Help To Those Who Need It Most

 Help To Those Who Need It Most – E F Schumacher

Published in AVARD (Association of Voluntary Agencies for Rural Development) Newsletter, January-February 1961

 I can, frankly, see no value in discussing such questions – very interesting from a purely academic point of view – as the ideal size of towns, the ideal location of industry, or the ideal transport system, because even the most brilliant answers to them will do nothing to mobilize the creative power of the people. Instead, I think, we should ask the much simpler and much more profound question: Why is it that the people are not helping them­selves? What has come over them? On the whole, throughout history, all healthy societies have managed to solve their problem or existence, and always with something to spare for culture. Grinding poverty with malnutrition and degradation, with apathy and despair, as a permanent condition of millions of people, not as a result of war or natural catastrophe – this is a most abnormal and historically speaking, an unheard-of phenomenon.

 All peoples – with exceptions that merely prove the rule – have always known how to help themselves; they have always discovered a pattern of living which fitted their peculiar natural surroundings. Societies and cultures have collapsed when they deserted their own pattern and fell into decadence, but even then, unless devastated by war, the people normally continued to be able to provide for themselves, with something to spare for higher things. Why not now, in so many parts of the world? I am not speaking of ordinary poverty, but of actual and acute misery; not of the poor, which according to the universal tradition of mankind are in a special way blessed, but of the miserable and degraded ones which, by the same tradition, should not exist at all and should be helped by all. Poverty may have been the rule in the past, but misery was not. Poor peasants and artisans have existed from time immemorial; but miserable and destitute villages in their thousands and urban pavement dwellers in their hundreds of thousands – not in war time or as an aftermath of war, but in the midst of peace and as a seemingly permanent feature – that is a monstrous and scandalous thing which is altogether abnormal in the history of mankind. We cannot be satisfied with the snap answer that this is due to population pressure. Since every mouth that comes into the world is also endowed with a pair of hands, population pressure could serve as an explanation only if it meant an absolute shortage of land – and although that situation may arise in the future; it decidedly has not arrived today (a few islands excepted). It cannot be argued that population increase as such must produce increas­ing poverty because the additional pairs of hands could not be endowed with the capital they needed to help themselves. Millions of people have started without capital and. have shown that a pair of hands can provide not only the income but also the durable goods, i.e., capital, for civilized existence. So the question stands and demands an answer: What has gone wrong? Why cannot these people help themselves?

 Now, I shall venture to suggest the reply that the cause lies in the impact of the modern West upon these societies and populations, The para­lysis or apathy – “somewhere very near the soul of India", as the Indian author said – is similar to the paralysis of the Aztecs when they met Cortes and his men sitting on the backs of horses and equipped with firearms. It was not the power of the Spaniards that destroyed the Aztec Empire, but the disbelief of the Aztecs in them­selves. I suggest that the cause of economic misery in a country like India is not the adherence to her own traditions[1] (which Mr. Black[2] pre­sumes to call "tragically inadequate") but the turning away from these traditions, and that the cause of this turning away is the mere existence, abroad and in India, of the modern Western methods of production, distri­bution, administration, and so forth. M. de Jouvenel[3] says that the difficulties to achieve a "take-off" are greater for Asian countries than they had been for the West. This is probably true, but hardly because “the industrial revolution in the West coincided with the demographic explosion, while this explosion occurred in Asia without an attending industrial revolution.” A population determind to help itself never finds a shortage of productive tasks to employ all hands. What seems to me to be of infinitely greater importance is that the West abandoned its own traditions only as it itself developed and applied the modern methods, while the Asian countries­ partly owing to European domination – lost (not all, but still too much of) their own traditions, because of some­thing that had arisen not among them­selves but in the West. Thus they fell into an abyss of misery.

 To talk in purely economic terms, probably the greatest cause of poverty in an underdeveloped country today is the existence of a modern transport system. None of the developed coun­tries ever had the task of achieving development at a time when transport was fast and cheap. No, it was, only after extensive and broadly based development had taken place that transport became fast and cheap. To start with, every town, every village enjoyed the protection of high transport costs – a kind of natural educational tariff to shield it against competition from all other towns and villages. Hence it was obvious and natural that each locality should attempt to provide for its own normal and fundamental needs through its own labour, intelligence, and natural resources.  Hence there arose a multi­tude of skills in a multitude of localities, and out of the ground thus prepared grew a middle class among which could be found the adventurers and entrepreneurs for more ambitious enterprises. All this was an organic process of growth, carried forward by individuals coming from "the people" not by small groups of intellectuals, educated in foreign lands, who took it upon themselves to transform whole societies and create new traditions. All these possibilities, however, are destroyed by cheap and fast transport. Village industries, thousands upon thousands of small workshops, wither away, because there is somewhere an "efficient" modern factory which can deliver similar (though often vastly inferior), goods at a lower price. But is not this the essence of "progress" – the substitution of superior methods of production for inferior ones? Does not the lower price benefit the villagers, raising their standard of living, enabling them to save and to invest and finally to accomplish the "take off"? Many economists argue that way, but the truth is otherwise. Because their own production has stopped, the villagers are poorer than ever before; they may be unable to pay for any of the factory goods, except by getting into debt. It has happened even that the factory itself, having accomplished its frightful work of destruction in the villages, has had to close down for lack of a market

 It was his intuitive understanding of these fatal mechanisms which led Gandhi to say in 1912 that “India is being ground down, not under the English heel, but under that of modern civilization.” On another occasion he said: “much of the deep poverty of India is due to the departure from Swadeshi in the economic life. If not a single artIcle of Commerce had been brought from outside India she would be today a land flowing with milk and honey.” He also suggested that a small part of India ought, to be set aside and protected against all goods from out. side the area: it would then soon be demonstrated that the inhabitants of the chosen area would extricate themselves out of theIr mIsery, by theIr own efforts and within a very short time, while limiting their external trade entirely to necessary commodities not locally produceable.

