over the past few decades. In this new concept of sustainable development, economic, ecological and human capitals are all ‘independently maintained in real physical/ biological terms’ (Ayres et al. 2001: 160), on the principal premise that natural resources are irreplaceable by any manufactured or human capital and that key ecological events are irreversible. The concept of sustainability requires recognition of the intrinsic value and unsubstitutability of the components of biodiversity – species, ecosystems, landscapes – which must be conserved in order for all humans of the present and future generations to equitably share the fruits of civilization. This recognition implies that not everything that human beings consider valuable can be made equivalent to a finite sum of money. As Jaeger (1994: 233) asserts, There are things which money cannot buy, and there are beings which money should not be able to buy. In both cases, one may ask what economic arrangements would assign an infinite price to these things. In many cases, there is a straightforward answer: A normal rate of interest of zero would assign an infinite price to any source of permanent income.

To understand how a zero rate of interest leads to infinite value of an environmental good, let’s consider a resource like a river which can be expected to yield a constant rent (in terms of, say, annual fish catch) over an indefinite amount of time in future. The price (p) of this permanent stock – as a source of permanent income – is equal to the pecuniary benefit or rent (r) – however small – discounted by a normal rate of interest (d): P = r/ d

(eqn. 6.11)

As the normal rate of interest decreases, the stock’s price increases. At d = 0, the price of any resource stock of permanent income becomes infinite. Consequently, trade in, and replacement of, such stock will cease, ‘because at a zero rate of interest no finite payment can be equivalent to a source of permanent income’ (Jaeger 1994: 233). Nobody can own or buy the right to pollute or deplete the resource stock. The consequence of zero rates of profit and of interest is an economy of zero quantitative growth and of enhanced qualitative growth toward long-term social equity and environmental integrity, which is the goal of sustainability.

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The sustainability concept that I advocate here is a double helix of environmental integrity and inter-generational social and environmental equity, both of which are possible in a zero-growth economy. It can be shown that zero-growth economy will result in better environmental integrity because with zero rates of profit and interest, there will be no further incentive to invest in technology to accelerate depletion of natural resources. Zero rate of profit may not need stopping of all business enterprises; rather, enterprises will strive to maintain the average rate of profit, which is zero, and avoid negative rates of profit. New enterprises may continue to come up, with new investments to improve the quality of life by increasing the range of services and the stock of human and man-made capital, rather than enhancing the profit of the firm. Heal (2003) considers that sustainability is not a separate goal from optimality. He examines different feasible paths of resource use that yield the highest value of the long-term utility level. His approach involves incorporating the resource stock itself as a source of utility (see Technical Discussion 12). In his analysis, a number of alternative optimal paths of resource use are possible, and all these paths ‘involve maintaining at least a part of the initial resource stock intact forever’ (Heal 2003: 345). For renewable resources, the optimal resource use policy must ensure that consumption, stock and utility all grow monotonically over time, and that consumption level must not exceed the rate of renewal of the resource stock. In the non-renewable context, zero consumption and complete conservation of the resource stock is optimal, regardless of the size of the initial stock. The vision of sustainable development is one of a world that repudiates the current mode of development that promotes consumerism and deprives other humans (including those yet unborn) as well as other denizens of the earth of the potential uses and benefits of the planet’s resources. A sustainable world economy is possible in […] a culture of sufficiency and frugality where quality is deemed more important than quantity of consumption. … If nothing else, this vision entails a reversal of the social trend of the last two hundred years. It would involve a deliberate dampening of growth and resource consumption before the planet becomes exhausted and polluted. (Harper 2001: 285)

This vision of sustainability is, of course, often baffling in a world that has been brooded in developmentality and is accustomed to the mainstream precepts and practices of development. While little dispute remains over the tangible spheres of production and consumption, based on principles of natural science, much of the continuing debate swirls around the measurements of the ‘quality of life’ and equity – concepts of social sciences, which are more

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Maintaining Resource Stock for Undiminishing Future Welfare Heal (2003) treats the utility function as being ‘additively separable’, consisting of a part of the resource that is extracted, and a part that derives from the stock of the resource. Using the notations used in Technical Discussion 10 and 11, U = w(Ct, Xt) = w1(Ct) + w2(Xt)

(eqn. 6.12)

where Xt > Xc and w1 and w2 are the positive social welfare functions of the consumption of products derived from the resource Xt, and that of the resource itself, respectively. This implies that any positive consumption level will deplete the resource stock, and therefore result in a reduction in the welfare function of the stock. For a non-renewable resource stock, progressive depletion of the stock will result in progressive decline in the welfare function of the resource for future generations. Thus, any rate of depletion of the resource from its initial stock (X0) is bound to result in generational inequity in welfare. Formally put, to find the highest utility level that can be sustained indefinitely for generations is to maximize w(Ct, Xt), where Ct = 0 and Xt > Xc, ‘and the solution is clearly to preserve the entire stock and never consume anything’ (Heal 2003: 338). This posits the extremely strong sustainability proposition (see above), and is true for critical natural resources like the ozone layer. To understand the dynamics of the welfare of renewable stock, we may add the welfare function of the remaining stock of resource after some amount (Xt) has been extracted. A renewable stock, say, groundwater extracted from aquifers, yields welfare in agriculture, so that the benefit to the economy is increased. When the resource stock is renewable, consumption, stock and utility will increase monotonically over time, provided that w2(Xt) < r, where r is the rate of regeneration, or intrinsic rate of growth of the resource (Heal 2003). In other words, a sustainable harvest of the stock is possible, as long as the rate of harvest does not exceed the rate of renewal of the stock (see Technical Discussion 1). However, an escalating welfare function of the resource works in the current economy as an incentive to deplete the resource as fast as possible. The rate of harvest exceeds the rate of replenishment, and the stock is rapidly depleted. Excessive withdrawal of groundwater, for instance, leads to progressive decline of the water table. Every year, deeper and deeper layers must be pumped to maintain the same welfare level, and (because water is not substitutable in agriculture) future generations of consumers will have to pay higher and higher costs to obtain the same amount of welfare from the remnant water stock. Generally speaking, the greater the welfare function of a renewable but finite resource for the current generations, the wider the welfare inequity between generations. It follows that in other to maintain equal welfare levels between generation, the welfare function of the extracted or consumed amount of the resource must be equal to, or more than, that of the amount of resource that remains to be consumed by future generations: r > w2 (Xt) ≥ w2 (X0 – Xt)

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Thus, if generation 1 is benefited by the welfare of a harvested quantity of the resource (Xt), then all subsequent generations will have less and less welfare. This will violate the definition of sustainability (undiminished welfare for all future generations). In order to maintain the same level of welfare from a non-renewable (and unsubstitutable) resource stock, all consumption levels must eventually become zero in the long run, and utility become a function of the remaining resource stock alone. However, it is likely and feasible that in some cases, w2(X0 – Xt) is complementary to w2(Xt), so that any reduction in one is offset by a corresponding increase in the other, and the sum total U remains undiminished. Eqn. 6.12 may thus be rewritten as U = w(Ct, Xt) = w1(Ct) + w2(Xt) + w2(X0 – Xt)

(eqn. 6.13)

Examples of this ‘inclusive utility’ (that includes aggregate utility across generations) of natural resources are not hard to find. A part of the stock of atmospheric oxygen is ‘consumed’ for respiration, and this vital welfare function of the consumption of oxygen for any generation of humans is at least as important as the welfare function of the unbreathed oxygen for all future generations – for no future generations will be born if the present generation cannot survive. The same can be said of the stock of all food resources that must be consumed for survival. Thus the welfare from the current consumption of a vital resource is no less than the future welfare of that portion of the resource as well as that of the quantity of the resource remaining. For all such vital resources, w1(Ct) ≥ w2(Xt), or, w1(Ct) = w2(Xt) + m1,

(eqn. 6.15a)

where m1 ≥ 0 is the amount of the forgone current welfare of the resource consumed. Furthermore, for a vital resource that the current generation must consume for future generations to come into being, w1(Ct) ≥ w2(X0 – Xt)

(eqn. 6.15b)

Equations 6.15a & b suggest that generational equity in welfare from the resource should prevail when w2(Xt) + m2 = w2(X0 – Xt),

(eqn. 6.16)

where m2 ≥ 0 is the future forgone welfare of the unutilized resource stock. Replacing the terms in eqn. 6.13, U = [w2(Xt) + m1] + w2(Xt) + [w2(Xt) + m2] = 3 w2(Xt) + m1 + m2

(eqn. 6.17) continued...

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continued... If there is no forgone welfare of the resource (mi = 0), either at present or in future, the minimum level of U that can be undiminishing over generations is approximated by U = 3 w2(Xt)

(eqn. 6.18)

But it can be shown that even if m2 may become zero, m1 must be abovezero to ensure inter-generational equity of welfare. From Technical Discussions 9 and 10 it is obvious that U can remain undiminishing only until (X0 – Xt) > XC. Equation 6.16 may thus be rewritten as: w2 (XC + q) = w2 (Xt) + m1, or, w2 (XC) + w2 (q) = w2 (Xt) + m1,

(eqn. 6.19)

where q is the residual amount of the resource above the critical level of renewability. But because w2 (Xc) = 0 (see Technical Discussions 10), w2 (q) – w2 (Xt) = m1.

(eqn. 6.20)

Maintaining an undiminishing level of welfare over an indefinite number of generations requires that a residual amount of the resource must be left unutilized by the present generation, whose total future welfare would exceed the future welfare from the extracted portion of the resource (Xt). In other words, w2 (q) > w2(Xt) for all t. From eqn. 6.20, it implies that m1 > 0, and therefore, (m1 + m2) > 0. It follows that Xt must have an upper limit of utility, and Ct must be kept in check below some upper limit in order for welfare to remain unreduced. Therefore, some positive amount of current utility of Xt must be forgone in order to maintain an undiminishing level of welfare across generations. The quantity of this forgone present utility may be approximated by the factor (m1 + m2), which must be above-zero.

subjective and difficult to quantify. I take the liberty of choosing not to engage in a discussion of these debates, as excellent reviews and overviews of them are available in current literature (e.g., Glasbergen and Blowers 1995; Harper 2001; Köhn et al. 1999; Maser 1999; Redclift 2000). In subsequent sections, I shall largely elaborate sustainable modes of production, especially in the fields of agricultural production, and how these have the potential of influencing national policies.

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Empirical Ground for Sustainability: Sustainable Agriculture

Sustainable agriculture is particularly important for conserving the local resource base to support the poor’s livelihoods, which industrialization of agriculture has jeopardized by driving ecology out of the input-output equation. The explicitly commercial orientation of the dominant resource exploitation mode has resulted in decimation of public health as well as the environment. Industrialized farming system has reduced the common property resources – the land and water – into open access resources; individual farmers benefit from exploiting the resources, while the costs are borne by society. The reckless use of toxic agrochemicals and exhaustive withdrawal of groundwater for industrialized farming is a prominent example of sacrificing the community’s long-term interests for promoting individual profits. Sustainable agriculture seeks to reverse this trend and protect the resource base and the interests of the present and future generations. With chemicalization of agriculture, a growing concern among ecologists and environmental activists for food safety and the health effects of food additives and chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides gave rise to the ‘alternative agriculture’ movement. Following the publication of The Silent Spring, the harmful effects of synthetic pesticides became clear to the Western consumers as well as to producers. Public health issues in industrialized countries have played a large role in reducing chemical use in agriculture. Similarly, the growing evidence of build-up of resistance in pest organisms to all pesticides prompted adoption of the integrated pest management (IPM) strategy in a majority of countries. IPM involves a large diversity of techniques for stimulation of growth and reproduction of natural predators of crops pests, cultivation of pest-deterring plants grown between rows of the major crop, breeding and release of parasitoids that kill pest insects, use of different types of repellants and/or traps for pests, and natural biodegradable pesticides and fungicides. Alongside, the concern for biodiversity conservation and maintaining ecological functions also drew attention of ecologists to the issue of sustainability in agriculture. Individual farmers and organizations had developed various models of organic farming systems, drawn essentially on different traditional farming techniques of indigenous cultures. These models, most of them site-specific, are implemented in different parts of the world under the rubrics of ‘organic,’ ‘biodynamic,’ ‘biological’ and ‘ecological’ agriculture. Zero-chemical, non-industrial agriculture is sustainable not only because it can produce crops for an indefinitely long period of time, but also because it has the potential to be self-supportive, foster equity of benefits, and provide acceptable livelihood means to the poor.

