Finding technologies appropriate to needs

Press, 26 June 1978, Page 16

Finding technologies appropriate to needs

By

COLIN NORMAN,

of the Worldwatch Institute,

Washington

During the last few years, dozens of “appropriate technology” groups have been established in countries as diverse as Ghana, India, and the United States. Even in California—the epitome of the technological society— Governor Jerry Brown has established an Office of Appropriate Technology in the state government.

Many foreign aid agencies and international lending institutions, including the World Bank, have begun to accept some of the arguments for appropriate technology.

This interest in the development and dissemination of technologies designed to meet human needs, and to be in harmony with the environment, reflects considerable disenchantment with the social and environmental impacts of modem technologies. Although the infusion of technology into society during the last few decades has brought immense benefits, many of the technological promises of the post-war

era have yet to be fulfilled.

Indeed, there is mounting evidence that some technological developments may aggravate, rather than solve, pressing social and environmental problems. No technology can be considered appropriate unless its impact on employment, equity, the use of energy, and the environment is carefully weighed. One of the most formidable tasks facing the world, for example, is the need to provide vast numbers of new jobs. At least one billion jobs must be created by the year 2000 to keep pace with burgeoning growth in the global labour force. Most of those jobs will be required in the impoverished nations of the Third World, where at least 300 million people are already unemployed or grossly underemployed. Investments in modern technology alone cannot hope to provide employment on such a scale. On the average, it costs $20,000 in in-

vestment to create a single job in modem industry. Few countries can afford to provide sufficient numbers of jobs through industrial expansion along Western lines. Worse, when a country with limited resources invests in expensive technologies, income gaps between the workers in the modem sector and those outside it tend to increase.

A critical need for most Third World countries is to find inexpensive ways to increase employment and to raise the productivity of millions of people who are eking out a living.

This will require the development of technologies accessible to small farmers, techniques that will lead to more productive use of labour in public works programmes, tools and implements that will relieve backbreaking drudgery, and a network of small-scale industries serving local needs. It will also require careful monitoring and control of imported technologies to ensure that they mesh with national needs.

There are some encouraging signs that small-scale, in-

expensive technologies can provide employment and raise living standards. Cheap windmills made from local materials have raised agricultural productivity in the Omo Valley in Ethiopia. Smallscale sugar plants developed in India provide 10 times more employment for a given investment than large plants. In China, some 500,000 small rural industrial units have been established during the last two decades, producing items such as cement, steel, fertilisers, and agricultural implements. Technologies such as windmills, biogas plants (producing methane gas from cow dung), small hydro-electric plants, and improved wood stoves, are being developed in many countries.

There is also scope for the use of more appropriate technologies in the provision of services in underdeveloped countries. Most poor countries, for example, spend the bulk of their health budgets on city hospitals that use sophisticated technologies, when the medical needs of the rural and urban poor would be better served by training paramedical workers

to provide low-cost, preventive health care. In countries where such strategies have been adopted, results have been encouraging. In Sri Lanka, for example, life expectancy at birth is approaching 70 years, yet the average income in that country is only about $l5O a year. Although most of the atten tion devoted to appropriate technology has focused on its use in the Third World, there is also good reason to question many of the technological trends in the industrial countries as well. Unemployment is at unacceptable levels in most countries, and there are fears that increased automation through computer-controlled production could have severe social impacts.

those potential side-effects of technological innovations need to be carefully monitored and planned for. Similarly, the employment impacts of different technologies need to be taken into account in the choice of technologies. A study in California has indicated that while one nuclear plant would provide

about 36.000 jobs directly and indirectly, a solar programme producing an equivalent amount of energy would create about 241,000 jobs. The technological systems in place today grew and matured in an era when oil and gas were exceptionally cheap and when nuclear power seemed to premise unlimited supplies in inexpensive electricity. They have consequently become heavily dependent on fossil fuels.

With petroleum prices having risen sharply, supplies uncertain beyond the next decade or so, and the nuclear industry in trouble in most countries, energy efficiency and the use of renewable energy sources must assume central importance in the development of new technologies.

No technology — however appropriate — will solve social problems by itself. It is essentia] that problems of poverty, malnutrition, disease, and land degradation be attacked bv adequate public health programmes, overhauling credit facilities, instituting land reforms, and similar social and political reforms.