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The common perception of the need for developing countries to
employ more productive technology and the demonstrated existence of more
efficient and effective technology in the advanced countries provided
the basis for large-scale technical assistance programs of the past
three decades. An unprecedented sharing of knowledge has occurred
through international education, advisory assistance and transfers of
capital goods to less developed countries.
Perhaps the most difficult lessons of this international effort to spread the
benefits of modern technology throughout the world concern the
limitations of existing knowledge and
practices in other geographical, social,
and cultural settings. Surprisingly few processes, techniques, policies, or
institutions are transferable without adaptation or without undesirable
side-effects.
The process of
development can be described as one in which adaptation is constantly, if gradually, occurring on three planes --
technical, institutional and personal -- in order to apply increasing
knowledge and increasing capacity to practical tasks. It is a process in
which institutions in advanced countries have important supporting roles
to play in sharing existing knowledge, creating new knowledge relevant
to the problems of developing countries, and assisting the building of
local competence to create, adapt, and apply modern knowledge. The
latter task is most difficult, because, although the experience of the
advanced countries indicates the nature of the tasks confronting new
institutions abroad, it does not reveal how these tasks can most
effectively be accomplished in non-Western societies.
Thus, three
decades of experience in development have brought the sober realization that the developing countries could not,
even if they wished, follow in the
footsteps of the Western nations; that their versions of modern technology, their
institutions, and their policies will necessarily be different
from those of industrial countries; and that neither the
developed nor developing countries yet know the solutions to many of the critical problems they face.
Promising collaborative efforts are already underway to adapt the three
main instruments for problem-solving -- policy, organization, and
technology -- to the
needs and circumstances of the developing countries. These collaborative efforts
offer hope not only for
the developing countries but for the United States as well.
In this Annex, we reflect on the technical assistance experience
and the opportunities in the future for productive technical
collaboration. We then consider the organizational means by which the
United States might enhance its participation in the collaborative
process.
II.
Technical Assistance: Sharing
Modern Knowledge
The United States, as the country with the most completely
articulated systems for creating and using modern knowledge of any large
nation, has since the Second World War been recognized as a vital source
of both funds and technology. U.S. institutions have mobilized to offer
technical assistance and to share existing knowledge. Invaluable as this
process has been, however, the limitations of direct transfers of
technical knowledge and processes are now becoming better understood.
Probably the largest transfer of knowledge has occurred through
publication. The Japanese made extensive use of Western scientific and
technical publications between the wars, employing thousands of
translators in the task. They then designed their own institutions to
use the knowledge, a process that has enabled them to become
efficient producers.
Translation is still useful, but the
quantity of scientific and technical information now in existence is
many times that of the interwar period. It is
also a time-consuming and expensive process. Instead, most societies
today make use of the material in English, which has become the dominant
world technical language. This has the advantage that access is
available without the delays of translation; but it has the disadvantage
of widening the gap between the highly educated and the rest of the
society, for only those trained technically and in the English language
have access to the knowledge.
Training in
American institutions is another important means of transferring
knowledge. Approximately 150,000 foreign students per year now attend American universities and colleges, gaining technical and scientific knowledge
needed at home, and making friends and professional contacts that they
frequently maintain throughout their professional careers.
Although this
process is advantageous to both the United States and the developing countries, it
has several familiar disadvantages:
·
It is costly, which means relatively few individuals from
the poor countries benefit from it. Often the children of wealthy
families are the main beneficiaries, perpetuating and reinforcing class
distinctions.
·
Even when
scholarship funds are available, an intellectual and professional elite
is created.
·
The American
system of higher education is so diverse that the placement of foreign
students in the United States is somewhat haphazard, both for the
students and for universities.
·
Students are often poorly prepared to take full advantage
of American higher education because of language problems and learning
habits.
·
Courses,
designed to meet the needs of American society, prepare people to work
under physical, social, and financial conditions that may not exist at home.
·
Large numbers of students remain here for their
professional careers, for reasons related to the kind of training that they have received and the
institutional setting in their home countries.
