Following up on a discussion we had on FFR a couple of weeks ago, I wrote recently on the subject of technology relinquishment, exploring the question of whether technology adoption has been forced upon those who don’t want it and whether this will continue to be the case. I believe that we, as a society, make some accommodation to those who don’t want to accept new technologies, and that we are perhaps a bit more tolerant of those who seem to reject new technologies along a nice clean break line, what I described as a “plateau of completeness.”
The standard example is the Amish, who see the world as being pretty much technology sufficient as of the 18th century — no new developments sought or required. I also suggested that human augmentation technologies might be another coming break line, and that non-augmented humanity will be the Amish of the age of augmentation.
Another example of a technology that seems to represent some kind of break line is genetically modified foods. (I don’t suppose I need to reiterate my own views on what relinquishment of this articular technological development means.) What’s interesting about the relinquishment of this technology is that many people who are doing without this development –who would probably want it f given a clear choice in the matter — have no say in the decision to reject it.
Kerry Howley writes at Reason.com:
In May 2002, in the midst of a severe food shortage in sub-Saharan Africa, the government of Zimbabwe turned away 10,000 tons of corn from the World Food Program (WFP). The WFP then diverted the food to other countries, including Zambia, where 2.5 million people were in need. The Zambian government locked away the corn, banned its distribution, and stopped another shipment on its way to the country. “Simply because my people are hungry,†President Levy Mwanawasa later said, “is no justification to give them poison.â€
Rejecting GM crop technology in the form of food aid is only a small part of the problem, however. The real damage is done by the fact that growing GM crops is banned throughout almost all of Africa by authoritarian African governments, acting in collusion with Western governments and NGOs. Regressive agricultural standards and practices in Africa are driven by a romanticized Western idea of what “natural” farming should be about — forcing Africans to struggle to feed themselves while the rest of the world benefits from the technological developments we deny them. Robert Paarlberg describes life on the typical African farm:
It would be a woman and her children primarily, and they would plant not a hybrid maize, but a traditional openly pollinated variety, and they would time the preparation of the soil and planting as best they could for when they thought the rains would come. But the rains might not come in time, or they might be too heavy and wash the seeds out of the ground. It’s a risky endeavor. They can’t afford fertilizer, and it’s too risky to use fertilizer because in a drought the maize would shrivel up and the fertilizer would be wasted. They don’t have any irrigation. As a consequence, even in a good year their yields per hectare will be only about one third as high as in Asian countries, 1/10 as high as in the United States.
This goes well beyond genetically modified crops. Basically, African have been denied access to almost all major advances in agricultural production from the past century or so. In our discussion of technology relinquishment on FFR, we were all quick to agree that it would be wrong to force iPods and Priuses on the Amish. No one should be required to adopt a technology they don’t want. But what are we to make of governments and other groups who force others not to use technology that they might want and would almost certainly benefit from?
The hypocrisy of Western organizations — coming from countries whose economies have benefited tremendously from these developments — is palpable. Read the entire article, which ends on the hopeful note that at least one Western group is trying to make inroads on introducing drought-resistant crops into Africa. That alone would be an enormous step forward.