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Sustainability of local food production can lead to greater autonomy for a community. In a world where inequality is perpetuated through institutionalizing market-dependence, models of sustainable agriculture that ensures the provision of the material basis for an adequate standard of living are an important part of any programme for local and regional sustainability. Sustainable agriculture further ensures a nutritional food security for producers and extricates them from the complex matrix of market-dependence. In the 1970s, the notion of ‘regenerative agriculture’ was promoted by Robert Roadale to address the problems of soil degradation and risks to humans from the use of agrochemicals. The organic farming and natural food movement developed in response to the post-World War II perception of ecological harm when agriculture was turning to chemical fertilizers and pesticides. By the 1970s the movement had attracted a diverse following. Organic gardeners and farmers were ‘environmentalists’ before the emergence of the more encompassing environmental movement in the 1970s. Fundamental to the organic agriculture movement’s philosophy is the belief that human health depends on food grown on healthy soil – soil alive with humus, the partly decomposed residue of organic matter. Feeding the soil – rather than feeding the plants ‘intravenously’ with synthetic fertilizers, as is the practice in agribusiness – is, according to this view, the way to support the health of the soil. The organic food and agriculture movement is gaining strength in spite of the monumental opposition from the agrochemical industry, as farmers are increasingly becoming aware that industrialized farming entails an ever-increasing production cost and rapidly declining soil fertility, crop yield and livelihood security. The US EPA, which has served as the template for environmental regulations in many countries, also used to have little respect for ideas associated with anything ‘organic’. Indeed, the USDA and EPA regarded the practice of composting, for example, as being unscientific – until, that is, the late 1980s when, ‘soon after the signing of the consent decree stopping ocean dumping of sludge, “land application” of sewage sludge came into its own’ (Rockefeller 1998:14). The history of success of biological control of pests, alongside the failure of synthetic pesticides, and the unrelenting ability of insects to develop heritable resistance to pesticidal chemicals led to the concept of IPM as a significant component of environment-friendly agriculture that is likely to be economically and ecologically sustainable. Traditional crop breeding practices were also highlighted as an effective tool for improving crop yield. The discourse of sustainable development thus subsumed the question of agricultural development that would flourish outside the domain of industrialized and internationalized agriculture, and eliminate the use of synthetic agrochemicals.

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As a guideline to developing strategies of sustainable agriculture, Hardwood (1990: 4) provided a workable frame of definition to be filled with appropriate detail by country and by farm community: […] an agriculture that can evolve indefinitely toward greater human utility, greater efficiency of resource use, and a balance with the environment that is favorable both to humans and to most other species.

However, this definition is too abstract for a guideline for action, and is open to misinterpretation. For example, invention and application of herbicides and herbicide-tolerant genetically modified crops may be shown to ‘evolve indefinitely toward greater human utility’, while ‘balance with the environment’ is a concept that is difficult to empirically prove or disprove. More practical definitions of sustainable agriculture are, however, available. Since environmental degradation is linked to the current practices of mainstream agricultural development, ostensibly characterized by the use of hazardous agrochemicals, such definitions of sustainable agriculture tend to emphasize environmentally clean practices. The US National Research Council, for instance, considers one or more of the following characteristics as essential to sustainable agriculture: 1.

Diversification rather than continuous planting of fields to single or only a few annual crops;

2.

Biological pest control and other innovative methods to reduce pesticide use;

3.

Disease prevention in livestock rather than routine use of subtherapeutic doses of antibiotics; and

4.

Genetic improvements in crops to resist pests, diseases, and drought and to use nutrients more efficiently NRC (1989).

Sustainable agriculture encompasses, but is not limited to, farming systems known as biological, ecologically clean, low-input, organic, and alternative. While the ecological component is of major concern, the question of economic viability is often relatively understated. It is intuitively clear that if a farming practice is not profitable, it is not sustainable. The Iowa’s Groundwater Protection Act of 1987 also considers the social component, in addition to the economic concern. It describes sustainable agriculture as ‘the appropriate use of crop and livestock systems and agricultural inputs supporting those activities which maintain economic and social viability while preserving the high productivity and quality of Iowa’s land’ (Iowa General

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Assembly 1987). The notion of ‘social viability’ is presumed to address the issue of equitable distribution of benefits among the members of the farm community. Moreover, in line with the notion of development, sustainable agricultural development would imply improving the quality of life of farmers, farm families and farm communities. As defined by the American Society of Agronomy (1988) and adopted by the US Congress, sustainable agriculture is […] an integrated system of plant and animal production practices having a sitespecific application that will, over the long term: 1. satisfy human food and fiber needs; 2. enhance environmental quality and the natural resource base upon which the agricultural economy depends; 3. make the most efficient use of non-renewable resources and on-farm resources and integrate, where appropriate, natural biological cycles and controls; 4. sustain the economic viability of farm operations; and 5. enhance the quality of life for farmers and society as a whole.

I shall use this definition in our subsequent discussion. The general objectives of sustainable agricultural practices – to be economically viable, to meet human needs for food, to be environmentally positive, and to be concerned with quality of life – can be achieved in a number of different ways. Sustainable agriculture is not linked to any particular technological practice. Nor is sustainable agriculture the exclusive domain of organic farming. Rather, sustainable agriculture is thought of in terms of its adaptability and flexibility over time to respond to the demands for subsistence, its demands on natural resources for production, and its ability to protect the soil and the resources. This goal requires an efficient blend of local knowledge and small technology in a manner conducive to sustainability.

6.5.1 Models of Sustainable Agriculture Models of ecological agriculture operate on the principle of minimum perturbation to the farm ecosystem and make the utmost use of biodiversity in farm management. Hoe cultivation, no-till agriculture, use of green manure, animal compost, legume cover crops, mulching, mixed cropping, and employing natural products to control pests and diseases – are different types of ecological agriculture that ensure sustainability. In the farming system commonly called ‘organic’ farming, the inputs constitute organic matter for manure. The nutrient chemicals necessary for crop growth are derived from bacterial decomposition of organic manure (dead vegetable matter, and animal waste) and/or nitrogen-fixing cover

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crop cultivated in the field. In organic farming, pest populations are kept under control with recourse to biological control methods, instead of chemical pesticides. In addition, crop rotation, agroforestry and multiple cropping are needed to maintain a high biological diversity and complexity, which are believed to result in a higher resilience to the farm ecosystem than simpler agro-ecosystems with poor biodiversity. Sustainable agriculture hinges on the availability of an appropriate choice of crop diversity suited to local soil and climatic conditions, and also to the gustatory cultures of the community. Farmer-selected crop land races are thus an essential component – the ‘hardware’ of sustainable agriculture. Another equally important component is the local knowledge – the ‘software’ – regarding agronomic properties of the crops and the range of their end uses, ecological relationships of the crop species with other plants and animals, and the time-tested techniques and methods of farming. The traditional agricultural knowledge base is location and culture specific. The diverse items of traditional agro-ecological knowledge and information have been perfected by farmer experiments and innovations, and are ensconced in the diverse systems of farming. This knowledge system is dynamic and heuristic, involving constant modifications in both materials and methods. It is therefore often difficult to discuss the ‘hardware’ and the ‘software’ in isolation from each other. While folk crop genetic materials constitute tangible materials, they also embody a vast body of traditional knowledge regarding the agronomic properties and cultural uses, as well as the techniques of selecting and breeding the specific stable varietal lines. Similarly, knowledge pertaining to crop pest control involves the knowledge of relevant pest-control properties of diverse materials that are locally available, and also the cropping system. Cropping system variability in different locales has in turn facilitated anthropogenic selection of diverse folk crop varieties. I shall describe these materials, methods and systems of sustainable agriculture without any distinctive classificatory rubrics.

A. Farmer breeding of crop varieties The Agricultural Revolution, some 10,000 years ago, engendered a rapid proliferation of biological diversity. In Erna Bennett’s words, The patchwork of cultivation sown by man unleashed an explosion of hybridization and a flood of evolution that found expression in literally inestimable numbers of new races of cultivated plants and their relatives… Its products, the evolutionary consequences of a unique genetic explosion are the principal component of our genetic resources today. (Bennett 1978: 144)

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The farmer landraces of Indian rice (Oryza sativa var. indica) numbered over 50,000; Andean potatoes had 12,000 varieties; and the number of Meso-American corn is estimated at 30,000. The number of folk varieties (also called landraces) of cultivated rice (Oryza sativa) is estimated at about 140,000; 3,800 varieties of Andean potatoes have been recorded; and the number of Meso-American maize varieties is estimated at over 20,000 (Bioversity International 2006; Heal et al., 2004; Jackson, 1995). Several other crops like wheat, millets, yams, gourds, beans, and fruit crops like mango and apple have thousands of folk varieties, cultivated by indigenous farmers. This explosion of genetic diversity was made possible by indigenous farmer breeders through selection and breeding of chosen varieties over millennia, based on combinations of different agromorphological traits of the early crop varieties that were best adapted to the local environmental conditions (Cleveland and Murray 1997; Cleveland and Soleri 2002; Deb 2000, 2005). The ancient agronomic practice of selective breeding techniques over millennia is still continued by generations of indigenous farmers. Thus, characteristics like drought-tolerance, flood-tolerance, salinity-resistance, pest-resistance and disease-resistance are all found in farmer landraces. Most of these characteristics of the farmer landraces are either not found or are not stable in the modern high-yielding varieties, because (a) they are developed under optimal laboratory conditions unlikely to prevail in the farm, and (b) the modern varieties have too narrow a genetic base to adapt to marginal environments. Farmer landraces are found to survive different ranges of temperature, day-length rains, drought and biotic pressures from pests and pathogens. Biotic pressure may also include crop loss by birds, bats and ungulates, and several crop landraces are selected on characteristics that reduce such predation. For instance, certain rice landraces with typically erect and strong flag leaf or long awns are grown in western districts of Bengal to reduce avian or mammalian predators, respectively. Combinations of different crop landraces in traditional farming practices are known to provide insurance against crop losses due to environmental stochasticity. In contrast, monocultures are highly susceptible to sudden environmental perturbations, resulting in disasters like the Irish potato famine of 1848. Indigenous farmers also traditionally select several crop phenotypes which are important to the local cultural practices. Colour of seed or kernel, cooking time, taste and aroma are the morphological traits that are subjected to selection based on food cultures. In addition, different landraces are grown because they are ritually used in certain local socio-religious ceremonies. These landraces are often characterized by certain distinctive traits not found in any modern varieties. Mean yield of folk crop varieties is affected relatively less by genotype-by-year interactions than are modern varieties, because genetic variability of folk varieties

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Table 6.1. Characteristics of Rice Landraces Desired by Indigenous Farmers in the Philippines and West Bengal, India Farmers’ Choice (%)* Crop Characteristics Good taste Aroma Late maturing Tall stature High yield Expands when cooked White grain Flood tolerance Drought tolerance Low input level required

Philippines§ 100 100 54 48 36 18 12 9 NA 9

West Bengal Caste Hindu 100 98 21 43 86 20 56 12 88 67

Santal 100 74 47 89 69 48 22 8 92 98

Notes: * in rounded-up figures. § from S. Fujisaka (1999: 63). NA = data not available

provides some ‘built-in insurance against hazards’ (Harlan 1992: 148). Horizontal resistance of folk crop varieties to pests and pathogens, based on genetic diversity, is also higher than modern varieties (Cleveland and Soleri 2002). Due to their resistance to pests and pathogens and also their capacity to withstand marginal climatic and soil conditions, folk crop varieties have a much greater yield stability than any modern ‘high-yied varieties’ (HYVs.) Because the folk varieties are specifically adapted to the marginal environmental conditions, many of them may have lower mean yields in optimal environments than HYVs, but in marginal environments, they often have higher average yields than HYVs (Cleveland et al. 1994, 2000; Deb, 2005). Farmer-selected folk crop varieties are often characterized by a range of agromorphological traits that match different practical needs of the farmers in local environments. In southern Bengal, farmers grow a few submergence-tolerant folk rice varieties in lowland farms. In low-rainfall districts, upland farms with poor irrigation facilities are sown to drought-tolerant landraces. Fragrance, taste and grain enlargement upon cooking are properties desired by local food cultures. However, such preferences vary with socio-economic determinants like levels of economic position, scope of luxury consumption, and even religious beliefs. Table 6.1 shows the characteristics of rice cultivars preferred by indigenous farmers in Tarlac district, the Philippines and in Bankura district, West Bengal. In my sample of 620 dryland farmers, 89 percent of tribal farmers prefer rice cultivars with long straw which they use for thatching their mud houses, whereas more wealthy

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Hindu farmers are not particularly interested in long straw because they live under tin roofs or in concrete houses. Grain expansion upon cooking is a characteristic that is favoured by a smaller number of farmers with a taste for fine grains, a luxury which the marginal farmer households cannot afford; they prefer the coarse grain rice that expands, because they feel these cultivars ‘fill their belly’ better than the elite fine-grain or aromatic cultivars (Deb, unpublished data). In contrast, all Philippino farmers prefer the aromatic cultivars, and only 18 percent would opt for bold grain rice that considerably expands on cooking (Fujisaka 1999). Farmers in southwestern districts of West Bengal do not seem to choose floodtolerant cultivars because seasonal inundation of farms is a rare experience in the rainfed farms in the area; instead, they prefer to choose drought-tolerant cultivars. Early maturation in rice is preferred by farmers who have adequate supply of water for irrigation, and are able to harvest two or more rice crops. For these farmers, early maturation of crop varieties would ensure quick succession of crops. In contrast, late maturation is a property preferred by most marginal farmers whose farms do not receive adequate irrigation to support two crops of rice. Most indigenous farmers prefer to grow rice with minimal chemical inputs, unlike wealthy farmers, who can buy the costly inputs for Green Revolution style of farming.

