Fishy business. The Social Impact of SST.pdf - Act Now!

problems of the poor.’ He pledges that ‘firm steps’ would be taken to preclude a ‘classsociety…emerging in this country.’Sadly, no such steps were taken. Gewertz and Errington found that (Ibid:144) :[H]owever optimistic and energetic many of the Papua New Guinean middle class might beand however important an effect they might have in driving contemporary changes in PapuaNew Guinean society, the future they confronted was an uncertain one of twists and turns:theirs was a world strongly affected by the shifting strategies and interests of anincreasingly influential corporate and multinational capitalism.It is an obsolete paradigm to think of development as a tradeoff between culture and progress.Postwar development theory shifted in the eighties away from a top-down North-Southdistribution of ‘aid’ toward a more equable understandings of change in the developing world.Ideas about modernity began to change: the new China, for example, does not aspire to look likethe new London, new Tokyo or new Detroit. Development is always a Faustian contract. Somecall it planned poverty (Illich 1997:99). But the more important it becomes, the more dangerousit also threatens to become. In Arturo Escobar’s critical description of the postwar picture(Escobar 1997:91-2),[D]evelopment grew to be so important for Third World countries that it became acceptablefor their rulers to subject their populations to an infinite variety of interventions, to moreencompassing forms of power and systems of control; so important that First and ThirdWorld elites accepted the price of massive impoverishment, of selling Third Worldresources to the most convenient bidder, of degrading their physical and human ecologies,of killing and torturing, of condemning their indigenous populations to near extinction; soimportant that many in the Third World began to think of themselves as inferior,underdeveloped and ignorant and to doubt the value of their own culture, deciding insteadto pledge allegiance to the banners of reason and progress; so important, finally, that theachievement of development clouded awareness of the impossibility of fulfilling thepromises that development seemed to be making.The alternative is finding another economic model for the developing world, which is wherepost-development research and theory stands today. 2 But in the East Sepik Province, the onlydefense against unplanned and inappropriate development appears to be the aptly named ‘4 thDimension’ in the Province’s Corporate Plan. As explained in the plan itself:The PNG Government system, including that of the East Sepik Province is chiefly based ona three dimensional dynamics. This system has for many years overlooked andovershadowed the empowerment need of the people. While the Nation recognizes theunique diversity and successfully forges unity, it fails to realizer the dynamics of thebusiness sector in the industrial and commercial world which is foreign to most PNGpeople.It’s hard to see how this kind of thinking will in any way preclude the imbalances of foreignventures, much less guarantee the full empowerment of the grassroots. But this is be discussedfurther below.2 Illich tells us (Op cit:99): “The only feasible answer to ever-increasing underdevelopment is a response tobasic needs that is planned as a long-range goal for areas which will always have a different capitalstructure. “24