·
Those students who return home may have difficulty relating
their knowledge to the problems of their societies.
Despite these serious problems, training foreign students
has probably been the most useful and lasting form of technical
assistance. Basic scientific and technical knowledge, the techniques of
discovery and verification, and a problem-solving orientation --
once acquired -- are invaluable assets for the individual themselves,
and for their societies. Many of the defects listed above could be
mitigated by structuring programs with the special needs of foreign
students in mind.
Another form of the direct transfer of knowledge is the
employment of Americans in advisory and operational posts abroad. This
wave crested in the 1960’s and has fallen to much lower levels
recently. In 1973, approximately 12,000 publicly supported American
experts and volunteers served abroad, about half the number of a decade
earlier. The decline has several causes, including increased costs of
supporting Americans abroad, which will rise sharply under the new tax
laws, and diminishing sources of public and private funds. More
important is the increase in trained people locally available, and the
rise of national sensitivity to the presence of foreigners in key posts.
U.S. experts and advisers serving abroad are naturally limited by
their own experience in what they can offer, but the most sensitive and
adaptable have frequently made the transition to a new and strange
environment successfully; in such cases, the didactic phase of technical
assistance, once described as “know-how, show-how,” is a
thing of the past.
An additional
important form of direct transfer of scientific and technical knowledge is embodied in capital goods and
the productive systems employed
in their use. Equipment sales and grants, and investments by U.S. firms, are commonly thought of
first among the forms of the transfer of technology.
Although capital goods may seem to be different in
kind from training and advisory assistance, machinery can be considered to be a physical
expression of technical
knowledge. However, the main difference between capital goods transfers and training/advice, for
this discussion, is that
the greater the concentration or complexity of the capital goods in
question, the less flexible are its uses; whereas a highly trained
doctor may be more able than a medical technician to adapt his skills to
another environment, a more complex piece of machinery is less adaptable
than a simpler tool.
Investment by private multinational firms in lower income
countries has become increasingly important recently in transferring
technology and managing production. Their operations are encountering
mounting criticism. Developing countries increasingly want a greater
share of ownership and control of their productive assets, a wider range
of products to meet low income needs, techniques better adapted to local
markets and factor availabilities, and more training for local people.
The international patent system has also come under attack as a barrier
to the acquisition of technology by developing countries.
Each of these means of transferring technology has had important
beneficial effects in the developing countries, and all will have
continued value in the future. Their most obvious limitation is their
dependence on the existing stock of knowledge and on systems devised in
the developed world with only partial relevance to developing country
conditions. As a result of direct transfers, distortions and inequities
have emerged or increased in the economic and social systems of the
developing countries.
III.
Technology
The realization
that the direct transfer of modern technology from the advanced to the
developing countries is often inefficient and ineffective has led to
various attempts to find technology that is more “appropriate.”
The appropriateness of technology is a subject on which much has
been written and even more remains to be learned; it is a concept with
at least three dimensions: physical, economic, and social.
Physically, because most advanced countries
are in the temperate zone and most developing countries in the tropics
or sub-tropics, agricultural and medical technologies of the advanced
countries imperfectly fit the conditions of developing countries. Economically,
advanced countries typically have a relative abundance of capital, and
shortage of labor, compared to developing countries, so industrial
technology in the advanced nations tends to be more capital-intensive
than is appropriate to developing countries. Socially,
the goals, capacities, and cultural characteristics of the advanced
countries differ from those of the developing countries, and these have
a bearing on product configuration, productive organization, and the
quality of the labor force. Obviously, differences of the same kind
exist among developing countries as well, so that technologies
appropriate to some will not meet the needs of all.
The search for
technology appropriate to a particular need may be of varying
complexity, from selection through adaptation to basic knowledge
generation. But even the selection from existing alternatives, as among
the more than 4,000 known strains of sorghum, may
be a complicated process.