B. Agroforestry Agroforestry is an ancient and widespread production system in which land is managed for the concurrent production of agricultural and forest crops and for the rearing of domestic animals (Farrell and Altieri 1995). Perhaps the most ancient form of agriculture is agroforestry, which evolved in forested areas, by integrating trees in crop farms, and involving annual and perennial crops as well as animals. In Central Africa and much of tropical Asia, traditional agroforestry systems include planting cultivable plants between forest trees. Farm productivity is enhanced by planting of leguminous trees and shrubs (like Acacia spp.), which harbour nitrogen-fixing bacteria, and trees with pest-repellant properties like neem (Azadirachta indica) and akanda (Jatropha gossipifolia). Annual and perennial crops include leguminous pulses, oilseeds, and cereals in different combinations in space and time, which form an intricate system of support to one another by providing shade, water, nutrients and pest-repellent properties. Spatial combination of such crops is exemplified by the traditional cropping systems in subSaharan Africa, where parallel rows of Leucaenna, a leguminous shrub, are planted with annuals like maize or sorghum in between. The leaves and stems of

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Leucaenna are periodically cut and spread over the annual crop as nutrient subsidy. This practice is known to significantly improve soil characteristics, and stabilize soil invertebrate populations (Plucknett and Smith 1986). A very efficient agroforestry practice by many tribal communities in MesoAmerica, northeastern India, and South East Asia, mimics natural ecological succession of forests. The cropping system is initiated by planting annual cereals, followed in succession by rapidly growing annuals like yams or beans, perennial shrubs such as avocado or lemon, and finally large trees such as coconut, jackfruit or mango. Thus each stage of succession prepares for the next stage (Stinner and Blair 1990). Productivity is enhanced by growing rice, pigeon pea, winged bean or lablab (Dolichos lablab) alternately interspersed by rows of shrubs and trees. Annual and biannual non-woody trees like banana, and dioscorid vines are also grown along with woody trees. Shifting cultivation is another type of agroforestry, and is the most widespread farming system involving sequential rotation of forest vegetation and cultivated crops. It is characterized by clearing a patch of forest by slashing and burning vegetation, before planting crops for a year or two, and then leaving the land fallow for a long period to allow the forest to regenerate. There are wide variations in this general pattern, as are the local vernacular names that reflect both the type of land and the farming system (Christanty 1986: 226): milpa in Meso-America, conuco in Venezuela, ladang in Indonesia, chitemene in Central Africa, taungya in Burma, kaingin in the Philppines, dongya in southwest China, jhum in India, Bhutan and Nepal. Synonymously termed ‘swidden,’ ‘nomadic,’ ‘fire-field,’ ‘cutand-burn’ and ‘slash-and-burn’ cultivation in English, shifting cultivation was invented in the Neolithic period, around 7000 BC. This farming system has been an object of continual reproach by agricultural experts and development agencies for supposedly being destructive of the forest and soil fertility. People who indulge in this primitive practice are also scorned as short-sighted savages. Those who are not aware of their complex social mechanisms of preventing despoliation of forests (see Box 6.1 on Mizo fire control strategies), tend to explicate their practice of periodic forest clearance as an example of ‘the tragedy of the commons.’ However, in the face of all opposition from agricultural experts and in spite of governmental programmes to phase it out, shifting cultivation has remained popular among most hill tribes in the humid tropics, and in fact increased in some places like some northeastern States of India (IFAD et al. 2001). The system persists because it is more productive than any other farming system in the hill slopes. Several studies have shown that traditional methods of shifting cultivation cause the lowest amount of soil erosion, even in steep hill slopes, compared with any other land clearing and tillage system (Mertz 2002). Soil erosion is minimized

Beyond Developmentality

Box 6.1

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Fire Control Strategies of Mizo Shifting Cultivators

I

n communities practising shifting cultivation and agroforestry, the forest is a component of bio-cultural system, rather than purely natural (Raffles 1999). Long-term maintenance of the forest cover has been an ingrained objective of forest use in the shifting cultivation tradition of indigenous people in the humid tropics. The fire management practices by shifting cultivators of Mizoram in northeast India demonstrates the customary care for the forest, and belies the conventional official view of the destructiveness of slashand-burn or jhum cultivation in hill forests. To prevent the incidence of fire spreading from the jhum field into the surrounding forests and villages during the burning operation, Mizo village councils maintain certain norms and regulations (often tribe-specific) regarding jhum fire. The strategies and techniques employed in community-based fire management may be categorized into three main measures: Regulatory, Preventive and Punitive (Darlong and Vancchong 2001).

a. Regulatory measures Adult male members of the family operating the jhum must inform or notify village authority and neighbours about the date and time of jhum burning. Setting of a particular time for jhum burning activity is decided by the community. This ensures that all jhum fields will be burned at roughly the same time, necessitating the presence of all cultivators. This measure is legally supported by the Mizoram Rules (Prevention and Control of Fire in the Village Ram) of 1983. The burning period is decidedly between February 15 and March 15. Moreover, Mizos begin jhum burning in early afternoon, and the burning is completed by early evening. b. Preventive measures At the time of the burning operation, cultivators must remain watchful in the jhum field until the fire is completely extinguished. Every cultivator must keep a wide space between the slashed vegetation and the adjoining forest before setting fire. This creates effective fire breaks between the forest and the jhum field. The vegetation that has been slashed is kept away from the adjoining forest floor. Furthermore, because leafy branches and twigs become handy to control fire, trees and shrubs with abundant foliage in the jhum field are not cleared. Back in the village, women of the operating family must store adequate water in the house in the event of fire spreading to the village. Every village is encouraged to set up a Village Forest Fire Prevention Committee, which designates ‘Fire Watchers,’ who remain particularly watchful and prepared for fire fighting during the peak period of jhum burning activity. c. Punitive measures In case of incidents of fire spreading to either the adjoining forest or the village, individuals and sometimes even the entire villages are fined. Fines

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for individuals vary from Rs. 5,000 in the case of deliberate negligence to Rs. 2,500 in the case of accidental fire. For the village community, the fine for inactivity to control fire ranges from Rs. 10,000 to Rs. 50,000, depending on the assessment of the cause of fire and the extent of damage. The fines are collected by the village authority and deposited in the Village Welfare Fund (Darlong and Vanchhong 2001).

by a brief period of exposure of the soil after burning, mulching, negligible or no tillage, and traditional preventive measures like horizontal placing of unburned logs across the slope. Uhlig et al. (1994) have estimated that shifting cultivation is far more benign as a carbon source than settled agricultural systems, and that modernization of farming in South East Asia is the main reason for the region to become a carbon source. Traditional home gardens in South and South East Asia are another ancient form of multiple cropping system that has been functioning efficiently for centuries. Home gardens are known to sustain a high diversity of crop species. In Nagaland, for example, more than 122 crop species have been recorded to grow in Naga home gardens (Godbole 1997). Home gardens from southern (Babu et al. 1992; Jose and Shanmugaratnam 1993) and northeastern Indian States (Godbole 1998; Gupta 1998; Das and Das 2005) are known to be supportive of high levels of nutrition and are an indirect source of household income. The home garden systems seem to be highly productive and sustainable in fertile soils where they require little improvement, but are unlikely to be successful in nutrient-poor soil (Millat-e-Mustafa 1998). The large species diversity, judicious crop mixture, and the farmers’ ability to adapt to changing circumstances are all likely to contribute to the ecological persistence of the system. The species mix in MC system utilizes available light, water and minerals, in harmony with the different resource requirements of the crop plants, more efficiently than monocultures. For example, leguminous crops provide nitrogenous nutrients to non-leguminous crops, while large canopy plants provide shade to the shade-loving vines and herbs.

C. Multiple cropping in settled cultivation Multiple cropping (MC) system is an umbrella term which includes a wide range of farming practices involving multiple species and varieties of crops. Multiple cropping is classified into two systems, namely, sequential cropping and intercropping. These terms differentiate between the time and space dimensions of multiple cropping. Intercropping is a mixed cropping technique, producing

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different crops simultaneously. Although occasionally used interchangeably with multiple cropping, the current consensus is that intercropping is the space dependent form of multiple cropping. In Latin America, the major proportion of cassava production occurs in poorly irrigated, dryland farms with poor, acidic soils. The high productivity of cassava takes place in mixed cropping farms with maize, beans and cowpeas. Protein equivalents of cassava and groundnut have been shown in a study by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) to be higher in intercropping systems than in monocultures of either cassava or groundnut (Plucknett 1990: 46). Intercropping is a technique of multiple cropping in which different types of crops are grown between rows of the principal food crop. Thus rice is intercropped with diverse vegetables and legumes. Alley cropping, a form of intercropping, is a practice of growing food crops in alleys between hedgerows of trees and shrubs. This technique of farming is most effective to restore soil nutrients during the bush fallow period in a slash-and-burn cultivation, which is most common in much of tropical Africa (Plucknett 1990). A judicious species mix in MC system utilizes available light, water and minerals, in harmony with the different resource requirements of the diverse crop species, more efficiently than monocultures. For example, leguminous crops provide nitrogenous nutrients to non-leguminous crops, while large canopy plants provide shade to the shade-loving vines and herbs. Multiple cropping systems may involve cultivation of different crops in succession. A common MC practice in West Bengal and Bangladesh consists of the rotational cultivation of Sesbania canabina, rice and sesame and/or mustard. In southwestern districts of West Bengal, traditional farmers grow rice and mustard for one or two years, and then resort to mixed cropping of different oil seeds, cucurbits, legumes and spices for three to five years. The crop cycle thus spans four to seven years, with about 30 crop plants grown on the same plot of land. The farmers believe that the ‘recess periods’ of growing the mix of vegetables and pulses replenish the soil nutrients that are exhausted by rice. In most MC systems, a cover crop is grown either simultaneously or rotationally with the principal crop species. The cover crop consists of one or more leguminous species, which include pulses for human consumption and species for livestock fodder. Leguminous crops enhance nitrogen availability to plants through root rhizobial activity, and contribute to improving the quality of diet of animals, and enhancing yield and persistence of grasses. Another highly successful MC system, integrated crop and animal production, includes livestock maintained for draft purposes, milk, meat and manure. Crops or their residues are used as fodder, and the animal dung is put back into the farm soil to maintain soil fertility. In pre-modern Bengal, six or more varieties of rice, along with leafy

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vegetables, pulses, oilseeds, fruits and tubers were harvested round the year from an average farm. In a few extant wetland MC farms in West Bengal, production of fish, crabs and mollusks in addition to lowland rice, contribute to the household economy and nutrition (Deb 2004a).

D. Traditional pest control methods Crop pests have evolved with crops since the First Agricultural Revolution some 10000 years ago. Traditional farming practices interfered minimally with the co-evolution of crop varieties, pests and their natural enemies, allowing natural control of pest populations. Populations of numerous minor rice pests like leafhoppers seem to explode in October. However, these pests are soon controlled by the spiders and dragonflies which also increase in numbers. Traditional Indian farmers used to light open fires in farm fields to control the boom of pests during this season – a practice that has been ritualized as Diwali and Chhat festivals in the new moon night of Ocrober (Deb 2000). This traditional use of light traps was also supplemented by biological control of pests, like planting nests of predatory wasps (Vespa tropica) to control pest insects, and erecting perches for nightjars and owls to control rodents in the farm fields (Borromeo and Deb, 2006: 16). Most of these traditional practices are now forgotten, and only reminisced in symbols associated with farming rituals and ceremonies. The barn owl, for instance, is associated with the farmer goddess Lakshmi, and is a sacred species. Many South Asian farmer communities still consider pest-eating birds like the Indian roller and myna, and reptiles like the rat snake and the chameleon as sacred species. The number of major pests on staple crops like rice and wheat used to be small – only six to eight – until the advent of the Green Revolution, which turned many minor pests into major pests (Bera 1996). Thus, pest attack seldom assumed serious magnitudes to result in major crop losses. In fact, recorded history of crop failures in South Asia over the past few centuries indicates that climatic factors like long spells of droughts have been the principal reason (Davis 2000). Nevertheless, local outbursts of pests were not uncommon, and were controlled by using low-cost, biodegradable substances. One major reason that traditional agricultural techniques are more environment-friendly and sustainable than modern industrial agriculture is that the former relied on using pest-repellants, pest-growth inhibitors and anti-feedants rather than pest-killing substances. As many as 2121 plants are reported to have pest control properties, with 384 as antifeedant, 297 as insect repellent, 31 as growth inhibitors, and 1005 showing pesticidal property (Sharma 2003: 18).

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The most common bio-pesticides in South Asia include neem (Azadirachta indica), mahua (Bassia latifolia), custard apple (Annona reticulata and A. odorata). Neem seed extract is effective in controlling rice cutworm, diamondback moth, green leaf hoppers and brown plant hoppers. Neem oil inhibits growth of insects and fungal pathogens. Mahua seed extract works against sawfly (Athalia lugens proxima), while Chenopodium and Bougainvillea have antiviral properties. Cattle urine is another effective substance to control pests of cereals and vegetable crops. Indigenous farmers still use cattle urine, garlic, custard apple and soap solution to control a large number of farm pests. Several plants are also used to effectively control weeds. Pigeon pea (Cajanus cajan) leaves are used to suppress the growth of mutha grass (Cyperus rotundus), a pestilential weed in rice farms. The chemistry and bioassay of these ‘Organic’ pest control agents remains largely unexplored. Although big agribusiness has recently turned its attention to mining and pirating this vast resource of folk knowledge8, it will perhaps take a little longer for institutional agriculturists to recognize the vast potential of this resource to be incorporated into the edifice of ‘big science’ they worship.

