So Hard to Remember, So Easy to Forget
Paddock, William and Elizabeth
THE CULTURE OF BUREAUCRACY: So Hard to Remember, So Easy to Forget by William and Elizabeth Paddock In the 1940s the American people began a long journey that was to take them to the hungry...
...Fifty officials...
...This is my major contribution," Franke said...
...Hinton: Be smart enough to operate as a catalyst for change...
...The AID director is generally the principal economic counselor to the ambassador...
...Twenty...
...Hinton: 1 know nothing about it...
...In addition, he said, research was moving ahead on other crops, such as black pepper, vanilla, cashews, allspice, mangos, tea and achiote...
...the Government of Guatemala seems to have accepted...
...The Chocola station is today a graveyard where the forgotten bones of this carefully planned major aid program have been left to rot...
...He was rightly proud, for it was a beautiful experiment station...
...Of the four authors of the study for which Hinton had contracted Iowa State, only one was then in Guatemala...
...Deane Hinton, U. S. AID mission director in Guatemala, was fresh from the National War College and recently decorated with a Superior Honor Award...
...With each rewriting the reports reflected less and less the pessimism at the front and more and more the optimism that prevailed in the Pentagon...
...Hinton: I've been here too short a time to know the details of previous programs...
...The result: neither worked with the other...
...This can similarly be found in Latin America and, I am sure, in Africa as well...
...Paddock: Is any money going into the experiment station at Barcenas...
...Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, from his years of experience, pointed at the answer when, after a highly optimistic White House briefing about Vietnam by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he said President Johnson had been "led down a garden path...
...Hinton: The agricultural school at Barcenas...
...He claimed that field reports written near the scene of combat in Vietnam were rewritten as they passed through each higher echelon...
...Always it is biased in favor of their programs...
...Hinton's letter was postmarked Santiago, Chile...
...they were just different, sometimes unrecognizably so...
...It's a work farm for the Barcenas students...
...This is an old story...
...With prices as low as they were, neither rubber nor citrus was sufficiently attractive to the farmer without the easy loan money...
...I was doubly pleased because back in 1956 I had had a small hand in selecting Los Brillantes, from several possible sites, for a substation to augment the work at Chocola...
...What preceded...
...There is no experiment station there in the sense any of us would think of one...
...Did it fail...
...I wrote to Hinton some nine months after the report had been released, asking two questions: How has the report been used...
...It was also to be a training center offering short, practical courses to farmers and agricultural extension agents from all of Central America, so they could carry home with them updated knowledge of improved farming practices...
...The center assembled a group of experts who set about interviewing agriculturalists and scientists from such other fields as anthropology, sociology, and psychology...
...Thus another orphan program joins the graveyard...
...And that is his support...
...Actually, Acheson is more exactly reported to have said, "With all due respect, Mr...
...The United Nations took up the cause, declaring the 1960s to be the "Decade of Development...
...Paddock: That program emphasized agriculture...
...He replied that the report had been circulated widely but had "encountered a fairly general lack of interest...
...With half of Guatemala's export earnings coming from one crop, he said, AID is keenly interested in helping Guatemala break the shackles of coffee dependency...
...Superficially, it looked much as it had in 1958, except that the beautiful buildings were empty...
...Hinton: Gene Martin...
...Paddock:, Who made the study...
...Five...
...These two agricultural stations were separated as if by the Great Wall of China...
...AID programs are constantly scrapped, abandoned, or started anew -or forgotten...
...Undoubtedly Hinton, whom I found to be a likable man, was highly regarded as an administrator at AID'S Washington headquarters...
...Paddock: I understand Barcenas includes the forestry school the U. S. government helped establish 10 years ago and later helped merge with the agricultural school there...
...Stadelman was now working here on rubber, and AID, according to Oliver, was greatly pleased with his progress...
...Which of its recommendations have been acted upon...
...Hinton: I don't know about that...
...Everybody wants loans...
...Upon arrival at a project, our usual procedure was to be briefed by the officials in charge, who then would arrange our tour and go with us or send an aide to answer our questions in the field...
...He was a young graduate student named Eric Graber, and I sensed he was doing most of the field work for the study...
...The same reporting situation occurs with development projects in the "third world," and with the same result...
...Graber: I haven't found one...
...Never have I seen a harder working, more dedicated, or more lost soul...
...Hinton: I don't know anything about that...
...At Los Brillantes, the first person I met was Raymond Stadelman, a man whose writings I have admired for so long I thought he must be dead...
