X. How to Make Enemies in "Backward" Nations
America's Unknown Enemy: Beyond Conspiracy
Editorial Staff of the
American Institute for Economic Research
[1993]
| This article is a review of
anthropologist Grace E. Goodell's The Elementary Structures of
Political Life: Rural Development in Pahievi Iran, New York
and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986, 362 pages, $45,
hardbound. |
For the past quarter century, much of the rest of the world has
indulged in an anti-American binge. In many reaches of the globe
today, it is fashionable, if not obligatory, to castigate America and
Americans. To those who can recall the years following World War II,
when America was openly revered as a patron of democracy and economic
savior of friend and foe alike, the insults hurled so casually our way
today must seem especially undeserved. Often they have come from the
very countries that received lavish amounts of U.S. aid.
Seldom has anti-American sentiment reached the fever pitch that it
evidently has in Islamic revolutionary Iran under the Ayatollah
Khomeini. To date, Iran's overt and covert anti-American activities
(from ritualistic mass demonstrations, to hostage-taking, to bombings,
to the mining of the Persian Gulf) have crippled two American
presidencies, produced rifts in the Western alliance, and threaten to
entangle American foreign policy in the Mideast even further -- if not
draw us into a shooting war. It would be pointless to recount here all
of Iran's bloody attempts during the past 9 years to vanquish "Great
Satan" America. It also would be impossible to predict the
outcome of the current U.S. naval convoy assignment in "Silkworm
Alley."
Nevertheless, as Grace E. Goodell's recently published book The
Elementary Structures of Political Life: Rural Development in Pahlevi
Iran illustrates, there is a useful lesson (one that we have
stated on many other occasions) to be drawn from our experience with
Iran over the past 30 years: namely, that U.S.-sponsored centrally
planned economic development projects that are channeled through
existing political bureaucracies in developing nations invariably
produce economic disaster rather than economic progress -- and
generate animosity rather than goodwill.
Professor Goodell's book is a comparative study, based on a 4-year
sojourn in Iran, of the experiences of rural peasants in the period
immediately preceding that country's dramatic estrangement from the
United States. She spent 2 years in a village (Rahmat Abad) during the
land reform that preceded centrally planned development and 2
additional years in a "model city" (Bizhan) observing the
behavior of the forced subjects of Shah Reja Pahlevi's subsequent U.S.
and World Bank-sponsored development policies. Although its
geographical locus is narrow, it in effect empirically tests a wide
range of theories that often have been accepted uncritically by "development
economists."
Goodell's study focuses on the Dez Irrigation Project (DIP) in Iran's
Northern Khuzestan region during the mid-1970's, and it describes in
great detail the ways that visionary "modernization" schemes
irreparably disrupted usual market processes that, prior to the
imposition of centrally planned development, were rapidly propelling
economic growth within the Iranian peasant community.
In brief, the Dez Project adopted the World Bank's Development Model,
which was inspired by the TVA and still is in use today. According to
this model, huge irrigation projects, large agribusinesses, and State
farms offer numerous advantages over "backward" peasant
farming operations: land consolidation under single management units
produces economies of scale; foreign investors are able to introduce
modern agricultural technology; food urgently needed in the growing
urban areas can be most efficiently produced and released to the
cities by large commercial farms; and these businesses in turn gain
valuable foreign exchange by their export crops, while providing
nonagricultural employment through their "spinoff"
industries -- such as petrochemicals and farm machinery, processing
facilities for sugar, paper, cotton, etc.
The Dez Project's administrative priorities thus called for farm
corporations to displace small farmers and model towns to displace the
mud villages that dotted the Khuzestan landscape. As Goodell observes,
the World Bank can lend only huge sums -- and these only to
centralized agencies, and "It is assumed and often asserted that
a given scale of benefits directly follows from the size of the
investment in a project. ...[I]t is argued that incremental, locally
directed production will entail too many risks, considering the
enormous investment that has already been targeted deductively ... and
that an investment the size of the DIP … was hardly the place for
training thousands of illiterate peasants, and could hardly be left in
their hands." Moreover, it is always easier for the Bank to
monitor a single, compact, technocratically oriented agency with a
highly paid cadre of bureaucrats than to try to fathom the "vagaries
and minutiae" of the ways of "backward" peoples.
To accomplish such broad aims, the peasants were offered arbitrary
payment for their lands and were transported to new housing in model
towns where they were forced to pay high rents and do as the town
managers demanded.
Operating on the assumption that peasants were incapable of making
decisions for themselves, the Dez Project managers assumed control
over virtually all aspects of peasant life in an effort to make the
farming classes conform to the planners' notions of what behavior in a
"modern" community ought to be. Some of their efforts to
this end are laughable, as when the Shah ordered that all men had to
wear "Western clothing" in the model towns. The effect in
most villages was to inspire the population to pool funds to purchase
a single pair of trousers and shoes to be worn whenever a villager had
to deal with bureaucrats in town.