The adaptation of technology to conform to local needs and
opportunities will require sustained effort at several levels, the most
important of which is within the developing countries themselves. A wide
range of indigenous research and development
institutions is needed for the task, and here the disparity of local
capacities among the developing countries is most evident. Regional and
international centers for adaptive research and experimentation also
have great potential, as is illustrated below in the food production field.
In the
biological fields, agriculture and medicine, basic knowledge on which to
build improved technology is sometimes inadequate. Research priorities
in advanced countries have naturally reflected their concerns, so that
malaria and bilharziasis receive scant attention compared, for example,
with heart disease and cancer. In time, basic as well as adaptive
research needed by developing countries will be done in their own
institutions by their own scientists; building their capacities is a
high priority task, but for the next twenty years or so, the most rapid
gains in basic knowledge are likely to be made in advanced countries.
Despite the
magnitude of the task of devising more effective technology in and for
developing countries, encouraging examples demonstrate an advance from
technical assistance, or the sharing of existing knowledge, to technical
collaboration in search of new knowledge and new ways of applying
knowledge.
The most widely
heralded example of the development of appropriate technology is in the
field of agriculture, where dwarf strains of wheat and rice were
genetically produced to form the basis for high-yielding farming systems
in the tropics. These “Green Revolution” varieties were bred by
Western-trained scientists working in tropical climates in institutions
able to combine international scientific standards with a strong
problem-solving orientation in an atmosphere free from local political
or social forces.
This institutional arrangement has
great advantages in directing high quality, well-managed research to
solving specific technical problems facing low-income countries. The
international agricultural research center model, pioneered by the
Rockefeller Foundation in Mexico and extended by both the Ford and
Rockefeller Foundations to the Philippines, Nigeria, and Colombia,
offered potential gains in knowledge that went well beyond the financial
abilities of private foundations to realize. International financing for
an expanded group of centers is now arranged through the Consultative
Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), organized by the
World Bank, FAQ, and the United Nations Development Program. The
combined budgets for these centers is $80 million in 1977 and likely to
rise to over $100 million by 1980; the United States contributes
approximately 25 percent of the cost.
These
international centers have been criticized on the grounds that their
results contributed to accentuating income differentials in the rural
areas. Large farmers accepted new practices more readily and had greater
access to credit, information, and other ingredients of production,
while small farmers were less able to take advantage of new methods.
This problem did occur, but the fault should be found less in the new
production technology than in delivery systems and policies in the
developing countries.
Another effort to promote the development of more appropriate
technology was stimulated by Congress in the International Development
and Food Assistance Act of 1975. Section 107 authorized $20 million for
three years to support private effort in the field of intermediate
technology. A private, non-profit agency for this purpose, called
Appropriate Technology International (ATI), is being created under the
direction of a six-member board of private citizens. The principal objective of the
Congress is to stimulate the development of more labor-intensive
production methods, in order to offer increased employment opportunities
in developing countries, and to increase access to improved tools and
machines for small farmers and small businessmen. (1)
The ATI may find that it is difficult to deal effectively with
many of the issues involved in devising more appropriate technology from
a base in Washington, but its creation
by Congress constitutes important recognition of the fact that modern
technology must be
adapted to meet the needs of developing countries.
The need for
adaptation goes beyond productive technology. For example, an
international program launched with Ford and Rockefeller Foundation
assistance in 1976 seeks to increase the acceptance and use of
contraceptives in developing countries, by adapting the contraceptive
products and the accompanying information material to the socioeconomic,
cultural, and physical characteristics of the people using them. Pills,
IUDs, and other contraceptive products
available to family-planning programs
throughout the world are virtually
the same, regardless of the cultural background and health of the people
for whom they are intended or the system through
which the products reach the users. The Program for the Introduction and
Adaptation of Contraceptive Technology (PIACT) seeks to help develop the local
capacity to adapt products to
local needs and customs. Research is employed to find alternate dosage
forms (such as the paper pill devised in China), alternate dosage
schedules for oral contraceptives, contraceptives for anemic women,
information media for illiterates, improved inserters for IUD’s, and
safer products for women suffering from liver disease as a result of
hepatitis or bilharziasis.
(Continued)
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