Some Food for Thought on Development

September 20, 2013 

The International Society for Ecology and Culture (ISEC) Volunteer Coordinator, Richard, is also working on updating the film Ancient Futures by re-interviewing individuals who appeared in the original film 20 years ago.  I’ve been able to accompany him on few of these interviews, which has been extremely interesting in terms of learning more about perspectives on development and globalization.  I will share with you one interview, which was extremely poignant.  It was with Sonam Anchuk, founder and director of SECMOL (Student Ecological and Cultural Movement of Ladakh) and an incredibly intelligent and eloquent individual.  He first heard about Helena Norberg-Hodge in the late 1980s when he was schooling in mechanical engineering and his peers were interning with LEDeG.  As an engineer, he first became interested in technical gains and machines such as ram pumps and passive solar technologies and only later was influenced by the cultural and social ramifications of Helena’s work.  But he acknowledged that he holds a different view of how Ladakh has passed through history, one that directly goes against Helena’s views (Helena argues that tourism was the cultural downfall of Ladakh).  According to Anchuk, Ladakh lost its independence to Jammu and then to India, but these very large events had little impact on the local village level.  Instead the opening of the road in the early 1960s had the biggest influence, as it brought goods, officers, schools, teachers, etc., who all held the view that traditional is primitive and modern is what we should strive for.  He phrased it that “people had a huge colonial hang over” and thought that anything that resembled their master (England) was modern and good to strive for, which rendered Ladakhis backwards, poor, and uncivilized.  What was perhaps most damaging, however, is the fact that this new view of development came without any questioning and these ideas came indirectly/third hand to boot (from England to Delhi and Delhi to Srinagar and Srinagar to Leh).  This led to “Ladakh taking a nose dive in self-esteem and cultural strength” – people didn’t want to speak the language, wear the clothes, eat the food etc. and they felt proud of anything that made them look not Ladakhi.  “The early 1960s to mid 1970s was a dark era,” Anchuk noted.  But shortly thereafter, another huge change took place, a “happy change” in his opinion: in 1974, Ladakh was opened to the entire world (not just India as it had been in the 1960s).  This time, Ladakhis could meet the “masters” [of development] themselves, which “short-circuited the distance” and now Ladakhis could see that not everything was right.  With the arrival of westerners, they saw that farming was becoming disastrous (e.g. green revolution), that mechanization and modern lifestyles were breaking down families, stressing people out, and polluting cities.  Tourists brought first-hand stories of the negatives of development in the West, which was positive because it questioned the previous model that was so celebrated and told them “not everything modern is gold.”  And more importantly, tourists brought the idea that Ladakhi culture should be valued, which was a huge relief after a decade of shame (Ladakhis were told that their farming system was a miracle – growing something in such difficult conditions, irrigation and water sharing system as a social miracle etc.).  “This opening to tourism was a saving grace for Ladakh” as otherwise, “we would have continued downwards on a one lane road to hating and changing ourselves – becoming another village with no identity and just part of the mass.”  And he had quite thoughtful opinions on localization: “It will happen one way or another but it’s a matter if we actively choose it or if we wait until fossil fuels run out and we have no choice but to localize production.”  He made the analogy between a beggar and a monk.  While superficially, the monk and beggar may seem similar in their behavior, in reality, they are very different: one is begging out of helplessness and the other begging for a cause, a deep philosophy, which is highly respectable because the monk has chosen to beg to extricate himself of a worldly life.  According to Anchuk, it would be better if we respectfully choose to localize (e.g. food production) now and save the good things for the future rather than condemn ourselves after we exhaust all energy sources like coal and oil.  And lastly, his thoughts on agriculture resonated the most with me.  He explained how today, it is a positive thing that the government is supporting organic, which is in stark contrast to previous decades.  For instance, during the Green Revolution in the 1960s to late 1990s, there was a massive government push for chemical pesticides and synthetic fertilizers (side note: all govt. provided, very different from Tanzania) – “the government passed out and subsidized these ‘glittering chemicals’” and farmers were curious and eager to try them.  Today, however, most people have realized this isn’t good, which is an immensely positive trend for farming.  And what’s more interesting is that agricultural extension officers are now proponents of organic but they no longer have an audience.  According to Anchuk, “agriculture [in Ladakh] is dying” because young people are leaving the villages to flee to the cities for a white-collar life.  This shit leaves agriculture in the hands of older generations, which continue their livelihoods purely out of “social and cultural inertia to maintain the green fields” (there is a stigma attached to barren fields), “but this isn’t enough to keep farming going.”  Today, paid migrant labor is imported from Nepal and Bihar, which is not how agriculture is going to survive, and “if nothing changes in the next 10-20 years, then there will be a critical mass/shift away from farming, a cascading/domino effect of people in villages giving up farming.”  This is largely because it doesn’t make any economic sense to continue cultivating the land: farmers invest and lose money in agriculture, whereas they make money from tourism and the army and then put this money into labor and farming – it’s not a sustainable model.  And with the public distribution system, it also doesn’t make economic sense because people can get cheap food.  According to Anchuk, “mechanization is wonderful because it relieves people of drudgery and animals of cruelty,” but the situation demands “the right kind of mechanization.”  He said that people are happy about tractors, mechanized threshing, plowing etc. because it saves time, but this kind of technology is so overly dependent on oil that it is not sustainable.  “If there is a border conflict, land slide or natural catastrophe, or economic problems, and if you move totally to oil-based technologies, everything will collapse” (especially if you’ve given up animals in favor of tractors).  In this way, he believes that mechanization needs to be sustainable and make us independent more than dependent.  He uses solar power as an example, which is becoming more affordable, and could theoretically power the same farm implements currently being powered by diesel.  They may not be as a fast or as good, but they are much more sustainable in the long term.  And farmers here should make use of “simple machines – wheels and inclined planes.  We haven’t gone to wheels, we’ve gone directly to oil-based engines,” which I found extremely interesting.  And now that I think about it, I didn’t see a single wheel barrel in the village of Likir (just those horrendously uncomfortable backpacks).  Anchuk said, “We need more innovation for simple technologies” and used hydro-power as another example: “Ladakh now has surplus energy because of environmentally friendly dams” and could use this electricity to mechanize farming.  So he is clearly not in favor of diesel tractor-style mechanization as they “make things easy for the moment but could be the last strike that completely makes things collapse.”  He finished by explaining how one of the largest threats to the future of farming in Ladakh is actually parents who are discouraging children from staying on the farm.  As a director of a school, he has seen people in the younger generation who have been educated and do want to come back to the land, “but development agencies and experts did their jobs so well that previous generations were made to hate farming, soil, and dirt.”  So brainwashed parents are now blocking the future of farming – who’d have thought?