...Chocola is an illustration of one tragic aspect of our development work: AID has no memory...
...All [economic] planning...
...Paddock: What is his specialty...
...Now, to my amazement, the place seemed dead...
...Cashews and Oranges Assistant Secretary Oliver had urged me to visit the experiment station at Los Brillantes precisely because it was effectively solving this difficult, complex problem...
...New foreign aid directors arrive in the capital, sweep the decks clean, and begin anew...
...And for the first time we are going to take a serious look at the Guatemalan farm picture...
...The congressman arrives at the foreign capital...
...A faithful Guatemalan there is keeping the seed collection in what he believes is good order, just in case someday someone wants to use it...
...Graber: I really have no idea...
...President, the Joint Chiefs of Staff don't know what they're talking about...
...I'm talking about projects...
...Paddock: I'm interested to know why you chose the Los Brillantes coastal experiment station and the nearby agricultural school at Barcenas as projects for the new ambassador to see on his first trip into the country last week, and also why you considered them worthy of inspection by Congressman Clarence Long, who went with him...
...Back to the Graveyard From Los Brillantes I drove, for old times' sake, 30 minutes down the road to the station at Chocola...
...He replied: "I don't remember those specific reports...
...The most easily understood examples of this are the numerous congressional fact-finding missions where congressmen travel abroad to evaluate foreign aid projects...
...As is true of nearly all other AID mission directors, he had had no experience as a technician...
...With the help of only two field hands, he was trying desperately to manage this huge station...
...You remember, like Sunday dinner for the preacher or parents' day at school...
...The projects were not necessarily ineffective...
...The almost universal consensus, at the end of 1967, was that we should go to Mexico and Central America...
...Thus I was not surprised to learn that he knew little about agriculture even though this is the major economic business in Guatemala...
...Who would be so naive as to suggest showing them...
...Did it succeed...
...His Maize Cultivation in Northwestern Guatemala remains the classic background study on the agriculture of the highland Indians of Guatemala...
...Of course I'm prejudiced because I was once with the Peace Corps...
...This was the area with the most promising growth statistics, the experts said, and the cause for this was largely aid from a number of different development organizations...
...Paddock: Are you familiar with the Iowa State-Guatemala Tropical Research Center, operated here by Iowa State from 1945 to 1955...
...Why were the embassy and Washington continuing to send such visitors to see the "successful" AID program at Los Brillantes...
...Chocola Treat An agricultural experiment station operated by the Guatemalan government is located at a town on the Pacific Coast called Chocola...
...Poor fellow, he had literally nothing with which to work-no equipment, no help, and obviously, only hand-to-mouth money...
...The total effort of government research to find more economical ways to produce this crop, to combat diseases and pests, to solve harvest and processing problems rested on the shoulders of this one man...
...Hinton: He is a social scientist...
...I'm still learning...
...Graber: I have heard there was some kind of program but that's all I know about it...
...No one...
...Hinton: I've never heard of it...
...Support from AID to the research station had been reduced solely to providing his salary...
...When I wrote to the new U. S. mission director in Guatemala, his assistant answered, "I can assure you that the report has had a major impact...
...Hinton: We had a study made of the university, and the study showed this was the area of greatest need...
...In 1963 AID hired the Center of International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to find an answer to the agricultural dilemma of the world's hungry nations...
...In virtually every interview for this book which involved an unfavorable view of a development project, I was told, "Don't quote me...
...But I was startled by the way he expressed it, although it was refreshingly honest...
...Graber: We would like to determine the priorities for investment in agriculture...
...The local government, however, usually has neither the money nor the talent (nor, sometimes, the interest) to take over...
...one of the recommendations, the idea of placing more emphasis on basic grain cereals, particularly corn...
...Fighting for it with the sword of development has come to seem rather futile and out of date...
...When the loan money was used up (some loans were sizable: one farmer received $884,000) the station, once a beehive of projects, fell into the doldrums...
...The dormitories, which U. S. tax money had built, had last been used six months earlier when they housed eight students for six days...
...A long-time AID friend says, "Every morning we wake up and laboriously reinvent the wheel...
...perhaps it is because their studies are so often made on grants from the organizations being studied-or else they are hoping for grants for future studies...
...We asked key officials with both private and government development organizations to recommend their most effective programs in Mexico and Central America...
...Off they all go to see the mission's best project, and at its best appearance...
...The whole station is presently funded, all from the Guatemalan government, the equivalent of $3,500 per year...
...Being a former corn breeder, I lose few opportunities to emphasize that corn is of major importance in Central America and Mexico...