6.5.2 Taking Stock: Benefits from Ecological Agriculture Farmers in India have experienced that GM crop cultivation involves a great deal of financial risks, beyond their capacity to bear. The enormously high seed price and additional water and chemical inputs have only served to raise farming expenses, unlike in conventional non-GM farming. In Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and Punjab, GM cotton growers are changing over to non-GM seeds and organic farming. New Zealand apple growers have already benefited from a drastic reduction in sprays. New programmes now produce high quality fruit with less chemical inputs and residues. This has been achieved by quality research resulting in a mixture of conventionally produced virus-resistant trees, Integrated Pest Management (IPM) and organic programmes. Furthermore, New Zealand onion producers have also tried IPM programmes, aiming to reduce chemical applications and thus the cost to the farmer and environment (GMWatch 2004). The instance of Cuba is spectacular. Until 1989, Cuba was a model Green Revolution-style farm economy, supported by enormous quantities of imported agrochemicals and machinery from Eastern Europe. Soon after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the already existing and soon to be tightened US trade embargo resulted in plummeting productivity of Cuban agriculture. Cuba faced the worst food crisis in its history, with consumption of calories and protein dropping by as much as 30 percent. However, Cuba soon made use of the foreign trade embargo

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to forge a self-reliant economy, based on adoption of zero-chemical agriculture, creation of urban farms and home gardens, and opening of farmer markets. This new agricultural extension revolutionized crop production, so that ‘by 1997, Cubans were eating almost as well as they did before 1989’ (Rosset et al. 2000: 56). The Cuban miracle is perhaps the best evidence that ecological agriculture is capable of ensuring food and nutritional security without harming the environment. Most governments have realized the adverse effects of pesticides and have introduced IPM modules in their agriculture policies. There is a growing understanding that farm economy is unlikely to be sustainable unless the integrity of the farm ecosystem is maintained. Poisoning of water, air and soil leads to the disappearance of key organisms from the agro-ecosystem, which eventually become less and less resilient to environmental vagaries. Farmers are becoming increasingly aware that agricultural sustainability can result from restoring the organic base of agriculture – the biodiversity base. Thus, the concern for farm economic sustainability is linked to the concern for biodiversity conservation and maintaining ecological functions. Individual farmers and organizations have developed various models of organic farming systems, drawn essentially on different traditional farming techniques of indigenous cultures. These models, most of them site-specific, were developed and are being used in different parts of the world under the rubrics of ‘organic,’ ‘biodynamic,’ ‘biological,’ ‘regenerative’ and ‘ecological’ agriculture. The organic food and agriculture movement is gaining in strength, in spite of the monumental opposition of the agrochemical industry, whose economic existence depends on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides of every sort. The movement is gathering momentum in spite of the dominant view of agricultural development, as farmers are increasingly becoming aware that industrialized farming entails an ever-increasing production cost and rapidly declining soil fertility, crop yield and livelihood security. The general objectives of sustainable agricultural practices – to be economically viable, to meet human needs for food, to be environmentally positive, and to be concerned with quality of life – can be achieved in a number of different ways. Sustainable agriculture is not linked to any particular technological practice. Nor is sustainable agriculture the exclusive domain of organic farming. Rather, sustainable agriculture is thought of in the context of its adaptability and flexibility over time to respond to the demands of subsistence, its demands on natural resources for production, and its ability to protect the soil and the resources. This goal requires an efficient use of technology in a manner conducive to sustainability. Finally, because agriculture is affected by changes in market and resource decisions in other sectors and regions, it is important that these changes do not

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provide a rationale for unsustainable agricultural practices. The fundamental rationale of sustainable agriculture is that it must be based on ecological principles of production. The farming methodology is to produce crops in harmony with biodiversity – within and in association with the farm ecosystem – to make the production system ecologically adaptive, simulating and maintaining the natural biodiversity and complexity of natural ecosystems. Models of ecological agriculture show that the more biodiverse an agroecosystem, the more sustainable it becomes. Ecological farming systems operate on the principle of minimum perturbation to the farm ecosystem and make the utmost use of biodiversity in farm management (see Box 6.2). Hoe cultivation, no-till agriculture, use of green manure, animal compost, legume cover crops, mulching, mixed cropping, and employing natural products to control pests and diseases – are different types of ecological agriculture that ensure sustainability. Ecological stability and resilience of the agro-ecosystem, like other ecosystems, depends on the diversity of species and the range of ecological interactions. Numerous studies show that by and large, productivity of traditional multi-tier, multi-species agricultural systems is highly resilient, due primarily to two reasons. (a) The farm soil is enriched by cyclical inputs from legumes and leaf litter, and by the rich soil microbial and invertebrate population, which enhance organic decomposition rates (NRC 1989). Furthermore, (b) the complex interaction among the large number of species renders a high ecological resilience to the farm ecosystem, which is capable of withstanding larger fluctuations in the environment than any monoculture farm (Stinner and Blair 1990). Quantitative studies examining the benefits of these farming systems substantiate this understanding, on agronomic, economic and ecological grounds. These benefits are discussed below.

I. Agronomic benefits i) Improved soil fertility Traditional polyculture systems, especially agroforestry, are known to sustain soil fertility for centuries. Soil analyses before slashing and after burning in a jhum field have shown that the flush release of phosphorus and potash from the ashes improves the soil fertility several-fold (Thrupp et al. 1997). The fire releases cations on the soil surface, pushes up the pH level of acidic soils, thus improving the availability of nutrients; it destroys seeds of weeds, and controls pests. Fire allows a steady release of nitrogen throughout the cropping season. Also, leaf litter from

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a few trees left unburned in the jhum field supply nutrients (Juo and Manu 1996; Thrupp et al. 1997). Experiments by marginal farmers in the global South as well as by scientists reveal that complete replacement of chemical fertilizers and pesticides/herbicides with organic manure can improve soil fertility and have fewer detrimental effects on the environment, without compromising crop yields. Inorganic fertilizers are readily dissolved in water and a large proportion of the fertilizers that is not immediately used up by the crop plants is lost by leaching and de-nitrification. In contrast, slow decomposition of organic compounds results in gradual release of nutrients to the soil. This process of slow nutrient release contributes to the accumulation of carbon and nitrogen, and minimizes leaching losses (Jenkinson et al. 1994). Productivity of farms is stable in organic farms because nutrient cycling is made tighter in the agro-ecosystem by organic inputs than by synthetic chemical inputs. ‘Sustainable and productive ecosystems have tight internal cycling of nutrients, a lesson that agriculture must re-learn’ (Tilman 1998). Results from experiments at the Rothamstead Experimental Station in UK show that over a period of 150 years, soil organic matter and total nitrogen levels increased by 120 percent in manured plots, compared with only about 20 percent in the plots receiving chemical fertilizer inputs (Jenkinson et al. 1994; Powlson 1994). More recently, Drinkwater et al. (1998) compared crop yield and soil characteristics in three farming systems: a conventional system with high-intensity inputs of chemical fertilizer and pesticides; and two organic farming systems receiving zero chemical inputs. One of the alternative systems was fed with manure from livestock raised on the grasses and legumes grown on the plots, while the other, with no livestock, derived its nutrients from a variety of legumes. Soil organic matter and nitrogen content dramatically increased in the manure system, less so in the legume system, while it decreased in the conventional plots. ii) Higher productivity The USDA Farm Costs and Returns Survey data show that farms with mixed cropping and with low or medium chemical inputs have higher returns per acre as well as higher returns on assets than monoculture farms using high agrochemicals (Hefferman and Green 1986). Hornbaker (1989) also has shown that farms with more expenditure on agrochemicals per acre have yielded higher, but earned less profit per acre than farms spending less on inputs. Furthermore, a USDA study of a farm that had stopped using any synthetic pesticides, herbicides or

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fertilizers since 1971, consistently had higher crop yields above country averages (Madden and O’Connell 1989). The higher productivity of alternative farming methods is acknowledged in the US National Research Council’s study, which found that ‘successful alternative farmers often produce high per acre yields with significant reduction in cost per unit of crop harvested’ (NRC 1989: 8), despite the fact that many government policies discourage adoption of alternative practices. It further noted that ‘a small number of farms using alternative systems profitably produce most major commodities, usually at competitive prices, and often without participating in federal commodity price and income support programs’ (NRC 1989: 8). In Latin America, the major proportion of cassava production occurs in poorly irrigated, dryland farms with poor, acidic soils. The high productivity of cassava takes place in mixed cropping farms with maize, beans and cowpeas. Protein equivalents of cassava and groundnut have been shown in a study by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) to be higher in intercropping systems than in monocultures of either cassava or groundnut (Plucknett 1990: 46). On-farm validation trials indicate that polyculture farming has the potential of increasing yields by 70 percent (Plucknett 1990: 46). Land equivalent ratio (LER) is used to measure the efficiency of a multiple-crop (MC) farm relative to a monoculture farm, and is defined as LER = Lc /Lm, where Lm is the land planted to a crop in combination with other crops in a MC system, and Lc is the land planted to monoculture of that crop giving the same yield as Lm of the crop. Most MC farms often have LER > 1, implying that the yield of crops on a MC farm is more than a monoculture of a given crop using the same amount of land. For example, Ahmed and Rao (1982) showed that intercropped maize-soybean systems under different nitrogen input regimes in 14 locations in seven countries had LER >1 in all but one case, and found a higher economic return from the MC systems than monocultures of either crop. Another experiment conducted by the University of Nebraska researchers over eight years compared 13 cropping systems, including an essentially organic rotation, which used zero inputs of chemical fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides, on MC farms, growing soybean, sorghum, maize and oats and sweet clover in various rotations (Helmers et al. 1986). The results demonstrated that rotations in MC have higher yields and higher net returns per unit area than continuous mono-crop of any of the crop species, and confirmed previous studies using traditional crop cultivars. Similar studies conducted in the past few decades

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confirmed this finding (see overview by Tilman 1998; Tilman et al. 2006): the total yield of muli-species plots is greater than that of each species grown alone. In a pioneering experimental investigation of the relationship between diversity and primary productivity in multispecies systems, Naeem et al. (1996) randomly drew various combinations of species from a pool of 16 species to establish species assemblages that contained from 2 to 16 plant species. Multiple (>10) replicates of such assemblages were created, and compared to 64 monocultures. The results showed that average productivity (rate of photosynthetic production of oxygen) increased with diversity, and that the variance in productivity was lower in species assemblages than in monocultures (Hector et al. 1999). Tilman’s rigorous field experiment comparing plots containing 1 to 24 plant species randomly drawn from a pool of 24 species also showed that productivity, measured by the total cover of all species in a plot, was positively correlated with diversity (Tilman 1999; Tilman et al. 2006). An agricultural equivalent consists of traditional rain-fed farms with multi-storeyed cropping systems in the Philippines, yielding more than 49 tonnes of edible biomass per hectare (Perlas 1995). When productivity is defined as crop yield per unit of input, multi-crop systems as in row or alley intercropping are remarkably more productive than monocrop farming systems. The Cropping Systems Programme of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) studied traditional row intercropping systems of Javanese small farmers using maize and rice and found that these were from 30 to 60 percent more productive than monocultures and had less weed and pest problems (Geno and Geno 2001). A similar study by Drinkwater et al. (1988) showed that crop yield averages in the organic farm plots that either received nutrients from cattle manure or from legumes (see above) were no different from chemical farm plots. Several studies have indicated that the output-input ratio in both monetary and energy terms is considerably higher in shifting cultivation than in settled cultivation. The ratio tends to be higher with the duration of fallow. The absolute quantity of crop output is reported to be adequate for subsistence of farmers in Mizoram villages, with an average family size of six. The productivity of jhum, with an average of five-year fallow, is sustainable in 88 percent of Mizoram villages (Singh 1996). iii) Enhanced crop longevity and pathogen defence The use of legume cover crop is a viable alternative to synthetic fertilizer that reduces soil nutrient loss, reduces runoff, enhances water infiltration, and significantly curtails disease incidence or severity in diverse crops (Mills et al. 2002). A

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pioneering study by Kumar et al. (2004) has demonstrated that using legume cover crop significantly reduces disease incidence and slows crop senescence through up-regulation of specific and select groups of genes. This study compared growth of tomato crop in a hairy vetch (Vicia villosa) cover crop system with that in black polyethylene field, both under the same growing conditions in a USDA research centre farm in Maryland. Leaf senescence of tomato plants grown on plastic covered mulch began on day 65, whereas tomato plants grown on the hairy vetch (HV) plots showed minimal senescence until day 84. Further, in polyethylene mulch plants, bacterial leaf spot, early blight and Septoria leaf spot occurred and spread progressively from day 65, whereas ‘barely any disease symptoms were seen on HV-grown plants until day 84 after transplanting; thereafter these plants showed disease severity that was significantly lower’ than polyethylene mulch plants (Kumar et al. 2004: 10536). Gene-specific molecular investigation revealed that certain gene products accumulated progressively in leaves of HV plants, causing a delayed pro-senescence hormonal signalling and enhanced disease tolerance.

