CHAPTER 11.   Efforts to Use Science and Technology for Development
 

"A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization."
Samuel Johnson

Development Issues12
Technology holds no less attraction for developing countries than it does for developed countries.  Perhaps even more, because they understand it less.  In practice, it is no easier for LDCs to adopt policies that will provide economic development through the use of technology than it is for countries like the United States, Germany or Japan.  It may be harder.  Rushing the process, some LDCs have imported technologies in advance of their industrial potential at the time.  The mere suggestion that LDCs utilize "appropriate" technologies -- simple plows rather than tractors for one-acre plots, for example, or simple technologies to utilize plentiful labor -- brought political charges that proponents would withhold state-of-the art technology, allotting the LDCs permanent technological inadequacy.

It was clear to development economists that certain levels of the science and technology base in a country were necessary to adopt new money-making technologies, that a minimal infrastructure -- schools, roads, banks -- was necessary.  Capital was also required.  While necessary conditions for economic development through science and technologyScience and technology:for development  may be generally known, not all sufficient conditions are understood for every circumstance.  If they were, all developed countries -- and many LDCs -- would be applying them with uniform success.

To paraphrase Tolstoy: Developed countries are all alike; every undeveloped country is undeveloped in its own way.  There are few generalizations -- even the ones given here.  Stages of economic development, cultural values and geography all conspire to demand treatment of each application of technology as a separate case.
Nevertheless, most LDCs have some conditions in common: low output in all sectors, especially in industry; financial instability that may include foreign debt and inflation; inefficient if not corrupt management; lack of capital; antiquated or inadequate infrastructure, particularly in transportation and communications; lack of opportunity for education; poor health care.  Many LDCs have essentially one-product economies depending on oil, sugar or fruit.  Thus they suffer the ill effects of violent swings in world market prices.

Not all these LDC conditions relate to science and technology: certainly debt does not.  But certain problems of industrialization, education and infrastructure development might yield to S&T approaches.  The LDCs themselves came up with their own proposals for applying science and technology to problems of development:

• access to technology on favorable terms, including terms of no payment at all,
• similar access to S&T information,
• legally binding code of conduct for developed-country firms engaged in technology transfer,
• commitments of a certain percentage of developed-country R&D budgets to LDC problems,
• strengthening S&T infrastructure, including training and R&D capabilities,
• increased imports by developed countries of LDC technology and
• curtailment and reversal of the brain drainBrain drain , possibly with compensation for what had already taken place.

United States S&T initiatives in Atoms for PeaceAtoms for Peace  and space cooperationSpace cooperation  attracted LDC participants.  The United States also took part in the 1963 UN Conference for the Application of Science and Technology for the Benefit of the Less-Developed Areas (UNCSAT)UN Conference for the Application of Science and Technology fo .  This conference made less of an impact than sponsors hoped, which was unfortunate, for by the time of the second one in 1979, termed the UN Conference on Science and Technology for DevelopmentUN Conference on Science and Technology for Development , some of the issues had become too politicized to solve easily.

Technology specifically aimed at development -- generally in a framework more imaginative than straight technical assistance, but short of two-way S&T cooperation -- was the central feature of a series of U.S. foreign affairs initiatives in the 1970s designed to address LDC proposals outlined above.  There were S&T initiatives before and after, but this was the most concentrated and interconnected group of all and is worth particular notice.  The first series was launched in 1974.  The United States continued to propose and support such initiatives at the United Nations special sessions and general assemblies of 1974-5, at the Conference on International Economic Cooperation (CIEC) in 1975-7, at the 1976 meeting of the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and at the Organization of American States (OAS) in 1974-5.  These are of great interest to us here for their emphasis on science and technology.  They are not so far in the past as to be irrelevant or forgotten, but far enough back so that some of their effects may be gauged.  These are taken up in Chapters 12-14 and 20.

Another early example of a U.S effort to bring science and technology to bear on economic development of LDCs is the program with Latin America in 1973-5.  The United States proposed a "new dialogueNew dialogue:with Latin America ."  Hemisphere foreign ministers meeting in April 1974 (among other accomplishments) established a working group to set up a committee on science and the transfer of technology.  The Department of State made a major and original effort to back up this initiative.  Disagreement on the issue of technology transferTechnology transfer  and a code of conductCode of conduct  in one of the working group's four deliberating subgroups prevented progress in the other three.  (The code of conduct was to be a set of rules to guide firms in developed countries transferring technology to LDCs.  The LDCs always wanted a legally binding code enforced by national governments in the firms' countries.)  Then VenezuelaVenezuela:boycotts new dialogue  and EcuadorEcuador:boycotts new dialogue  vowed to boycott all meetings after the U.S. Trade Act of 1974 withdrew most-favored-nation trade status from them and other OPEC members.  The new dialogue ended (a more complete report of the new dialogue is in Chapter 21).

The end of the story may be told at once: the United States never brought any of its science and technology initiatives of this era to completion.  The Department of State was severely challenged to design and, more particularly, to execute such initiatives.  Where the Department separated project design from implementation it couldn't always induce other agencies to implement them.  The Agency for International Development (AID) wasn't able to absorb all the new ideas into its program; besides, its mandate directed its major efforts toward the poorest LDCs.

Certainly, lack of enthusiasm and suspicion on the part of LDCs didn't help, nor did their linkage of S&T issues to intractable ones like debt and oil.  LDC political leaders didn't seem to care whether they got accessAccess:to S&T information  to S&T information -- which they could have worked out -- if they couldn't get economic concessions.

Without even foreign champions it is understandable that the initiatives came to be ignored or forgotten in the United States by a bureaucracy with a short-term institutional memory and other things on its mind, overlooked by a new administration in 1977.  In 1981 it looked as if some of the issues might be readdressed, but little occurred.  Yet in many forums the possibility for science and technology to be used as tools for development has only been more strongly proclaimed since 1977.  While such use is still debated, the continued role played by the issue of science and technology for development in U.S. foreign affairs appears undisputable.