THE UNEXPLORED DIMENSION
Lens, Sidney
The Unexplored Dimension By Sidney Lens Karachi HOW CAN any Asian oppose the American program of spending millions of dollars on Point Four? As you walk through the stench-filled hovels of...
...It's like a doctor who prescribes sunshine and good food to a TB patient who got the disease in the first place because he couldn't afford sunshine and good food...
...Like it or not, our aid will do more harm than good unless it attacks not only technical ignorance but the social structure which sustains that ignorance...
...And when, as a result of American advice and "know-how," the peasant or intellectural learns that a relative of the minister of agriculture or a Sheikh has been given a large tract of land to irrigate with pumps, he naturally begins to transfer his hatred of Sheikhs and landlords to the Point Four program...
...At first this reaction seems sheer ingratitude...
...It makes no sense for American technicians to point out the advantages of pumping water into the fields so long as the little fellow can not buy such a pump...
...Once this nation had 30 million people in the days when it was called Mesopotamia...
...But as the project turned out, the recipients were all large landowners, friends or relatives of the minister of agriculture...
...clinics, irrigation surveys, dams, and health projects...
...In the long run we would make more friends by stopping Point Four than by continuing to advance it without insisting on more equitable land distribution, cooperatives, and honest village government as preliminary prerequisites...
...My emphasis of this point may seem far-fetched in America with its modern agrarian system, where farmers own 80 or 160—or more— acres of land, and much machinery...
...It had the most modern system of irrigation canals of ancient times...
...II The unexplored dimension in foreign aid is social structure...
...Yet it affects everything we do...
...Unwittingly, Point Four know-how becomes the accomplice of a landlord system which cannot absorb that program democratically...
...We've missed one whole dimension of a foreign aid program...
...Only the well-to-do can afford it...
...Sooner or later, however, the landlord squeezes the surplus out of the peasant...
...And for all our $43 millions in Iran there are literally tens of thousands of "Yankee Go Home" signs plastered on the walls...
...Illustrative of what happens in haphazard gift programs is the experience of a respectable private agency which arranged to give agricultural equipment to peasants in a certain country...
...Statistically this will look good...
...He opposed Point Four...
...One day in Lebanon a wealthy landlord took me to Baalbak, ancient site of Phoenician, Roman, and Moslem temples...
...Put in abstract statistics and measured against need, the story of Point Four is an impressive saga...
...So long as the old landlord class controls the administrative apparatus of government, the Point Four program is spitting against the wind...
...Not every Point Four project serves a big landlord...
...In a country like Lebanon (probably the most democratic of Middle Eastern countries except for Israel) my landlord and his family control some 11 out of 70-odd votes in the parliament...
...where three-quarters of the land is untilled because of lack of water, our irrigation plans should be hailed with enthusiasm...
...Today it is barren for thousands of miles...
...Our aid relies exclusively on implanting "know-how" without looking beyond to the full consequences...
...an American woman pediatrician and a number of nurse-midwives saving scores of babies and mothers in Samawa...
...In one village of 1800 people the landlord has introduced mechanized farm equipment...
...It is true that those who benefit directly are grateful—at least for the moment...
...Small things like $3,000 pumps can make the waters of Northern Iraq irrigate vast holdings...
...It is only by the insistence of conditions that will assure gain for all the people that we can achieve the great goals of the Point Four program...
...Or if prices go down he cuts acreage and hoards his produce against a better price...
...It is surveying the area for irrigation projects...
...As you walk through the stench-filled hovels of Karachi or cross the vast barren lands of Iraq or Syria, you wonder how anyone can look askance at what seems like pure philanthropy...
...To clear the project the man in charge had to see the minister of agriculture and secure a list of "needy" peasants...
...Whichever way you turn, while the landlord system remains intact, our aid seeps into the wrong channels—always leading back to the landlord's barn...
...But what about the peasants who would be thrown off the land...
...But the man who shares two or three arces and must pay 50 or 70 per cent to his landlord, plus interest charges up to 60 per cent for any advances in food or seed—to such a person the landlord system becomes a handcuff that no amount of know-how can unlock...
...You're liable to be told in Iran that the whole plan is a clever scheme of intelligence work for the British...
...few people who plan our aid programs take it into account at all...
...Talk to anyone in Iraq or Lebanon or Iran or Egypt, and he can give you literally scores of such instances from his own personal knowledge...
...But a peasant who earns $28 a year for his whole family can hardly buy such a pump...
...There are, of course, exceptions on a limited scale, but over-all that is the result...
...It's the other way around...
...Those that have remained receive 28 cents to $1.12 per day, plus the four walls of a hut...
...Total production will rise...
...Look at the roster: 35 villages in Iraq supplied with a rodent control program...
...As far as the eye could see Point Four was a bonanza for the landlord and his family...
...The many important improvements wrought by Point Four are brushed aside because of this one overpowering fact: our aid does not weaken the class which has hindered progress for centuries, but on the contrary strengthens it...
...The landlord, our host, favored it...
...Consider Iraq, a rich country with a large potential...
...Now comes Point Four...
...If we insist on social changes we can be accused of "interfering in internal affairs...
...Production costs will fall...
...But no one sings hosannas for us...
...where half the nation or more suffers from malaria, our clinics should, one would think, be appreciated...
...If as a result of the additional water he is able to grow three or four crops a year instead of only one or two, he will naturally mechanize further...
...In Iran, when the government cut rentals by 20 per cent many a landlord merely imposed a 20 per cent fee for water which previously had been free...
...As a result we have made enemies where we should have made friends...
...Or he begins to charge for services which he formerly gave free...
...Now, the peasants who were sharecroppers since time immemorial are agricultural laborers...
...With each new tractor, more peasants are tossed out of the village...
...It makes people hate us for "giving...
...In countries where half the babies die in childbirth American feirfale gynecologists should certainly be welcome...
...It is a subject which is sadly underestimated in the United States...
...Yet it stirs few hearts and excites no demonstrations on our behalf...
...Ill One of the most frequent criticisms of Point Four concerns the people that it is sending to the United States for study...
...The tragedy, however, is that it serves the landlord system, which is pretty much the same thing...
...We can't expect them to shout hallelujah too...
...Another landlord controls 14...
...we have helped to weaken the position of the down-trodden and impoverished rather than liberated them...
...If an irrigation project is finished it may temporarily improve the yield of a particular village...
...A country like Syria refuses to have any part of Point Four...
...The roof they must build themselves...
...Along the way we discussed the issue...
...It is harder this way—much harder—but the gains would be vastly greater and more enduring...
...But deeper down, there's another side to the story...
...The only persons who were supposed to receive good metal plows were those who had dilapidated wooden affairs or mere sticks...
...To the simple peasant or the idealistic intellectural, all this means that Point Four is consolidating the corrupt social system...
...My landlord friend was happy: the project will service most of his villages...
...A large proportion of these "students" are relatives or friends of the local bigwigs and their trip is merely a junket...
...With us in an elaborate chauffeur-driven Lincoln Cosmopolitan was a young liberal lawyer, an anti-Communist and a nationalist...
...no one paints slogans welcoming Point Four or calling for more...
...But if we don't insist on such changes, we are still interfering—only we are interfering to strengthen the landlord and his feudal system...
...Wartime profits made the tractors and combines possible...
...Our Point Four works only through and with official government agencies...
...The landlord's family owns eleven villages...
...They were for it, without reservation...
...Many of them have been replaced by the machine and have left the village...
...Or that our agricultural experts are merely spies in farmers' clothing...
Vol. 17 • September 1953 • No. 9