...The result: another U. S. loan to Guatemala, this time for $23 million...
...Our conversation went like this: Paddock: Are you familiar with an earlier Iowa State agricultural program in Guatemala...
...Hinton (after a discussion of some political dilemmas): Agriculture...
...This preface will help explain why I was so pleased when Covey Oliver, assist ant secretary for Inter- American Affairs in the Department of State, told me that one of the projects I should visit was an experiment station established with AID support at Los Brillantes, located near Chocola...
...I don't know a cow from a bunny rabbit," he told me...
...That certainly represented a major interest in those days...
...Unlike most foreign aid administrators, Franke had brought to his job a good technical background and a lively interest in tropical farming...
...The answers he gave could have come from any of several other highly-regarded AID mission directors whom I have known...
...Guest houses were constructed, and the station soon became a favorite spot for U. S. government personnel to visit...
...When I read that its purpose was to review the extent "to which the agricultural sector has changed since 1950," I realized it covered part of the 1945-55 period when Iowa State had operated its own agricultural experiment station in Guatemala...
...He had been transferred there to head up another program where, in the deeply entrenched tradition of AID, he doubtless was again starting from scratch...
...This enormous expenditure has been justified for many reasons, but the dominating motive has been the conviction that we "cannot live as an island of affluence in a sea of poverty," that if the world is to have peace it must be stable, and for the poor nations to achieve stability they must be "developed...
...I did not have the heart to write to Hinton that the corn seed stock from the old Iowa State College-Guatemala Tropical Research Center is sitting in a storeroom at the experiment station at Barcenas...
...This study, remember, was intended primarily for Guatemalan officials and Americans stationed there...
...This seemed to jibe with a current policy in economic planning-namely, encouraging the developing countries to diversify their agriculture in order to alleviate dependence on a single crop-in the case of Guatemala, coffee...
...Paddock: What is the most effective AID program in Guatemala...
...As for the stability of the world, seldom has it seemed more elusive...
...That I know this about myself makes me wary of the same bias in others...
...In addition to giving them new technical skills, we should expose them to new ideas...
...It became an emotional crusade involving the government, national foundations, church groups, universities, and scientists...
...he is met by the ambassador and the AID mission director...
...Cows and Bunny Rabbits Wherever the United States has a foreign aid program it has a staff that supervises the spending of its money, plans its use, and cajoles the local government into actions intended to make the money effective...
...The reason for this, I learned, was that there had been some jurisdictional scuffling between the Guatemalan Ministry of Agriculture and AID...
...There is a lot about previous programs I don't know...
...I had last visited Chocola in 1958 with Louis Franke, then head of the U. S. program for agriculture in Guatemala...
...With nothing more definite than this in mind we set out to find the most promising region (not a single country) in the world to study...
...Paddock: What will your current study indicate...
...THE CULTURE OF BUREAUCRACY: So Hard to Remember, So Easy to Forget by William and Elizabeth Paddock In the 1940s the American people began a long journey that was to take them to the hungry nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America...
...Paddock: What do you consider Guatemala's most serious problem...
...How could this have happened...
...The reason, Stadelman explained, was that Guatemalan farmers were interested in planting rubber only as long as AID provided money on easy terms (such as a seven-year grace period before repayment begins...
...Paddock: What is the most important thing AID can do in Guatemala...
...Always the reports are favorable...
...We not only held more than 200 prearranged interviews but talked with everybody in sight-government officials, scientists, merchants, peasants, laborers, doctors, and lawyers...
...For the record, we financed this research trip ourselves, and thus were beholden to no organization...
...tends to err on the side of optimism...
...We wanted our study to be a genuinely independent audit...
...We do not question the sincerity of the officials who gave the recommendations, but certainly we now question the accuracy of the information fed back to them from the field...
...Like AID mission directors around the globe, Hinton was filling an important post within the embassy structure...
...I'm a political economist...
...I commiserated with him and left as he was preparing for a visit by Congressman Clarence Long of Maryland and Nathaniel Davis, the new U. S. ambassador to Guatemala...
...Thus by visiting Los Brillantes, a project which Oliver indicated already shows "evidence of success or which [is] sufficiently well established so that a significant effect on development can be confidently predicted," I could also stop by and see Chocola...
...Budgets are cut and then, as an alibi, Washington primly says it is time for the local government to "take over...
...We wanted to visit and examine those specific programs which the administrators of development organizations themselves assured us were especially effective...
...Paddock: How would you do this...
