Globalization and Development

The debate today on “globalization” already shows the signs of having gone where old debates go to die – the realm of sterility and polarized rhetoric. This is despite the fact that it is only a few years old. The straw men employed by both sides in the debate are equally boring. Reactionary, stuck-in-the-past isolationists, technophobes and nay-sayers on the one side and ultra-rich, greedy capitalists, who would sell their own mothers if it helped the stock prices, on the other side. While both these species of animals may exist somewhere on the planet they probably don’t constitute the bulk of people participating in the globalization debate. For my argument here I will assume that whether you are pro-or anti-globalization, pro- or anti-technological progress, a believing Christian, a devout Muslim or an affirmed atheist, you are interested in how life can be improved for the vast multitudes of humanity that are currently unable to lead lives we would consider fully human. What exactly it means to lead a full life, what is a decent standard of living, does everybody need two cars or even one, does everybody need to emulate American patterns of production and consumption, these are question where we may legitimately differ and which we may productively debate.

In a more sophisticated (according to me!) debate on globalization both parties recognize that trade and exchange of men, materials and ideas between civilizations and nations have existed for millenia and will exist for many more. They recognize that the freedom to trade is a basic freedom that people should enjoy along with the freedom to express their ideas, to decide who to befriend and who not to associate with, who to choose to run their governments for them and who not to. The debate instead focusses on what constitutes a good exchange, what constitutes a bad one, and how to foster the good and limit the bad. If you and I interact as equals for our mutual benefit we may both emerge richer for it. If we engage in an unequal exchange, either as ruler and the ruled or as more subtle forms of inequality (racial or class prejudices, other barriers to free exchange) you may emerge richer and I poorer, materially but we will both have impoverished our humanity.

In addition both our debating parties may also agree on the criticism of policies that reduce people’s freedoms in the name of increasing them, that impoverish them in the name of enriching them, that allow rich countries to support subsidies and slap tariffs while poorer nations are disbarred from doing so. Perhaps we may also choose to criticize the fact that economic policies are debated and decided in an undemocratic and unparticipatory fashion by a select club of politicians and ecomnomists who are accountable often only to a small section of humanity while the policies themselves affect much larger sections. The debate may also honestly ackowledge that at times the interests of nations (particuarly poor and rich nations) will conflict. And that in such situations national self-interest will pit them against each other.

But I want to argue here that even this more enligtented debate takes for granted issues such as, what constitutes progress? Are different kinds of progress possible or is there only one? It is accepted as a matter of (at times blind) faith that what worked for today’s industrialized powers in the not-so-distant-past will work for the newly liberated “third-world” (the south, the post-colonial world, most of Asia, Africa and Latin America) -- a drive towards increased indutrialization and adoption of the modern lifestyle (“western civilization”?). True, some lip-service is paid to how modern technology can be adapted to local needs and conditions but it does not appear to go to the heart of the problem. Indeed the true problem may lie, not in faulty adaptation of technologies but with the technologies themselves. The conditions under which modern science (and its offspring modern technology) arose in 16^th-19^th century Europe were very special conditions. England, considered by many to be the birthplace of the industrial revolution, was an up and coming colonial power in the 17^th century and the empire was at its pinnacle in the 19^th century. This assured England with a vast supply of raw materials for her factories at extremely subsidised prices. And a ready market for finished goods (see Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” and Karl Marx’s esssays “On Colonialism” for an analysis of the economics of the colonial process and Sunil Sahasrabuddhey’s essays in “Science and Politics” and Claude Alvares’s book “Homo faber” for the impact of colonialism on science and technology). Unlike India and Africa, in colonies such as those of North and to some extent South America, the native populations were mostly decimated instead of being subjugated. But this also meant the availabiliy of large virgin lands to exploit and upon whose foundation to build a civilization. Note that for this argument it is not important to pass a value judgement on colonialism itself, only to point out that the economics of the colonial process informs the technological solutions developed during that period.