Other DIP initiatives had more dire consequences: "model"
houses were designed for families of four, when the average size of
village families was much larger, with the result that living
conditions were either desperately overcrowded or else some family
members were relegated to the ranks of the "homeless";
massive (and enormously costly) irrigation canals were built that
actually reduced tillable acreage (by intersecting existing
centuries-old irrigation networks); schools and health clinics were
built that were never opened for use even though the model town
dwellers repeatedly petitioned the bribe-seeking town managers to do
so -- and even though private firms offered to run them on a
for-profit basis; "traditional orchards" of fruit trees,
herbal plants, and wildflowers that were shaped by centuries of
Iranian peasant culture were preserved, but the peasants who developed
and maintained them were barred from using them, the town managers
having reserved them for special holidays when "top State
officials with their families and friends, often their Teheran
visitors, claimed the paradise as theirs." The State constructed
many facilities -- clinics, bath houses, and high schools, but "once
these fulfilled its own showy ends it did not allow their use even
when others offered to staff and run them." [p.175] In effect,
the Dez Project curtailed local growth and stripped the peasants of
virtually all rights to decide for themselves what endeavors they
would or would not pursue.
Not surprisingly, these "transformed" peasants, far from
accommodating the planners' notions of behavior in "modern
society," behaved in ways characteristic of people who are forced
to live under total State control: they feared the State; but at the
same time were mistrustful and contemptuous of State authority; they
resisted wherever possible further intrusions into their personal
lives and were intensely suspicious of all "outsiders"; and
perhaps more significant, in the face of the demoralizing
regimentation imposed by the State, they allowed long-standing ties
within social groups to crumble.
With respect to this last effect, according to Goodell the greatest
damage done by the DIP was in disrupting existing local political and
market structures that were themselves capable of accommodating
economic growth -- "modernization" if you will -- once
restrictions against the free use of land and labor had been removed.
The Myth of the Witless Peasant
A major contribution of Goodell's study is in revealing the peasant
farmers' enthusiastic response in Rahmat Abad to the genuine economic
freedoms granted them by the land reforms that abolished the
traditional privileges of the landed aristocracy. Goodell reports that
rapid "unplanned" growth there had followed the granting of
economic freedom in the early stages of the Shah's land reform. The
villagers' behavior plainly showed that many commonly held assumptions
about the "backwardness" of all peasants are sheer myth. The
Khuzestanl peasants quickly adopted technological innovations, such as
fertilizer, hybridized crops, and machinery (tractors, combines, etc.)
that were useful to them. They vigorously sought to extend and develop
new markets, even those in which they had no previous experience. By
Dez Project standards, such growth was carried out on an extremely
modest scale (one tractor would service an entire village; one or two
trucks would carry produce to market; a single motorcycle would be
shared by many families). But from Goodell's perspective this was
growth on a manageable scale that effectively utilized existing
resources and represented an incipient market-directed economic
revolution.
Far from being bound by ancient ways, the farmers took advantage of
every educational opportunity provided them. They even became their
own "urban architects," abandoning their old huts for new
homes on a modest scale that they subsequently planned to replace, as
profits permitted, with larger, technologically more-advanced homes.
They repeatedly petitioned the government for rural electrification,
which would enable them to purchase and use modern appliances. In
short, if permitted to make decisions for themselves, Goodell's
peasants had all the earmarks of an aspiring capitalist
entrepreneurial class.
Given the disruptions it occasioned in peasant life, the denouement
of this story is not surprising. Shortly after the "experimental
stage" in model town building was completed in 1976, the Dez
Project collapsed suddenly. During the next 2 years, the
agribusinesses it had fostered were declared bankrupt and the Shah and
the State took them over, requesting the former peasants whose lives
had been so upset to return to farm the land that had first been given
them, and then taken away by the DIP.
Goodell reports that since then, the Ayatollah's revolution "finally
completed the Shah's land reform for him, distributing the land even
to the landless.... The revolution also broke up the State farms,
surely a confirmation that these had already failed." But the
irrigation system that local farmers had successfully managed on their
own had already been destroyed. And since the revolution, the
technical manpower needed to operate the new canal system has fled.
Furthermore, fertilizer is expensive and the revolutionary government
has prohibited the cultivation of cash crops lest city dwellers be
deprived of the less-lucrative grains. Goodell reports that "Thus
some of the formerly prosperous farmers ... have begun to lease land
that the revolution gave back to the landless and smaller farmers; the
former then hire the latter to work it, consolidating fields once
again in the hands of a nascent post-revolution landlord class."
[p. 344] In short, progressive land reform, aborted by the disastrous
intrusions of visionary economic developers and the subsequent ravages
of internal revolution and external war, has come full circle.
This study thus runs counter to many commonly held notions about "modernization"
that have provided the theoretical basis for development economists'
central plans: namely, it shows how disastrous the-bigger-the-better "overnight
miracle" planning that defies markets can be and how economically
creative so-called backward societies are when given the freedom to
pursue their own interests. One can only hope that Goodell's stark
epilogue to her Iranian story is not prologue to further misadventures
elsewhere:
Northern Khuzestan showed one of the first clear public
signs of the impending revolution when as early as 1976 a band of
high school boys declared Dezful to be a new Islamic People's
Republic. Having drawn up its manifesto, they marched on the nearby
air force base. ...The villagers ... had warned me, when we listened
to the Ayatollah on radio: "He will fill the city streets ...
with townsmen" [i.e., those whose lives and livelihoods had
been disrupted by the Shah with U.S. support -- ed.].
Dozens of other Irans are waiting to happen throughout the Third
World wherever large "top down" projects have been imposed
on viable cultures. Unless development economists and other
international policy planners gain a better understanding of the
ruinous effects of their centrally planned, State-directed "development
initiatives" -- and abandon them in favor of market-directed
development -- in all likelihood more of our foreign aid will end up
making enemies rather than friends.
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