...Whenever possible, we returned alone to the project, so we could study it without official guidance...
...Paddock: The director said he was having a problem placing some of the graduates...
...Hinton: None...
...We should emphasize the training of people and the need for changes in their fundamental attitudes...
...I asked Hinton about how AID was performing in Guatemala...
...Hinton: The trip was planned for the Congressman and he didn't want any briefings...
...Not surprising...
...Paddock: Do you know what use will be made of the report for which you are collecting data...
...That was the specific task assigned to Los Brillantes-a difficult one because theory and practice unfortunately are at odds...
...Paddock: Why are you using Iowa State University...
...Even Iowa Forgets In April, 1969, Iowa State University published the report, a full two inches thick, titled: Agricultural Development and Policy in Guatemala...
...No one takes the time to learn...
...They would be arriving the next day for the same reason I had come-American officialdom had told them it considered this to be a good and thriving development project...
...And yet at the time of my visit, this was the one and only coffee research station in operation in all of Guatemala, a nation that still relies on coffee to pay for 36 per cent of all its imports...
...Paddock: I don't mean the school's farm, I mean the experiment station...
...Its staff consisted of a single agronomist, a Guatemalan, Efrain Humberto Reyna, who had the equivalent of a high school education in agriculture...
...When I worked here in the 1950s this and the station at Chocola formed a major U. S. government effort...
...We asked, "What area in the whole world of development can we visit in order to see the most optimistic case for foreign assistance, an optimistic case based on valid accomplishments already achieved, not on blueprints or future hopes...
...The $100,000 study, published in book form, showed that each specialist finds solutions in terms of his own discipline...
...It is painful to go on...
...Hinton: Because it's a good agricultural school...
...Loans are another matter...
...He went on to explain that through his efforts, a contract had been arranged with Iowa State University to send a team of agricultural economists to Guatemala to make an analysis of the role of agriculture in the development of the Guatemalan economy...
...It was put in storage 10 years ago when ICA stopped funding the program...
...The planners say that such dependence makes a nation highly vulnerable to the vagaries of the international market and most governments have long tried to encourage the production of more kinds of crops...
...It was important that the praise for the projects come from the men responsible for the planning and financing of them, rather than from the press or the people carrying out the work in the field...
...We were able to convince the minister of agriculture that this agricultural school is important...
...Incredibly, I found there was no cooperation, nor had there been for years, between Chocola and Los Brillantes a few miles away...
...The last course prior to that had been held nine years ago...
...Graber: The Peace Corps...
...I don't have the time to go through all the past records...
...Paddock: What U. S.-supported project are Guatemala's officials most enthusiastic about...
...Who shows the failures...
...We asked that they name programs that were at least three years old so we could see progress already accomplished, rather than progress hoped for...
...Thus, like AID, Iowa State, too, has no memory...
...In the last few years enthusiasm for the crusade has flagged as the development of the poor nations seems, somehow, always to recede, no matter how much money is spent, no matter how many new ideas are put into operation...
...Now, on this revisit to Guatemala's south coast, I could see at once a definite increase in cattle production...
...No one could have been less optimistic about the future of rubber cultivation in Guatemala than Stadelman himself...
...Who even wants to see them...
...Was it that they had not yet heard that the program had dried up...
...A second glance showed it to be a disaster area...
...Thus the syndrome feeds upon itself...
...He knew that Guatemala's future depends on agriculture and he was able to convert this knowledge into action by getting the United States to put money into this station at Chocola and another at Barcenas...
...He was even less optimistic about the possibility of receiving the additional support needed to change the direction of this work or to revive it...
...Earlier, I knew, Los Brillantes had been kept busy for at least five years supplying rubber seedlings to Guatemalan farmers who had planted some 27,000 acres of rubber...
...He wanted to get out into the country and these fit his two-day itinerary nicely...
...Chocola was designed to become a major agricultural research center, concentrating on the problems of principal tropical commercial crops like coffee...
...Paddock: What do you consider to be the most effective AID program in Guatemala...
...He was puppy-dog happy to see me, as if I were the first visitor in IO years...
...The farm is terribly run down, stupidly managed, and the United States has never helped it with funds...
...There is probably no one in the Guatemalan government who would be sorry about our leaving or even notice if we left tomorrow...
...When we examined these projects in the field, we found they were not at all as described by the high officials back home (Peace Corps, AID, InterAmerican Development Bank, and the rest...
...Gunnar Myrdal, writing about South Asia, said, "Optimism, and therefore approaches that make optimism seem more realistic, is itself a natural urge for intellectuals...
