Unwanted Gift No. 3: Appropriate Toil
How about buying seeds, trees, farm animals and “appropriate tools” for an entire village, then? Here there is an assumption that your average subsistence farmer’s greatest ambition is simply to continue farming – albeit without the starving bit. He surely doesn’t want any of our Western luxuries, nor our advances in technology that have made farming so productive in the West. Aspiration is not for him, nor any of his family, nor his community. He doesn’t want his children to get off the land and go to university, for he is content and doesn’t want for much. And so this gift of so-called “appropriate technology”, plus a goat or two. will allow the village to continue their lives in the fields close to the agrarian traditions of their forefathers without the intrusion of such debased Western notions as “technological progress” and freedom from toil.
But these assumptions are misplaced – see our documentary I’m a subsistence farmer... get me out of here! What people want and need is either to leave and enjoy urban life or investment in infrastructure and industry, and in the agricultural sector that means industrial farming machinery, refrigerated trucks on tarmac motorways and the latest chemical pesticides. Sadly, for the sake of some mythical harmonious relationship with nature, sustainability seeks to preserve rural isolation, an existence that denies the developing world Western levels of development. This used to be called racism, denying our common humanity across the globe and prescribing what people can and can’t have in foreign lands. At a time when humans are rocketing to Mars, this gift epitomises the low horizons of western NGOs for their peers, and will not even provide what we would consider the bare minimum living standards.