II. Economic benefits The following is an elucidation of benefits measured in terms of direct use value obtained from sustainable agricultural practices. Non-use value of the agro-ecosystem is left out in this discussion. (i) Multiple consumptive uses The economic benefits from agroforestry systems are diverse. In small agroforestry farms maintained by tribal people of Jharkhand in India, trees provide food for humans in the form of fruits, (jackfruit: Artocarpus integrifolia, sajina: Moringa oleifera, plantain), flowers (sajina, plantain: Musa sapientum, M. paradisiaca), leaves (neem, palté madar: Erythrina suberosa), and seeds (sal: Shorea robusta, jackfruit). The leaves of these trees (especially jackfruit, plantain, and figs) are also used as fodder for livestock (Deb, unpublished records). The fruits of bhela (Semecarpus anacardiale) is used for cattle medicine. Several fast-growing trees also provide brushwood for fuel. Bamboos are traditionally maintained in the farm for use in construction, and for making farm implements and household articles. Trees like Phoenix acaulis, Bombax malabarica and Careya arborea in many ancient Indian agroforestry systems provided fibre, and neem and coconut yielded oil. Perennial shrubs and herbs served to provide fruits, flowers and seeds for food, fodder and medicinal uses. Nishinda (Vitex negundo) is planted in

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hedgerows, and its leaves, containing pyrethine, are burned to fumigate living quarters and cattle sheds to drive off mosquitoes and fleas. Leaf litters are employed to mulch the farm, thus recycling the farm nutrients and improving soil moisture content. Indigenous farmers of northeast India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and Melanesia grow rice along with sesame, maize, cotton, yams, chilli, ginger, turmeric and beans on their shifting cultivation fields (Harwood 2001). In traditional wetland farms of China, Bangladesh and east Indian States, deepwater rice varieties are grown in submerged lands, where fish, ducks, freshwater mussels and crabs provide additional food for the farmer’s family. Many such ‘primitive’ multi-species farming systems continue to yield high economic returns in the form of food and income to the majority of farmers in the tropics (Vandermeer 2003; Borromeo and Deb 2006). (ii) Increased productive value of land Different crop combinations have different economic potentials. It requires generations of experience to decide on the optimal crop combinations and rotations for sustainable yield and profitability. The study of Smolik et al. (1995) indicated that depending on the crop combinations, alternative agricultural systems with zero-chemical inputs were more or less profitable than the conventional chemical farming system in South Dacota. More recent studies compare farming systems with similar crop combinations and within the same edapho-climatic regime. Traditional home gardens in most Asian indigenous farming communities used to yield significantly high food production, often sufficient to cater to the nutritional needs of the peasant family round the year. In traditional home gardens of Kerala and northeastern States of India, more than 120 crops have been recorded to be cultivated, which include not only food crops but also shrubs and perennials to produce fodder for livestock, trees for fuelwood, bamboos for construction and herbs for medicinals (Das and Das 2005; and citations there). A recent study (Deb 2004) conducted in four districts of West Bengal shows that multiple cropping in the same soil and climatic regimes proves economically more efficient than modern Green Revolution farming systems involving monocultures. The summary of the findings is presented in Table 6.2. The data clearly show that the net value of the annual production of an average MC farm is uniformly more than that of an average GR farm. Amongst the MC farms, the dry upland farms of Birbhum district are the least productive (four crops a year), chiefly because of (a) lack of irrigation facility, and (b) paucity of vegetable varieties suitable for upland farming. The medium-lowland farms of Bankura are under rotational cropping, growing over

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Table 6.2. Annual Per Hectare Production Profiles of Multiple-cropping and Monoculture Farms N of farms

District

Multiple cropping farms Bankura 10 Medinipur 5 Birbhum 3 Monoculture farms Bankura 8 Howrah 3 Note:

Modal no. crops

Cost of production (in Rupees)

Production value (in Rupees)

Net profit (± S.D) (in Rupees)

12 7 4

45325.35 18546.38 21686.54

247690.00 88954.37 66703.26

202364.70 ±61068.62 70407.98 ±19275.70 45016.72 ±16915.86

26471.61 39740.90

62488.48 75046.78

38098.25 ±17930.09 35305.89 ±18731.57

2* 3*

* HYV rice, grown in succession every year

10 crops a year excluding rice. The irrigated GR farms, by contrast, grow two rice varieties in Bankura and three rice varieties (all HYV) in Howrah. The data show that the net production value of crops from the least productive MC farms of Birbhum was considerably higher than the most productive GR farm production. Monoculture farms of Howrah appear to be less productive in spite of three rice crops than those of Bankura with two rice crops. Farmers explain that this reflects the ‘farm fatigue’ from monoculture and intensive use of agrochemicals – an essential feature of GR system. In general, the value of the farm produce seems to increase significantly with greater diversity of crops. This strong linear relationship of the net value of total

Figure 21. Relationship of Loge-transformed Net Farm Profit with Loge-transformed Crop Species Number

ln Annual Profit (Rs/ha)

13

12

11

10 0

1

2

3 ln Crop No.

4

5

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farm production with crop diversity is shown in Figure 21, which seems to contradict the prevailing mainstream agronomic conjecture that intensive monoculture would enhance productivity of the land. Many farmers in Bankura and Medinipur have realized that over the years, the yield of the GR crops is unsustainable, and have reverted back to traditional farming systems involving folk crop varieties. Some of them have experimented with a hybrid system of rotational cropping of a large number of ‘secondary’ crops and a HYV rice. However, most of these MC farmers reported that ‘the cost of inputs eat[s] away the extra production of HYV rice’, and that the best means to cut down on the extraneous inputs is to ‘give the land a recess’ by growing vegetables and fruits for a few years before replanting it with rice (Deb 2004a). The value of aggregate farm produce becomes higher when crop farming is integrated with animals. In many traditional systems, farm plots are left fallow for livestock grazing after annual crops are harvested. In paddy-fish-crab-duck cultures, as practised in China and Bangladesh, the aggregate value of the farm production is substantially higher than if it were subjected to crops or fish alone. (iii) Viability under altered market conditions Sustainable agriculture is sustainable because it can withstand natural and economic risk. This high degree of viability, as argued, is because of greater species diversity and complexity (Cacek and Langer 1986). Current ecological theory suggests that more complex systems with greater species diversity are likely to be more productive than simpler systems (Pimm 1991; Schulze and Mooney 1993). This has also been corroborated by empirical evidence (Hector 1999; Naeem et al. 1995; Tilman 1999; Tilman et al. 2006). More precisely, the time taken for a complex system (with high species diversity and inter-specific linkages) to return to its equilibrium following a perturbation is quicker than that for a simpler system (Pimm 1991, 2002; Tilman 1999). In agronomic context, this ecological resilience is translated into sustainability of production. A study on the economic advantage from different farming systems under risk indicated that farms with multiple crop rotation were less vulnerable to environmental and economic risks than monocultures (Domanico et al. 1986). In another study, Goldstein and Young (1987) compared the farm economy between conventional industrialized and alternative farming systems, with and without government subsidies. They showed that when subsidies are removed, the highdiversity, low-input farming system proves more profitable. Thus, under changed market situations, the alternative system remains viable.

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Despite the overall importance of these site-specific studies, which imply that modern conventional agriculture is less viable than alternative farming practices, the persistent ‘problem of taxonomy’ delimits their interpretation. As White et al. (1994: 251–52) pointed out, these studies largely remain ‘anecdotal’ and individualistic: Each tends to address a different combination of crops, rotations, production practices, or climatic region. They are also very individual in their assumptions about the influences of market prices, government policies and even crop yields… The lack of common categories for classifying tillage practices, pest control regimes, crop rotations etc. makes it difficult to summarize results and draw general conclusions.

(iv) Reduced production cost There is a growing body of literature showing that the standard economic efficiency as well as long-term ecological productivity of organic farming systems is superior to intensive chemical farming systems. An increase in the cost of chemical input seems to boost farm production, but the farm income is proportionately smaller than when there are fewer farm inputs. A study of a 400 acre representative alternative farm in Wisconsin showed that the costs associated with conservation tillage adopted in the farm were higher in the short term, but significantly lower in the long term, than conventional tillage system (Mueller et al. 1985). Conversely, chemicalization of agriculture as a rule entails loss to the farmer in the long run. As an official USDA (1991) study of a group of 201 farms of Illinois, USA demonstrated, loss of farm income increases with increasing chemical inputs. In a study (Helmers et al. 1984) to measure the performance of a fully organic system, six possible cropping systems were considered, three organic rotations, two conventional rotations, and continuous corn (Zea mays). Animal manure was available, but other aspects of the livestock operation were excluded from the economic analysis. For the organic farms it was assumed that straw was sold and that the cost of manure was equal to application costs only. Given this scenario, the returns were comparable to those from the conventional rotations. The organic systems had the lowest costs of production, and all rotational systems performed better than continuous corn. There are several reasons for the cost reduction in organic farming systems. Costs of chemical pesicides are almost eliminated in multiple cropping and agroforestry due to the pest-repellent properties of different crops planted intermittently with other crops. In the event of pest attack, the traditional farmers know

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and use thousands of local pest control agents from indigenous substances whose cost is incomparably lower than any synthetic pesticides (Sharma 2003). In the home garden, agroforestry and MC systems, loss of crop yield to pests and weeds is significantly reduced by availability of host plants, and the presence of competitor and repellent plants. In traditional MC farms of South Asia, rows of crop plants are interspersed with garlic and marigold plants to fend off attacks from parasitic fungi, nematodes and different insect pests. Neem, karanj and Streblus asper trees are also maintained in agroforestry farms to take advantage of their pest-repellent properties. Mulching and cover crops reduce albedo and retain soil moisture, eliminating the need for irrigation water. Roots of plants grown in no-till and cover crop systems have a robust and larger spread than in plants grown on fertilizer-enhanced plots. Enhanced root development is beneficial for higher yields, especially under water stress, and therefore cover crop systems reduce the cost of water input. Cover crops can also reduce disease incidence through enhanced expression of specific gene transcripts and corresponding proteins like cytokinin receptor kinase (Kumar et al. 2004). The cost of fertilizer inputs is also reduced in the traditional farming systems because they support populations of soil fungi, nematodes, crustaceans, insects, millipedes, and earthworms. These organisms, in addition to plant root rhizobial activities recycle nutrients. In agroforestry systems and wetland MC systems, the need for applying fertilizers from external sources is zero. In farming systems that integrate crops and animals, the economy is sustained by a ‘tight internal cycling of nutrients’ (Tilman 1998). In the Apa-Tani agriculture in Arunachal Pradesh of northeast India, farms are fed with domestic refuge and animal manure through intricate channels.

III. Ecological benefits (i) Nurturing biodiversity Biodiversity itself is responsible for maintaining health of any ecosystem, yet it is impossible to assess the value of biodiversity; one cannot estimate the market value of earthworms added to unproductive soil. Yet, enhancement of biodiversity is a significant benefit to the farm ecosystem. Biodiverse farming systems are generally more productive than homogenized monocrop systems and modern chemical agriculture. Table 6.3 distinguishes the agricultural practices promoting and conversely, destroying biodiversity in agro-ecosystems.

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Table 6.3. Practices Affecting Biodiversity in Agroecosystems Sustained biodiversity

Decreased biodiversity

Hedgerows Dykes with wild herbage Organic manuring and cover crop Polyculture; agroforestry Rotation with legumes Dead mulch; living mulch Strip crops; ribbon cropping; alley cropping Biological pest control Plant resistance Germplasm diversity

Wild vegetation removal Tubular drainage Intensive application of chemical fertilizers Monoculture Monosuccession Bare soil Conventional mono-cropping Chemical pest control Plant susceptibility Crop standardization and homogenization

Source: Modified after Paoletti et al. (1992).

The traditional multi-species cropping system is known to have fostered a high biodiversity of crop and associate animal species, and continuous farmer experiments have enhanced the complexity of the system (Pimentel et al. 1992). On a considerable number of organic farms, primarily maintained by a section of small and medium farmers, MC is still in vogue. These farms, teeming with a large number of crop species (including four or more varieties of rice, fruit trees, tuber plants, vines, herbs, and shrubs in some places), and a plethora of vertebrates and thousands of arthropods, constitute an enormously complex ecosystem. The most important characteristic of MC farms is their high diversity, both in terms of habitat structure and species. Some forms of intercropping, such as mixed and relay intercropping, increase alpha (within-habitat) diversity, while strip intercropping in relatively wide rows increase beta (between-habitat) diversity (Stinner and Blair 1990: 125). (ii) Soil and soil moisture conservation Several studies have shown that traditional methods of shifting cultivation causes the lowest amount of soil erosion, even in steep hill slopes, compared with any other land clearing and tillage system (Mertz and Magid 2001). Soil erosion is minimized by brief periods of exposure of the soil after burning, mulching, negligible or no tillage, and traditional preventive measures like horizontal placing of unburned logs across the slope (Mertz and Magid 2001). In agroforestry, trees provide permanent shade above crops and below-ground support structure to the soil. Soil microclimate is preserved by the root systems of different trees, and the below-ground bacterial, fungal and invertebrate assemblages are supported to enhance nutrient cycling (Stinner and Blair 1990). In agroforestry and multi-tier