How does that happen? Let us take a specific example of relevance to the agriculture industry that is offered in the above-mentioned book “Science and Politics” and consider two methods for the conversion of Nitrogen into Ammonia. All living things need nitrogen. It comprises almost four-fifths of the air but free nitrogen in the atmosphere can be utilized by plants (and by extension animals) only after it has been “fixed” into ammonia or other related organic compounds. Fixing it into forms that organisms can use is tough (hence farmers spread nitrogen-rich fertilizer on their soil). Nitrogen in the air is very un-reactive. In nature nitrogen fixation is achieved by various types of bacteria and algae thorough multiple, reversible biochemical reactions catalyzed by enzymes (eg. nitrogenases), at ambient temperature and pressure. It is a slow, low yield process but is thermodynamically efficient.

Today nitrogen fertilizers are industrially made by a method almost a century old: the 'Haber-Bosch process', in which nitrogen and hydrogen are combined to make ammonia. Discovered by the German chemist Fritz Haber, this reaction uses an iron catalyst, on which the gases combine under high temperatures (~500°C) and pressures (~200 atmospheres). This is a fast, high yield and non-reversible process. But that makes it very inefficient (in terms of energy usage). The high temperatures and pressures necessary for the reaction to take place are dependent on a large-scale use of fossil fuels, water and other resources.

Through this example I wish to show how several technologies at the heart of the modern lifestyle (who can imagine agriculture without fertilizer?) make critical assumptions about availability of resources (and often markets). At the most general level this may not be news (all forms of human activity make assumptions) but my fear is that our core technologies have not changed to keep pace with our current realities (political, cultural, economic).

On the basis of these cursory obeservations I contend that the defining element of the western way of life, viz, modern science and technology (you may disagree of course, that science and tech are actually defining features of western life) arose under pampered conditions wherein little attention needed to be paid to designing processes and products that would be self-sustainable locally. Hence rooted in the very soul of modern science and technology is a wasteful use of resources that ensures profitability in the short run but risks rapid exhaustion of resouces with no time for adequate replenishment in the long run. Perhaps the concept of cost externalization is useful here (any economists reading this please feel free to attack this line of thought). One way of making products and processes of technology cheaper is to externalize part of their actual cost, meaning simply not to pay for it. Of course someone or something does pay for it, but the cost is hidden. One form of externalization is environmental (e.g. waste disposal by dilution in seas or rivers, extensive use of natural resources without adequate considersation for how to replenish them), the other form is human (e.g. making use of cheap labor like indentured servants, slaves etc., dispossessing peoples of their land and/or resources). Now all human activity may externalize to some extent but a way of life that emerges in the context of massive externalization may find it difficult to shed its injustices in future, more egalitarian times (as we hope we are living in now). This is how I think about the existence of sweat-shops and other inhuman working conditions (diamond mines, pearl fishing, toxic waste recycling plants, assembly lines) in the third world. The developed world (not the just the geographical north but the pockets of opulence that exist in countries such as India as well) needs someone to do the dirty work so that it may enjoy the privileges it is used to. As peoples all over the world gain access to this privileged way of life (i.e. they develop) they condemn someone else to their previously sorry existence. So on and so forth, until who is going to be left to do the work? Robots? Aliens? Can the world afford six billion Americans? True this is not happening in the near future. But already people in the poorer countries are demanding facilties and privileges of the rich. There is no reason to deny these to them but can we honestlly promise them those riches?

Finally, it is important to point out that I am not glorifying the medeival feudal order that colonialism and then industrialism replaced. Nor am I denying that the scientific and industrial revolutions greatly enriched our lives and improved our understanding of ourselves. I am merely pointing out that our enrichment has come at a great cost to many times our number and that this might be inevitable in the way we do things. In which case a truly participatory or egalitarian mode of development maybe impossible within the current paradigm. If this is not your goal then of course its all right.