UNDP-HDR slated for joining high-tech bandwagon

New Delhi (TWN) - A group of civil society organizations active on human rights and development issues have sharply slated the UN Development Programme’s latest Human Development Report (HDR) for its “unabashed pat” on the back for the high-tech bandwagon on which “a handful of powerful elites are galloping to even greater riches and more power.”

Strongly disagreeing with the HDR’s ‘verdict’ presenting “the hi-tech world of information technology and biotechnology as the saviour of millions of poor, starving, desperate people in ‘developing countries’, the civil society groups complained that this year’s message and conclusion “flies in the face of the conclusions reached by the UNDP itself in its 1999 and 2000 reports.”

Last year’s report, for example, made a strong argument in favour of global policies that are human rights based and favour fundamental rights of the world’s poor and vulnerable to food, housing, health and self-determination to name a few.

Going by the conclusions of the HDR 2001, apparently this was a one-off plea, said the NGOs. “So much for consistency and mainstreaming of human rights and environmental concerns across the UN system!”

This year’s report’s conclusions are “a clear and devastating turnaround and indicate the UNDP can no longer be relied upon to stand on the side of the very people from whom it derives its credibility - the disprivileged millions across the world,” said the NGO signatories which include Kalpavriksh (a Pune-based Environmental Action group), Lokayan Delhi, the Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security (New Delhi), the Habitat International Coalition, the Deccan Development Society, the Andra Pradesh coalition in defense of diversity and the International Group for Grassroots initiatives.

While admitting that modern technologies should not be viewed as “silver bullets” that could by themselves bring meaningful development to people, the HDR, nevertheless focuses predominantly on promoting such technologies. While claiming that such technologies would reach the poor if rooted in a ‘pro-poor development strategy’, the HDR did not lay much stress on what such a strategy should be. Nor does the HDR, while acknowledging the existence of ‘savage’ inequalities in the world that could stop benefits of new technologies reaching the poor, go to the logical conclusion that it would need economic and social policies emanating from the people themselves, building on their own capacities and knowledge.

In advocating that farmers and firms in developing world need to master new technologies developed elsewhere to stay competitive, the report ignores the scores of technological alternatives to hi-tech and biotech developed by ordinary people around the world including in agriculture, medicine, industry and energy.

Charging the UNDP and HDR of bias, such as in advocacy of Bt cotton for reducing pesticide sprays while ignoring success of farmers in India itself of using organic cotton production, without using pesticides at all, and yet producing high yields, the civil society groups charge that advocating modern biotech by citing a few dubious success stories, while ignoring natural and organic agricultural techniques was “a clear case of bias.”

Technologies that could facilitate community empowerment, such as organic farming and decentralised energy sources, are ignored by the HDR while pushing for biotech, technologies that could only further alienate people.

=F9Similarly while mentioning the need to be ‘fair’ in implementing intellectual property regimes, the HDR strongly advocates continuance of universal regimes that could provide protection to formal knowledge systems, and ignores informal and indigenous knowledge systems.

There is a “sugar-coated, but clear bias” in the HDR towards private capital, corporations and the profit motive, when it says: “the broader challenge for public, private and non-public decision-makers is to agree on ways to segment the global market so that key technology products can be sold at low costs in poor developing countries, without destroying markets and industry incentives in industrial countries.

“So now, public good has to bend itself to suit private profit.”

The signatories ask: “what more can one expect from a report, whose only mention of the Monsanto Corporation, universally criticised for its unethical and destructive practices, is a citation of its agreement to transfer patented genes to the Kenya Agriculture Research Institute for its virus-resistant potato?” – SUNS4936

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