...The total cost to the American people to the beginning of 1971 was 100 billion tax dollars plus the money and energies of the many nongovernment organizations...
...But how to effect the diversification...
...In his letter, Hinton commented that it was "still too early" to say which of the Iowa State recommendations would actually be put into practice, but "I am happy to tell you...
...The authors, firm believers in the doctrines of development and long involved in the struggle, believed now was the right time for a report about foreign aid which would be not only optimistic but useful as a guide showing how a variety of development projects had indeed succeeded...
...Occasionally, Reyna is able to scrounge a little fertilizer from manufacturers...
...But no one ever said that when their remarks were favorable...
...In fact, by now, the only people who remain enthusiastic seem to be those of the receiving countries (provided they get to spend the money, themselves, without This article is adapted from William and Elizabeth Paddock's book, We Don't Know How, to be published by Iowa State University Press this spring, strings), and the staffs of the massive (and firmly entrenched) development bureaucracies inside and outside the government...
...The oddest thing came out of this research...
...At one time the annual U. S. budget for Guatemalan agriculture was nearly $1 million...
...It is bounder on the north and west by Mexico, on the east by Belice, to the south and east by Honduras and El Salvador, and on the southwest by the Pacific Coast...
...I myself am no different...
...Writing Graber, I asked if his group had consulted any of the reports published during the course of that earlier program...
...Oliver told me a great deal of progress had been made at Los Brillantes through the introduction of rubber and citrus as new crops...
...We began by talking to government officials, businessmen, diplomats, foundation officers, directors of international agencies, missionary groups, and the like...
...We organized a list of "effective development projects" and traveled some 25,000 miles to inspect them...
...At Chocola, a laboratory was built, followed by classrooms, dormitories, offices, a cafeteria, and so on-all with U. S. funds...
...We were thinking of more than a glorification of all those thousands of people who have given up the amenities of their homes and gone out to strike development sparks in the suffering areas of the world's hungry nations...
...If you hire a social scientist to study the university, you end up with a solution that involves social science...
...You must remember that I have only been here 15 months...
...Although Guatemala contains only 108,889 square kilometers, approximately the size of the state of Louisiana, it has a very wide geographical diversity...
...Paddock: I am interested in what you think has been the most effective U. S. effort in Guatemala...
...The report begins with these deadly naive and patronizing sentences about a nation which, it would seem, no one at Iowa State had ever heard of before (in fact, they might have been written in 1852 by John L. Stephens, the first U. S. envoy to Guatemala): Guatemala lies just south of the Yucatan peninsula in Central America...
...Hinton: What experiment station...
...I have my hands full trying to keep track of what is going on today...
...Hinton: We are doing it in a training program in social sciences at the local university...
...that is, it was finding crops into which Guatemalan farmers could diversify and still make money...
...We wanted to give an account of a dozen or more effective development programs in the hope that the lessons learned from them could be applied elsewhere...
...Paddock: How did you happen to choose social sciences...
...Of the 26 new graduates in forestry, not one of them has a job in sight...
...The station was supplying seedlings and advice on how to plant them, and AID was providing the loans needed to support this diversification...
...That was the program which brought me to Guatemala originally...
...Other "developed" countries one by one joined us in this crusade...
...This station was once the focus of a major U. S. effort to assist agriculture throughout this coastal area of Central America, and a lot of U. S. money went into it...
...Now Stadelman was working alone...
...Although this was Hinton's first assignment in Latin America, he had served at several embassies in Europe and elsewhere, mainly as a political affairs officer...
...He was about to be transferred to Argentina and was anxious to show me what he had accomplished before leaving Guatemala...
...The chairs, typewriters, desks, furniture-even the microscopes and pH meters-are still there, stenciled with the letters S.C.I.D.A., the long-forgotten alphabet soup designation for the cooperative program that operated for a few years as a joint venture of AID'S predecessor, the U. S. International Cooperation Administration (ICA), and the Guatemalan Ministry of Agriculture...
...However, I know Iowa State is a good university and they have good men...
...It was then taken over by the International Cooperation Administration which, as you know, was the predecessor agency of your own AID...
...Journalists somehow never seem to write critical records of specific projects...
...I wonder how many bothered to read through this two-inch rehash of all the appallingly familiar data which had been kicking around the back offices for years...
...The staff is called a "mission" and the man in charge is the "mission director...
...Back home a President is elected and his new foreign aid administrator also sweeps clean...
Vol. 4 • February 1973 • No. 12