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MC, complex below-ground root structures and above-ground crown structures of different trees significantly reduce soil erosion losses by checking water runoff and wind movement. The multiple tiers of a complex MC farm serve to retain soil humidity and enhance decomposition of organic matter, thus enhancing efficiency of resource use. In eastern India and Bangladesh, the practice of growing dhanché (Sesbania canabina) prior to monsoon rice, and sowing chickpea and beans on the rice farm margin are known to improve soil nitrogen, moisture retention capacity, and microbial growth. In sub-Saharan Africa, the traditional practice of littering the farmland with Leucaena leaves is known to improve soil characteristics, and stabilize soil invertebrate populations (Plucknett and Smith 1986). Analysis of farm economics under different types of soil erosion constraints showed that no-tillage was consistently more profitable than conventional tillage (Domanico et al. 1986). More recently, Lu (1999) compared productivity of four systems in Maryland, USA: a no-tillage system with recommended agrochemical inputs, a no-tillage system with living mulch, a no-tillage system with winter annual cover crop, and a reduced tillage system with zero chemical inputs. The study showed that the no-tillage system was uniformly more profitable, with or without chemicals, than reduced tillage farms, and the one with cover crop was the most profitable. The organic system is not profitable in the initial years, but has the potential for long-term profitability. (iii) Reduced greenhouse gas emission An estimation by Uhlig et al. (1994) shows that shifting cultivation in South East Asia is far more benign as a carbon source than settled agricultural systems, and that modernization of farming is the main reason for the region to become a carbon source. (iv) Increased resilience In some forms of agroforestry systems, the cropping system is stabilized by physical structural integration and heterochrony of reproductive cycles of the different plant species. In ancient time farmers evolved diverse multiple cropping systems based on centuries of empirical observation of production consequences of diverse species combinations. MC farms are known to be highly resilient to environmental vagaries, with a part of the crop species always ensuring a quota of yield. Extrapolating from studies of species-rich ecological systems (e.g. Hector 1999; Tilman 1999; Tilman et al. 2006), the increased stability and

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Shifting Cultivation and Forest Flora

F

ollowing FAO’s (1957) labelling of shifting cultivation as the most serious land-use problem in the tropical world, all development literature condemned it as destructive of the soil, forest and biodiversity. This is sometimes also upheld as an evidence of how indigenous peoples have blindly destroyed their environment. Both shifting cultivation and its practitioners are often ‘negatively stereotyped’ as primitive, unproductive and destructive of the environment (IFAD et al., 2001: 41). Agricultural experts allude to the presumed unsustainability of this primitive agriculture to justify agricultural modernization and development. More balanced studies over the recent decade have shown that the environmental impact of shifting cultivation depends more on the length of fallow and the pace of regeneration of the forest during the fallow period than on the standard slash and burn activity (Mertz 2002). Forest trees and undergrowth are cleared, but a few uncut trees are left scattered in the swidden land. Fire burns most of the above-ground vegetation, but underground stumps of coppicious trees and rhizomes are not destroyed. The duration of cultivation of crops is normally one year, during which diverse crops are grown. The crops include dryland varieties of cereals, tuberous and rhizome crops, leafy vegetables, oilseed crops, fruit trees, and grasses and herbs. In most shifting cultivation farms, the number of crop species may exceed 30. The land is then left fallow for a period ranging between 5 and 50 years. The fallow system itself is designed to allow the ‘return of the forest’ in the farmland. Floral biodivesity is enhanced several-fold in the forest after traditional shifting cultivation with long periods of fallow. Singh (1996) reported that in Mizoram, within two months of the paddy harvest, the jhum field is covered with profuse shrubs and herbaceous plants. The bamboo Melocanna bambusoides also emerge and spread rapidly during the monsoon, and within a year reach a density of 1285 culms per ha. Early herbaceous colonists are replaced by bamboos, until one species, Dendrocalamus hamiltonii, becomes most abundant in a 20-year fallow. In a 50-year fallow, broadleaved species can re-establish by outcompeting the bamboo. The tree species diversity increases with successional age of the fallow, and a mixed forest with great floral diversity is eventually established (Ramakrishnan 1993). Farmers in Burma and Central Africa plant selected tree species after the crop harvest. This ‘planted fallow’ greatly enhances the process of soil restoration and forest regeneration (Christanty 1986: 238).

complexity of the MC farms, like traditional home gardens, is likely to account for high stability and resilience to the system. Traditional farming systems generally incorporate a large diversity of crop species and their varieties in order to ensure resilience. The traditional practice of growing mixtures of landraces is effective in reducing disease incidents (Castilla et al. 2003; Borromeo and Deb 2006). Planting of different crop varieties with a

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broad range of desirable agronomic characteristics in different combinations is designed to ensure yield against environmental uncertainties. The Hanunoos of Mindoro, Philippines used to grow 430 crops a year on the same farm plot, producing enough food and materials to meet the annual food needs of the household (Conklin 1957). In regions where the timings of rain and flash flood, and the duration of dry spell are largely unpredictable, polyculture systems tend to minimize the risk of yield loss. The sorjan farming system is an exemplary intensive intercropping system used in the Philippines and Indonesia (De Datta 1981). Briefly, the sorjan system is a series of alternate raised beds (ridges) and furrows that create a striped pattern across the field. Because upland and lowland crops are grown at the same time, the major advantages of a sorjan farming system over a flat-bed lowland rotation system are: greater opportunity for crop diversification, lower risk of total crop failure and increased farm income. Risk of total crop failure is reduced because, in seasons with heavy rainfall, crops on the ridges have good drainage, whereas in seasons of low rainfall, water collects in the furrows, thus decreasing the risk of drought to lowland rice (Clough et al., 2001).

Notes 1.

The Club of Rome’s computations was based on some highly questionable assumptions in a mechanistic model rather than a detailed empirical study of the problems at hand. However, the claim that human civilization is actually imperiled by a major ecological disaster has crystallized a growing consensus among scientists.

2.

In this example, I have used a pair of difference equations: Nt+1 = Nt r (1 – Nt /K) – V(Nt) Nt Pt Pt+1 = Pt [1 + c V(Nt) Nt – m] where Nt is the prey density, Pt the predator density, m the natural mortality rate of the predator population, and c the biomass conversion constant, that is, the rate at which prey biomass is converted into reproductive tissue in the predator’s body. V(Nt) is the characteristic trophic function of the predator, that is, a measure of how fast the average predator eats its prey at a given prey density. I have assumed the trophic function of the Holling type II form: V(Nt) = b Nt /(K + Nt)

3.

Assuming r = 1.2 and K = 100, as mentioned in the text, I have arbitrarily, though not unrealistically, chosen b = 0.1, m = 0.01 and c = 0.1 to produce the prey and predator dynamics shown in Figure 15. This is evidenced by a multitude of phenomena, often unrecognized as such in scientific literature. The annual outbreak of green leaf hopper and white leaf hopper populations just around the time of rice harvest (October-November) is well known to South Asian farmers for centuries. To control the abundance of these pest insects, Indian farmers traditionally observe the festival of light, diwali, with fires lit around houses and amid

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4.

A version of Chief Seattle’s (more correctly, Seathl’s) speech given in 1854 to Isaac Stevens, Commissioner of Indian Affairs for the new Washington Territories, was translated by Dr. Henry Smith. In 1972, Environmental Action magazine published Ted Perry’s re-wording of the speech, this time claiming that it was Seathl’s letter to President Franklin Pearce. Shortly afterwards, Seathl’s speech was reprinted several hundred times over, and became perhaps the most respected, duplicated and repeated statement of the environmental movement. The text is now known to have been mostly Perry’s composition (see Rothenberg 1999).

5.

This inference of the biological inheritance of the fear of snake from its apparently universal occurrence can be opposed on two counts. First, the universal occurrence need indicate a genetic basis: the antiquity of the belief in sprits in all cultures does not imply a genetic inheritance of this belief. Second, the human fear of snakes, like all phobias, is culturally transmitted, and develops with age. In villages of Asia and Africa, it is not uncommon to see toddlers play with snakes – until adults appear and intervene. Children learn to fear snakes, just as they learn to fear scorpions, witches and ghosts, from adults who construct these real as well as imaginary stereotypical objects of fear.

6.

Because of ecological and thermodynamic limits of the earth, sustainable growth is physically as well as in principle impossible in a finite world. I therefore choose to ignore all economic models of sustainable GNP growth, and confine my discussion to those that deal with sustainability as undiminishing social welfare across generations – a plausible condition for development. The prevalent free-market version of sustainability is treated in Section 8.2.2 as a corporate co-optation of the term to sabotage the very concept of sustainability.

7.

Every pisciculture pond is a drastically simplified and homogenized ecosystem, whose productivity is sustained by external inputs of matter.

8.

A few MNCs have claimed biopracy patents on folk knowledge of the uses and properties of different indigenous plants like the neem, turmeric and Indian mustard from India and quinoa from Mexico and ipil ipil from Amazonian nations. Challenges to these patents have resulted in withdrawal of these patents, albeit after expenditure of huge sums of money. A patent on the fungicidal property of neem was cancelled and acknowledged by the European Patents Office to have been a case of ‘theft’ of traditional Indian knowledge of this property, recorded in ancient Sanskrit texts (IFOAM press release, 2005: http://www.ifoam.org/press/press/neem_patent_victory.html).

C h a p t e r

7

Consilience and Change

C

onsilience is a Wittgensteinian term recently used by Edward Wilson (1998) to mean simultaneous conceptual and methodological advancement (‘jumping together’) of knowledge by sharing and interlinking pieces of information across different disciplines. In the sustainability discourse that is still evolving, a veritable consilience may be shown to have occurred in the disciplines of ecology and economics, and concomitantly, in the politics and ethics of environmentalism. The recent understanding of chaos and fractal dynamics of nature’s architecture, ecological functions of biodiversity, and the recognition of non-monetary values of natural wealth mark the beginning of an auspicious change in the ideological edifice of development. These understandings fail to conform to the conventional reductionist and instrumental view of nature. The conventional framework of resource management policies and practices has come to a turning point in history, as it fails to solve present problems of vanishing resources and values. ‘It does not effectively explain observed phenomena nor does it give good direction for future decisions’ (Bernard and Young 1997: 21). The conventional ecological thinking and the managerial worldview have both encountered a number of surprises (sensu Holling), which do not seem to conform to the conventional reductionist and deterministic worldview. A more coherent and comprehensive interpretation of the functional complexities of reallife interconnections and interactions between ecosystems and human social systems is given by the non-equilibrium ecology and ecological economics. This new interpretation constitutes major perceptual shifts in natural and social sciences, and also in public view of scientific progress. In the landscape of novel uncertainties 327

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and failed assurances – ranging from nuclear disasters in Chernobyl and the growing signs of climate change to the sudden outbreaks of fatal maladies from unexpected sources (AIDS, mad cow disease, bird flu, SARS), and unpredictable environmental hazards from transgenic organisms – the public complacency and confidence in progress has now shifted to a general suspicion and caution, and in some places, alarm. With the onset of economic globalization, the political discourse has merged simultaneously with the economic and ethical spheres of discourse. The new discourse is rapidly expanding. As Bernard and Young (1997: 23) have analyzed: Thousands of people from all walks of life are calling for change. Resource management professionals are risking their careers by questioning their organisations’ methods, observers and citizens are turning into activists calling for change, theologians and philosophers and educators are begging us to reconsider our place in the scheme of things…

In the current ecological and economic literature concerned with resource allocation, development and use, a perception that ‘the present framework does not work’ seems to prevail. In ecology, attention is now focused on the nonequilibrium phenomena. In economics, discussions on ethical and political components like preference, freedom, empowerment and entitlements to resources have taken place. On the policy level, a similar consilient shift is reflected in national legislations and international treaties that seem to increasingly recognize the importance of ecosystem peoples in ecosystem management. In this chapter, I focus on the current idioms of change in the development discourse. I shall treat the recent epistemic achievements constituting consilience toward sustainability, namely, the fresh attention of ecology to non-equilibrium dynamics, the emergence of ecological economics, the globalized civil society movements for peace, freedom and democracy, and the shift in national and international resource use policies governing the planet’s environment.

7.1

‘Post-modern Ecology’: A Paradigm Shift?

