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Playing God: Are We Trying to Make Developing Countries into Our Own Image?

Kendra Pierre-Louis | Wednesday 4th November 2009

Development is difficult.

Solving world hunger, for example, is not simply a question of feeding the hungry. Food aid argues the charitable organization CARE, may actually spur on hunger by destabilizing local food economies and driving local farmers out of business.

Teaching the hungry how to more efficiently farm, can actually create new unexpected inefficiencies. The Green Revolution in India, in which farmers in the Indian state of Punjab switched from traditional methods to American-style farming - with chemicals, high-yield seeds and irrigation- was once thought to be a rousing success. However, under scrutiny the shiny label of success has lost some of its sheen: India's Green Revolution has depleted ground water, destroyed soil through salinization, locked farmers into cycles of debt and turned what was once a localized hunger problem into a structural one. It also hasn't actually solved India's hunger problem: 1/4th of the world's hungry call India home. A whopping 230 million people or 18% of India's 1.25 billion population is hungry.

It is this model (with the addition of GMO technology) that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a driving force in development, is tenuously throwing its support behind to end hunger in Africa.

Einstein is oft attributed as having said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result. This, my friends, is insanity.

So why are we doing it?

I would say it's because, we in the so-called 'developed' countries have a bit of a God complex. Much as in the Old Testament, where God is said to have made man in his own image, the so-called 'developed' countries want to make developing nations a little bit more in their image.

We take a model of agriculture created in the US, export it to Mexico, then from Mexico to India, and now we're poised to move that food model to Africa, even as we develop a nascent recognition that even in our own countries this model is unsustainable.

In addition, the very idea of a development model is questionable. Cultures, economic systems, and people are diverse for a reason: diversity is sustainable, uniformity is not. Even within the United States the community development model of a single family home, with a resplendent green lawn, located outside of the main commercial area just doesn't fit in many places, despite its rapid growth. Where I am in the Northeast, multi-family units, or apartments are more sustainable in terms of energy use. In the Southwest lawns, which suck up far too much scarce water, just don't make sense. Most areas would benefit from mixed use zoning, where commercial establishments are mixed in with residential (assuming those establishments are not industrial businesses) which would allow the local coffee shop to be within walking (as opposed to driving) distance of the customers who would frequent it. Across the country people would benefit from housing structures that took into consideration the local climate instead of pop-up frame houses, which while quick to build, depend on vast amounts of energy to make them livable.

The writer Eduardo Galeano wrote in his book Upside Down in regards to Latin American development,

"if we are doomed to be imitators can we at least be a bit more selective of what we choose to copy?"

I argue, why do we have to copy at all? As humans we pride ourselves on ability for innovation. We should tap into that vein of creativity to build a more beautiful planet.

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