 Economists have assumed too easily that what works best in an advanced country must be best for economic development. Gandhi never made this mistake. “England has sinned against India by forcing Free Trade upon her. It may have been food for England but it has been poison for this country.” The problem posed by Free Trade, however, exists equally within a coun­try when such a country possesses (a) modern transport system and (b)a fringe of Western type industries. Efficient and fast communications, like Free Trade, are food for an advanced country, and poison for an under­developed country. Modern economists have generally seen the “potential” of an underdeveloped country mainly in terms of its raw material exports to the rich countries; and as such exports are obviously cheapened and facilitated by efficient transportation, they have concluded that investment in transport facilities deserves a high priority. This, I suggest, is a tragic error; it must spelI general ruin unless counteracted by deliberate measures or what might be called "controlled isolation" for a great number of relatively small communities, so that local labour will be used primarily to cover local needs.

It is here also that the institution of money, if handled in a manner which is “food” for advanced countries, may become poison for the underdeveloped. It is today fairly generalIy agreed that a country struggling for development cannot do so on the basis of free convertibility of its currency, in other words, that there must be some “controlled isolation”. But that the same need arises within the country, particularly a large country like India is generally over-looked. If no provision is made for this, then there will innumerable occasions when useful economic activity will only be possible on a barter basis (i.e., without money or not at all. Barter, however is clumsy and inflexible; what is really needed is local money or script issued in accordance with local needs as the American colonies possessed it before the War of Independence.

 These suggestions will appear reactionary and retrogressive to economists who imagine that the experience of advanced countries, where “development” is self-generating and may even be excessive, can be applied to underdeveloped, countries, where “development” is not only urgently needed but also exceedingly difficult to get started. From so unrealistic a point of view, my suggestions must of course look retrogressive, because it is in fact necessary to go back in the experience of the advanced countries to the early stages of their own development.

 M. de JouveneI rightly insists that “there are degrees of freedom in the processes” of economic develop­ment. This is perfectly true and constitutes a very necessary observation to correct certain schools of economic determinism. But it is also necessary to recognize that in a given situation some things are possible and others are not. What is decidedly impossible is to achieve economic development on a wide scale, when every budding activity is automatically exposed, to the icy blast of competition from produc­tion units employing advanced Western techniques of high capital intensity, whether such units are situated at home or abroad. Equally, it is impossible to mobilize and utilize “the really crucial economic and human resources” which “must come from within”, if the ideology of the “planners” mocks and denies the ideology of the people, for instance, when Mr. Black expresses his own ideology in the words: “There is real hope that people will take ideology less seriously simply because they will be too busy.” Man does not live by bread alone, and the poor, having little bread, are more dependent for their life and happiness on immaterial things – more than the rich. And if they are robbed of them, they lose their self-respect, their will-to-live and will-to-help-themselves. How can they then be mobilized?

 It is the impact of the West, now intensified by westernized ruling groups, which so easily tends to produce paraly­sis rather than the much-desired upsurge of vitality. It also produces the phenomenon to which M. de Jouvenel refers as, “technological dualism”, which represents, however, an irreconcilable division for beyond the field of technology and splits into "two nations" each leading a totally different life from the other. M. de Jouvenel himself says: “In fact there is no difference between the situation thus arising and the situa­tion arising in a colony with a ‘colonial’ and a ‘native’ sector,” – surely the most unfortunate and destructive disease to befall the body of any nation that has only recently gained its indepen­dence. This is not, as is sometimes suggested, merely a problem of the location of industry, and even the widest possible scatter of industry over the entire country could not re-unite the “two nations”, but would merely spread the disease.

 All the most decisive problems of development maybe summed up, it seems to me, in the question: “How can the impact of the West be canalized in such a way that it does not continue to throw the people into apathy and paralysis?” It is only when this question has been satisfactorily answered that we can be certain that Western aid – to render which we are in honour bound – will do more good than harm. More or better economic planning from the centre provides no answer. It is only for the purposes of analysis that one can isolate the economic factor from the rest of human life. For fruitful action, the whole of man has to be recognized. If this is not done and action is based solely on economic calculations, as laid down in elaborate central plans, the only mode of action can be coercion from the top. But what shall it profit? If coercion succeeds, freedom is lost; and if it is stultified by apathy and. sullen disdain, the people sink ever deeper into misery.

 The alternative to coercion cannot be provided by economic planning, because that itself pre-supposes coer­cion. It cannot be found when spiritual realities are dismissed as being of no account or treated as subservient to economic aims. It cannot be found when the people are considered as objects which must be driven, cajoled, or mani­pulated. Perhaps the best – perhaps even the only effective slogan for aid is: “Find out what the people are trying to do and help them to do it better.”

*bold emphasis not by the author

---

[1] Needless to say, there are some usages that are not true traditions but decadent bad habits. The sooner these are abandoned the better.

[2] "The Age of Development" by Mr. Eugene R. Black, the President of the International Bank in the Economic Journal, June 1960

[3] "Paths to Economic Growths," Drart Programme, August 1960 by Mr. M. de Jouvenel