The classical ‘equilibrium’ ecology worked on two fundamental premises, namely, that there is a balance of nature, and that this balance is disrupted by human activities. These premises work behind all national laws and international treaties concerning conservation (Botkin 1990: 9). All conservation legislation and regulations, based on ecological advises, aim to minimize and ultimately prohibit any anthropogenic disturbance to ‘natural’ ecosystems. Based on these premises, ecosystem people have been systematically kept out of reserve forests, sanctuaries and national parks everywhere. The enclosure of wild lands and ecosystems has

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sparked several protest movements and borne undesired consequences. The forest department’s agenda of conservation continues to be synonymous with enclosure and exclusion, justified in terms of ‘ecological’ principles of ‘scientific’ forestry, even when the enclosure has often proved disastrous to the very wild lands and wild species it aimed to protect, as happened in the exemplary case of Keoladeo National Park (see Section 3.3.2). As discussed above, the recent development in ecology theory describes nature as fundamentally erratic, discontinuous and essentially unpredictable. The biological world (and for that matter physical world, such as climate) is now understood to be dominated by nonlinear relationships and their resulting thresholds and multiple stable states. Application of the catastrophe theory to singular changes in rather entangled ecosystems holds a key to the uncertainty and unpredictability of ecosystem behaviour (Knowlton 1992; Scheffer et al. 2001). This ‘postmodern’ ecology theory seems to be considerably difficult to get accommodated in the environmental conservation premises. Many (e.g. SEI 2001; Ingerson 2002) see this radical change in the description of nature as a ‘paradigm shift’ in ecology. While this shift is consilient with similar shifts in social science research and political thought, it has invited critique mostly – though not exclusively – from non-scientists. An example is historian Donald Worster (1993) who argues that acceptance of the chaos theory would render scientific understanding of the world impossible. It would also alienate humans from nature, as there would be nothing to love or preserve in a world of constant flux and chaos. Worster’s apprehension is not shared by many ecologists, nor unsupported by studies of indigenous people’s relationship with nature. If the findings of nonequilibrium ecology have any implication to alienate any people from nature, it is the people and institutions in power, representing development of wild lands and native cultures. It alienates the people and institutions who might otherwise be supporters, financial as well as political, of ecological research (Ingerson 2002). In particular, the classical notions of harmony, stability and order in nature die hard in forestry and wildlife management regimes. The ‘new’ ecological view seems to challenge the ‘standard view’ of forest management. The evidence of the stochastic nature of ecosystems, governed by chance and analytically intractable complexity, contradicts the standard principle of forestry predicated on simplification, homogenization and predictability, underpinning governmentality. The nonequilibrium worldview creates the uncomfortable policy situation in that the science of ecology gives no certain answer to the questions of management of nature and natural resources. The unpredictability of complex ecosystem behaviour is due to the discontinuity of steady states of the system. It is almost impossible to identify the thresholds

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and breakpoints of an ecosystem. Coral reefs on the north coast of Jamaica provide a vivid example. Despite centuries of severe intensive mechanized overfishing, these reefs did not show any perceptible signs of disruption until the 1990s, when the corals and sea urchin populations rapidly declined for reasons that remain unclear (Knowlton 1992). Several coral species have already become extinct in many coral reefs around the world. Similar studies of complex ecosystem dynamics show that a loss of resilience usually causes an ecosystem to switch to an alternative state. Thus strategies for sustainable management of such ecosystems should focus on maintaining resilience (Scheffer et al. 2001). An important management implication of this is that removing a stress may not automatically lead to recovery: the damage (such as species loss) once inflicted may never be undone, particularly for complex ecosystems. Monitoring, a favourite tool of classical management theory, is not adequate to prevent a catastrophe, because once the ecosystem starts collapsing into an alternative steady state, nothing could retrieve it. Many ecologists try to contextualize the issue of unpredictability of ecological consequences: It is particularly important to emphasize the differences between an ecological worldview that focuses on historical contingency, population uniqueness, and irreversibility and a mechanistic worldview that emphasizes repeatability, replaceablity, and reversibility… Unless they provide this context, ecologists will not be able to convince managers to plan for surprises, to invest in learning, or to take a sophisticated approach to risk. (Peterson et al. 1997)

This allusion to the need to ‘convince managers’ is linked to the fact that the Western convention of nature in state of imagined innocence and balance has ‘permeated global policies and politics of resource management from the tropics to the desert, causing serious environmental problems’ (Gómez-Pompa and Kaus 1992: 272). There exists a cultural lag, an attitudinal inertia, in conventional resource management policy that inhibits a thorough institutional acceptance of the insights of the non-equilibrium ecology. Most textbooks are still suffused with descriptions of Lyapunov stability toward which natural ecosystems evolve as a rule. As Daniel Botkin observes, George Perkins Marsh’s idea of nature as undisturbed by human influence is [still] dominant in textbooks on ecology and in the popular environmental literature. Perhaps even more significant, this idea of nature… is the basis of most national laws and international agreements that control the use of wild lands and wild creatures just as it was an essential part of the 1960s and 1970s mythology about conservation, environment, and nature. (Botkin 1990: 9)

Some authors point out that in non-equilibrium ecology, ‘anything goes’: there is no natural law of stability and constancy, and therefore it is superfluous to

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devise mechanisms to restrict anthropogenic changes in natural ecosystems and landscapes. The idea of a risky nature is one that is hard for many people to swallow… Environmentalists recoil at the notion precisely because it seems to give man license to transform nature at will. If what is here could just as well have been something completely different, then what is wrong with turning forests to deserts or prairies to cattle ranches or wetlands to sugarcane fields? The honest and uncomfortable answer is that from a scientific point of view, there is nothing at all wrong with these things. (Budiansky 1995: 98)

This is an overstatement however, based on a wrong interpretation of the new ecological insights and findings. What is implied by ‘new ecology’ surely does not endorse anthropogenic mass extinction of species and ecosystem destruction. An enhanced extinction rate and deliberate ecosystem destruction are unacceptable to all ecologists. Even ecological changes that take place without apparent human agency could be undesirable from the perspective of unique species and human survival. As Botkin explains, […] to accept certain kinds of change is not to accept all kinds of change. Moreover, we must focus our attention on the rates at which changes occur, understanding that certain rates of change are natural, desirable, and acceptable, while others are not. As long as we refuse to admit that any change is natural, we cannot make this distinction and deal with its implications. (Botkin 1990: 12)

Writers (mostly non-ecologists) who hail non-equilibrium ecology as a radical science highlight the failure of conventional ecological premises to adequately take account of statistical uncertainty in describing certain key attributes of ecosystems like the community architecture. However, in conventional ecology, recognition of unpredictability of certain ecosystem properties is not out of place. The ‘new’ ecology is new because of its shift in emphasis on change and flux from that on stability and constancy. It recognizes that behaviour of a natural ecosystem may be largely unpredictable because of its complexity, that complex ecosystems have multiple equilibrium states, determined by different stochastic environmental factors. However, the existence of multiple stable points is no new discovery. It is a fact that has long been known to ecologists (May 1977; Knowlton 1992). The fact that natural communities are in a state of constant flux has also been indicated in several studies within the conventional paradigm of ecology (e.g. Lane 1985; Deb 1997). Environmental stochasticity has also been modelled in explaining different types of ecosystem behaviour. Thus ‘new ecology’ is new essentially for a shift in its emphasis on the process rather than on the end point, and in its policy implications. Risks and uncertainties do exist in reducing natural capital because of the inherently limited predictability of ecosystems and social systems. Also, losses of

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life-support functions of ecosystems are often irreversible. In the new ecology paradigm, the most important challenge is to identify in multi-perturbation space those perturbations that lead to extinction of the key ecosystem components (Kates et al. 2001). Far from overlooking anthropogenic perturbations, the development of non-equilibrium ecology recognizes that modern resource-depletive economic activities (like deforestation, mechanized fishing and industrialized agriculture) may elicit unpredictable and irreversible ecological changes. Thus it represents a shift of objective from prediction to precaution, and advocates for implementing the ‘precautionary principle.’ It suggests that in the face of uncertainty and irreversibility, conserving whatever remains of the earth’s life support systems and acting more cautiously with regard to economic growth until its effects upon the planet’s ecological life support system are better understood ought to be a sound strategy to avoid risk (Cairns 2001). However, while the new ecology advocates caution in managing the natural world, it does not consider all human interaction with nature to be destructive and disruptive of natural ecological systems. Ecologists now understand that there is perhaps no perfectly untrammelled, ‘virgin’ ecosystem: every ecosystem on earth has been influenced by human activities, directly or indirectly. Even the polar Antarctica, where no direct anthropogenic impact is detectable, receives a high dose of ultraviolet irradiation because industrial activities half the world away have created ozone holes in its sky. Non-equilibrium ecology acknowledges the state of constant flux of natural systems, and counts human agency as an important factor in ecological dynamics. Unlike the classical ecology theory, the ‘new ecology’ does not consider humans – especially ecosystem people – as an outsider. This has a ‘new’ radical political implication, and challenges what Botkin (1990: 9) calls the ‘mythology about conservation, environment, and nature.’ It subverts the élite view of the rural poor and ecosystem people as agents of destruction of nature. In the classical equilibrium view, wilderness is a delicately balanced, pristine natural space without human presence. In this view, human activities like hunting-gathering and agroforestry disrupt natural ecological processes, and the natural forest is degraded from its ‘climax’ state – a state of equilibrium in which species diversity is large and constant. When worked by humans, the climax forest becomes a relic, secondary forest. The climax theory has constituted a persistent scientific bias in conventional forestry and conservation biology. Its fallacy has been best described by two forest historians who examined the scientific myths about the forest-savanna mosaic existing in Kissidougou of Guinea. Forestry literature, school textbooks, statutes of environmental NGOs and international conservation agencies as well as ‘all administrators and environmental

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policy-makers for a century have been looking at a similar landscape, but thinking it to be the relic of a quite different one, suffering past and ongoing deforestation’ under the effect of logging, shifting cultivation and bush fires (Fairhead and Leach 1996: 25). Using local oral history, landscape descriptions in archival records and satellite data, Fairhead and Leach have shown that the forest patches of Kissidougou are more accurately post-savanna than post-forest. The forest mosaics are not degraded, sub-climax vegetation, but were created by native people who had been planting trees over centuries. This study confirms what the nonequilibrium ecology posits, namely that the conventional climax theory is unhelpful in explaining much of real-life forest architecture, species composition and ecological processes. Similar studies reveal that Mayan agroforestry over centuries in the past created what is now the Amazonian rainforest with its bewildering biodiversity and forest architecture (Gómez-Pompa and Kaus 1992; Roosevelt 1994; Raffles 1999). A growing mass of evidence suggests that what is now perceived as mature vegetation ‘may well be the legacy of past civilizations, the heritage of cultivated fields and managed forests abandoned hundreds of years ago’ (Gómez-Pompa and Kaus 1992: 274). The biased ecological assumptions regarding the ‘balance of nature’ and the inherent destructiveness of native human activity have systematically formed the principles of management of natural resources. ‘Scientific’ forestry since the 19th century has systematically blamed ecosystem peoples for deforestation. As Fairhead and Leach (1998) argues, the scale of deforestation wrought by West African farmers during the 20th century has been vastly exaggerated and élite conservationists and official conservation policies have unfairly stigmatized them and obscured their more sustainable, landscape-enriching practices. Non-equilibrium ecology acknowledges the role of ancient ecosystem peoples in maintaining and even enhancing the biodiversity of what has so far been described as ‘virgin’ ecosystems. It recognizes that the ecological history of every ecosystem is a history of change in the ecosystem structure, species composition and ecological processes, and that human economic-ecological systems that evolved alongside ecosystems are intricately connected to this history. This shift in perspective on people as a component, rather than a disruptive agent of local ecosystems is what constitutes the major management implication and political thrust of the ‘new,’ non-equilibrium ecology. The new ecology recognizes the key role of ecosystem peoples in shaping the forest physiognomy and biodiversity, and speaks against the principle of exclusion of ecosystem people from the wild lands which conservationists aim to conserve. In contrast to the conventional ecology, non-equilibrium ecology implies that human action is not necessarily destabilizing to ecosystems, nor is it necessarily destructive of biodiversity. Thus

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non-equilibrium ecology marks a shift in perspective rather than in the paradigm of describing nature. Perhaps the most significant change that the current emphasis on ecological dynamics and scale has occasioned is in the resource management philosophy. Instead of the administrative scale, management has now begun to recognize the importance of ecological scale. The new form of management adopts a strategy that seeks to mimic the flexible, dynamic and cyclic character of ecological systems. ‘Ideally, adaptive management increased responsiveness to ecosystem problems by promoting the values of continual innovation and adaptation in response to changing conditions, problems, and degree of success (or failure) enjoyed by solutions’ (Weber 2003: 196). Pro-active, rather than reactive prevention, post hoc mitigation of problems, and heuristic learning through experiments are the basic rules of adaptive management. The inherent uncertainties and limits of our knowledge necessitate interconnecting disparate sets of data from different disciplines. This interdisciplinary approach to the environment requires a large body of social experience, skills, and knowledge base, while adaptation in response to diverse experimental outcomes in diverse conditions of management requires community involvement. Adaptive management policy has been the basis of many indigenous resource management systems, and has also been adopted by many modern community management styles. Experiences of success in resource conservation through community involvement (see Section 7.5.2) indicate that adaptive management policy is likely to be most successful in a civic democracy where the decision-making process is decentralized and pro-active measures are implemented by broad based civic participation.

7.2

The Science and Economics of Sustainability

Recent reports of national and international scientific organizations, as well as reports from independent networks of activists and scientists indicate that there is an emerging realization among the scientific community that the continuing process of development is unsustainable. The United Nations Environment Programme Report, Global Environment Outlook 2000 has indicated that meeting fundamental human needs while preserving the life-support systems of Earth will require a worldwide transition toward sustainability. Environmental scientists and activists repeatedly express concern about the deepening vulnerability of both humans and the natural world resulting from the combined effects of global climate change, loss of biological diversity, increasing poverty and disease, and growing inequality. To halt this course of development, the world scientific community recommends the urgent need of a social transition toward sustainability

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through a general understanding of the complex dynamic interactions between society and nature (IAP 2000; Kates et al. 2001). Attempts at integrating scientific expertise from diverse disciplines have in recent years occasioned the emergence of ‘Sustainability Science.’ In October 2000, a workshop on Sustainability Science was held in Friibergh, Sweden. The workshop stated that What is urgently needed now is a better general understanding of the complex dynamic interactions between society and nature so that the alarming trend towards increasing vulnerability is reversed. This will require major advances in our ability to analyze and predict the behavior of complex self-organizing systems, characterize the irreversible impacts of interacting stresses, interpret multiple scales of organization, and assess the roles of various social actors with divergent expectations. (NCSE 2000)

Similar workshops on sustainability were organized in all continents (e.g. in Abuja, Nigeria: 13–15 November 2001; Chiang Mai, Thailand: 4–6 February 2002; Trieste, Italy: 6–9 February 2002; Santiago, Chile: 5–7 March 2002; Mexico City: 20–23 May 2002), all of which have articulated the goal of Sustainability Science: to forge a combined effort of science and technology to make a transition towards sustainable development (Kates et al. 2001; ISTS 2001, 2002; Clark et al. 2002; Gallopín 2002; TWAS 2002). These workshops recommended that Sustainability Science be integrated into national science policies as an on-going process in the development strategy of individual countries. In view of the complexity of ecological and socio-cultural systems, scientists also recommended that ‘Research strategies must be planned not only to deal with problems of land degradation, climate change and uncontrolled urbanization but also to take advantage of the natural endowments of the region especially biodiversity, cultural diversity, languages and indigenous technology’ (ISTS, 2001). Scientists at the New Mexico workshop articulated the need for a ‘substantive focus on the dynamic interactions between “socio-ecological” systems’ to promote sustainability (Clark et al. 2002: 6). It further recommended that science and technology be ‘embedded in the particular characteristics of distinct locations or contexts.’ By this, the workshop implied that science and technology ‘will have to broaden where it looks for knowledge, reaching beyond the essential bodies of specialized scholarship to include endogenously generated knowledge, innovations, and practices’ (Clark et al. 2002: 6). The science of sustainability receives strong collateral support from ecological economics, which deals with economic problems in conjunction with human ecology and the environment. The focus of ecological economic analysis is human social and political motives that govern and maintain economic processes. Ecological economic research seeks to correct the faulty assumptions in the

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tradition of neo-classical economics – like the universal profit-maximizing motive of individuals (see Section 2.2.1) and universal substitutability of natural resources (see Section 2.2.2). Whereas neo-classical economics, in its aspiration to become an exact science, regards politics and ethics as at best interesting social factors external to the omnipotent market mechanisms, ecological economics incorporates them into economic modelling, which becomes non-linear and sometimes too complex to solve. Rather than (over)simplifying, models of ecological economics highlight the complexity and mathematical intractability of the ecological-economic problems. One of the fundamental achievements of ecological economic research is that it has established the possibility and viability of a steady-state economy. Until the emergence of ecological economics, professional economists tended to disregard the idea of zero-growth economy (see Section 6.4) as utopian nonsense based on flimsy theoretical ground. Indeed, a normal interest rate of zero would strip the economy of any monetary incentives to growth (see Technical Discussion 2). This would further entail zero rate of profit, because the rates of interest (or discount) and of profit are interdependent (see Section 2.2.1), so there would be no quantitative growth at all. Ecological economics has now won enough theoretical ground to argue that an economy based on zero rates of profit and interest (see eqn. 6.11) is possible, provided there is adequate political will to accept radical transformations in lifestyle and thinking. ‘The transition to a steady-state economy would require that lower, and eventually zero, rates of profit be progressively considered as normal’ (Jaeger 1994: 235). Models of conservation-oriented resource use, prognostication of qualitative economic growth based on zero rates of interest and profit (Section 6.4), and empirical models of food and nutritional security without quantitative growth (Section 6.5) have fortified the strong sustainability contention of ecological economics. While zero rates of interest and profit seem to be unacceptable or impracticable to ministries of finance, policy makers and professional economists, many governments have set out to restructure their fiscal policies in an attempt to internalize the environmental and social costs of commodities and services. Most professional economists have accepted the urgency of conserving natural resources at least on utilitarian grounds, and consider that a fiscal policy to reflect environmental and social costs of the economy is the best policy instrument to achieve environmental goals because it works through the market. Lester Brown (2001: 234) believes that ecological costs of various economic activities ‘can be incorporated into the market price of a product or service in the form of a tax.’ He argues that environmental taxes and subsidy shifting are the appropriate and most

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effective instruments to reverse the current eco-destructive mode of the economy: Taxes designed to incorporate in their prices the environmental costs of producing goods and providing services enable the market to send the right signal. They discourage such activities as coal burning, the use of throwaway beverage containers, or cyanide gold mining. Subsidies can be used to encourage such activities as planting trees, using water more efficiently, and harnessing wind energy. (Brown 2001: 235)

However, there is a basic difficulty with the belief that eco-destructive behaviour will disappear with the restructuring of the tax system. Taxes cannot reflect the actual environmental and social costs. The costs of clear-cutting a forest include the costs of soil erosion, downstream flooding, local extinction of different life forms, disruption of groundwater recharging, reduction in carbon fixing rates, and so on. Determining the total cost of clear-cutting would presuppose a precise valuation of all relevant environmental goods and services. As discussed in Section 2.2.1, valuation of nature is bound to be incomplete. Furthermore, the amount of the environmental tax to be imposed in real life is delimited by the amount of income tax reduction to offset the additional tax on goods and services. The prevalent market arrangement will most likely reject any environmental taxes if they exceed the offsetting reduction in income tax. Only a reduction in the rates of interest and discounting to zero will be capable of reflecting the infinite value of natural assets, which no money can buy. Nevertheless, until a zero-growth economy is achieved, the current economic arrangements can deter profligate use of natural resources significantly by designing taxes to incorporate at least a part of environmental costs into the market price of a product or service. In The Netherlands, taxes on the industrial discharge of heavy metals have, within a period of 20 years, reduced the release of cadmium, copper, lead, mercury and zinc into the environment by 86–97 percent (Brown 2001: 238). Conversely, subsidies to zero-chemical agriculture, ecological forestry and solar and wind power technologies can propel research in, and development of, ‘alternative technology’ with low cost, near-zero environmental impact and improved quality of life. Certification of goods produced by environmentally friendly processes – like organic farm products, recycled paper, energy saving household appliances, and fishery products from sustainably managed fisheries – is another mechanism to encourage environmentally sound production and consumption patterns. All these fiscal mechanisms in the prevalent economic arrangements can facilitate adoption of an ecologically prudent economy because they work through the market. But market forces cannot bring about any fiscal rearrangement, which is possible only through political and legal measures taken

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by state legislators. The successes of the extra-economic attempt at (partly) internalizing environmental costs of economic activities seem to underscore the significance of political and legal superstructure in reorienting the economy toward sustainability.1 Research in ecological economics is increasingly influencing the tradition of professional economics to the extent that mainstream economic publications now cannot evade questions of environmental destruction, limits to growth, human development and freedom and extra-market controls (through state legislature) over resources. Ecological economic research is contributing to close the gap between economics, politics and ethics, and has given new directions to building a sustainable society. Ecological economics – and environmental economics – have suggested ways to restructuring the national economy, for example by instituting new mechanisms of incentives and disincentives to resource depletion and waste. Suggestions include imposition of energy taxes, instituting zero rates of interest and discount, and a system of certifying and ‘eco-labelling’ eco-friendly products and services. These novel ideas, although contradictory to conventional economic thinking, may be expected to find wide acceptance among the public and policy makers as the environmental problems become increasingly pressing.

7.3

Pre-industrial Societies and Models of Sustainability

Pre-industrial societies may serve as valid models of sustainability. Many of the indigenous societies in Asia, Africa, Australia and the Americas, constituting the Fourth World, are characterized by a diversity of pre-industrial economies. While most of the pre-industrial societies have perished in the wake of European colonial campaign of modernization, a considerable number of contemporary indigenous societies continue to remain outside the pale of industrial civilization. These societies share a common worldview in which inter-generational environmental equity is upheld in what Carolyn Merchant (1990) identifies as the ecological ethic. Inasmuch as these indigenous societies have resisted, or perchance escaped, market economy and/or Western(ized) education, their social polity and culture retain much of the ecological ethic through a pristine form of civic democracy, that has conserved their local resource base to a great extent. These societies involve most, if not all, of their adult members in problem solving and decision making processes; create and maintain physical and moral spaces for gathering of individuals; and function to give credence to long-term individual benefits through enhancing collective interests. Thus, traditional societies can guide a meaningful social change toward sustainability. A template of sustainability, characterized by inclusive

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freedom and inter-generational justice, is thus more likely to be found in indigenous societies than in any of the modern societies.

7.3.1 The Traditional and the Indigenous In the provenance of the current discourse on sustainability, the concept of ‘indigenous’ has received significant interest and focus, in the light of the growing demands by nationalities of their rights to management of natural resources. Owing to its multi-dimensionality, the term is inherently problematic. In the global discourse of sustainability, societies upholding their traditions regarding the view of nature and mode of natural resource use are considered to be indigenous societies. The most remarkable difficulty with the concept is posed by the people of South Asia. Literally, the expression should mean groups of people living in a place from the beginning of known history. It is relatively easy to identify the indigenous people in the Americas because only Native American populations inhabited these continents until 1500 AD. However, demarcating non-tribal inhabitants as non-indigenous, as is often meant in the development ethnographic literature, is inappropriate in a place like South Asia. In India, the regimentation of the native aboriginal populations in administrative discourse as ‘Scheduled Tribes’ (ST), is equally problematic, primarily because numerous tribal groups were Sanskritized and brought into the pale of dominant mainstream culture centuries ago, eventually making them lose their tribal identity – a fact that leaves these tribes outside the definition of ST. Recent research indicates that the Dravidian-speaking groups were the dominant aboriginal inhabitants of South Asia, but today these groups are mostly scattered in south and central India, along with other ethnic groups who also migrated and settled there (Gadgil et al. 1995; Cavalli-Sforza 2001). Waves of migration throughout the subcontinent and subsequent racial and linguistic admixtures over millennia blur the anthropological distinction between indigenous and supposedly non-indigenous groups. Thus, identifying indigenous peoples with the ST community alone not only ignores a significant dynamics of the bio-cultural history of the aboriginal societies, but also the fact that numerous non-ST peoples – living alongside the tribals in and around forests, along the coast, and in high-altitude montane areas – comprise the ecosystem people of India, whose mode of living, livelihoods and worldview have remained for centuries outside the mainstream modernity. Closely associated with the concept of the indigenous is that of tradition, which is operationally problematic in the context of indigenous societies and their behaviours. Some authors (e.g. Brouwer 1998) assert that ‘true tradition’ comprises proven ancient, original and distinctive customs, conventions and routines.

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However, this notion of tradition appears to be static, out-dated, and is bereft of its ontogenetic dynamics. Tradition consists in the age-old knowledge base and rituals, customarily passed down the generations. In this view of tradition, therefore, innovation in traditions seems to be an oxymoron. An opposing view of tradition is given by the Four Directions Council (1996): What is ‘traditional’ about traditional knowledge is not its antiquity, but the way it is acquired and used. In other words, the social process of learning and sharing knowledge, which is unique to each indigenous culture, lies at the very heart of its ‘traditionality.’ Much of this knowledge is actually quite new, but it has a social meaning, and legal character, entirely unlike the knowledge indigenous people acquire from settlers and industrialized societies.

This description seems to situate traditional knowledge in the context of indigenous cultures, yet allows innovations to take place within tradition (Dutfield 1999). It also describes tradition as a shared information base that is passed on to the successive generations of a community. This description delineates an important point of departure in the discourse of traditionality: it is the means of sharing and the transmission of cultural traits, and not the set of traits being shared and transmitted, that characterize tradition. To illustrate the social meaning of cultural heritability of innovation in tradition, let us compare an exogenous and an endogenous novelty which, as a unit of cultural replication and transmission, is transmitted between the members of a given population, both vertically (down family lines), diagonally (between distant relatives of different generations), and horizontally (among peers and friends). Such replicative units of cultural transmission, independent of rules of biological inheritance, may thus be called ‘memes’ sensu Dawkins (1976). In the context of cultural transmission, it is unnecessary to assume that a generation should mean a biological lineage.2 In our hypothetical example, the exogenous piece of information or meme consists of a technology borrowed from an exogenous source (say a herbicide introduced by a foreign corporation for controlling farm weeds), while the endogenous meme consists of, say, a variant technique of traditional weed management. Let us assume that both are more effective in controlling weeds than the conventional method in current practice. In this situation, both are, in principle, equally likely to be transmitted in the population under consideration. However, the difference lies in the mode of transmission. The exogenous meme is learned from an external agent (a company salesman), whereas the endogenous novelty is learned by direct experimentation and/or from participant observation of another farmer practising it. The former is acquired through instructional learning, while the latter is learned through observational and

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heuristic learning. This difference constructs a social meaning for the latter meme in question, which identifies a tradition. The ‘social meaning’ of such knowledge in traditional societies is governed by the following characteristics: a)

Transmission through non-literate communication: Information is transmitted by and large through word of mouth; folkloristic mechanisms, especially folk stories and rumour play a major role in spreading the information of say, the success of a novel technique of crop rotation.

b) Learning through participant observation and heuristic experience: A piece of information spreads when the members of a society learn about it by both direct observation and through trial-and-error method. For instance, as reported by Millar (1994), a Ghanaian farmer wanted to control a serious weed Striga hermonther and conducted a series of experiments with various rotations of crops until he discovered that a continuous cultivation of millet on the field for three or more successive years was a reliable method to eradicate the weed. c)

Preference for diachronic-endogenous over synchronic-exogenous information: Information which is tested and used by previous generations tends to be preferred over that which is not yet tested and comes from an external source. In traditional farming, the information base is constituted by empirical knowledge of predecessors and the farmer’s own intuition and exploratory actions. Innovations that come from outsiders and are devoid of any connection or reference to the past experience or lore of the society are difficult to accept, while innovations made by individuals within the society and those that can relate to the cumulative exp