"The broader challenge for public, private and non-profit decision-makers is to agree on ways to segment the global market so that key technology products can be sold at low cost in developing countries without destroying markets --- and industry incentives --- in industrial countries". UNDP Human Development Report 2001

The quotation above from the UNDP Human Development Report 2001, launched on July 11 in Dhaka, is a shameless propaganda for proprietary corporate technology, particularly transgenic products. It is a corporate marketing strategy in the name of 'development' and 'poverty reduction'. The blatant agendum to dump or create effective demand for genetically engineered and IT products aimed at running the wheel of corporate profit. It is appalling when it comes from UNDP Human Development Report, which enjoyed a kind of critical support from the social activists and people who work for social justice. Indeed earlier UNDP Human Development Report tried explicitly to maintain a balance with which one could live with given the dominance of corporate ideology in the era of 'globalisation'. It seems that UNDP has decided to tip over to the side of transnational corporations.

Many may be surprised, but given the history of the other UN organisations, it is not a shock. Unsafe hormonal injections like Depo-provera and notoriously coercive contraceptive such as Norplant was promoted by UNFPA, WHO in order to fill the million dollar profit pockets of pharmaceutical corporations. Governments of developing countries were forced to purchase contraceptives and unsafe medical technologies to terminate their own population. No one in a developing country could afford to purchase hormonal contraceptives and implants. Government received loan in the name of 'development' to spend on purchasing contraceptives from the companies. Tax payers' money of the rich nations were spent to purchase unsafe corporate commodities to dump in the developing countries like Bangladesh to terminate the 'poor' in their mother's womb to reduce poverty. If poor are not born, poverty will be reduced -- this was the strange implicit and explicit logic. UNDP couldn't be better. What we may have to explain why it was a bit different before this report came to light. The report used same rhetoric of the poor and the poverty, so familiar to legitimise the institutions and the process that generate poverty and forced the majority of the people of the world to remain poor.

The report was launched in other countries more or less at the same time. Immediately it has generated massive protest and criticisms have been mounting. "the report taken in its entirety forms an unabashed pat on the back for the hi-tech bandwagon on which a minority of powerful elites are galloping to even greater riches, even more power", said the prominent groups of India well-known for their activism to defend the political, human and environmental rights of the poor. It summarises the angry sentiment of the people working in their communities around the world.

The danger of the report lies not in it's blatant promotion of the profiteering mission of the corporations, but rather in the rhetoric of the poor. It claims that the hi-tech world of information technology and biotechnology is the saviour of millions of poor, starving, desperate people in the "developing" countries. It points at the site of resistance globally, in particular in the developed countries where GMOs are more or less rejected by the conscious consumers. Since market in the industrial countries are increasingly showing grim, the report claims that the First World's debate about the safety of genetically altered food and cutting edge drugs is forcing poor countries to wait for technology that could already be feeding their hungry and healing their sick. The playing of developing countries against the popular resistance against biotechnology and genetic engineering in the developed countries is a dangerous game. The safety issue of the GE food is not a debate anymore, it is a real struggle of all the people both in the rich and poor countries.

Poor countries do not need genetically altered food, they need to preserve their own food production. The UN Report is trying to undermine the protests and the concerns expressed by the farmers in the poorer countries about the GE food. The third world does not need the western countries to teach them how to protest. For countries like Bangladesh, we already have bumper crop production from our existing local production. Bangladesh does not need genetic engineering in food. GE will create market for corporate technologies but will destroy the livelihood of the farming communities. Farmers in Bangladesh have already experienced negatively from the hybrid technology and are apprehensive of any technology, which leads to the dependence on the companies for seeds and its associate inputs. The UNDP failed to see the implications of their proposition in the context of poor countries. It is trying to shift the technologies to the poor countries because those have been discarded by the first world. They have lost their market in the first world, or at least the confidence of the consumers. It is a well-recognised fact that biotechnology and GE has not been able to gain credibility, even in the scientific community. In this context, making poor the market place to dump and test the questionable technologies of the North can not be acceptable. Now poor have become the market place for the corporations. UNDP' report is a sneak and desperate effort to find excuses and justifications for hi-tech companies. It is sad indeed.

The Human Development Report entitled "Making New Technologies Work for Human Development" is a shame because under the leadership of late Mahbubul Haque and his team this annual UNDP report got credibility among many nations of the world. Despite it's limitation and a mainstream approach to development the reports used to play a converging arena where governments were offered a breeze to think about the people and the processes of underdevelopment. Unfortunately, the Human Development Reports are now being manipulated by the corporations for promoting their own self-interest in the name of poverty eradication. It will be difficult for the HDR to regain its credibility unless they withdraw this report of 2001 immediately and rewrite.

The Human Development Report 2001 is being criticised by many progressive groups around the world. It is accused of being a biotechnology industry-sponsored study. It focuses on Agriculture, Medicine and Information technology as the three main areas through which technological innovations are promoted for the world poor. Without any scientific evidence and with no sign of genuine home work the Report claims that in agriculture, plant breeding promises to generate higher yields and resistance to drought, pests and diseases. Biotechnology offers the only or the best 'tool of choice' for marginal ecological zones left behind by the green revolution but home to more than half the world's poorest people, dependent on agriculture and livestock. It says, "Western consumers naturally focus on potential allergic reactions and other food safety issues. People in developing countries however, may be more interested in better crop yield". This is utterly dangerous, as if food safety is not an issue for the developing countries. Since they are hungry, anything can be dumped on them. This is an absolutely irresponsible statement and obviously is not based on facts. People in developing countries are lured to become interested in so called yield with false and fraudulent measures. This is nothing but justification of promoting harmful technologies and forcing the poor to use them. Once the poor consume it, they describe them as interested. Even micro-credits are being used by NGOs in Bangladesh to force the poor to accept hybrid seeds along with several kinds of pesticides and chemical fertilisers. The poor women, who do not even have enough land to cultivate such crops are paying back the credit with high interest rates. The seeds that they have used did not provide better yields. The companies failed to sell their hybrid seeds through open market but have forcing them through NGOs micro-credit programme to accept it

The second issue that Human Development Report focuses is on medicine. It notes that 2 billion people do not have access to low cost, life-saving medicines because drug companies focus on so called "diseases of the rich". Of the 1,000 new drugs developed in the past 10 years, only 13 of those targeted devastating tropical diseases that afflict many poor nations. It urges the governments around the world to work with the "private sector" to reverse the trend. UNDP is an organisation of the nations in the world, not an organisation of the private sector. It is quite shameful to see UNDP urging governments around the world to work with the private particularly in a very essential public service that the governments must ensure for its citizens. This is dreadful. The health sector has already been invaded by the private sector and the public health care services have been dismantled resulting in less and less access of the poor to health care. The UNDP is promoting further privatisation in medicine and healthcare, which is entirely against the poor. The major expenses after food that poor have to incur is on health. Privatisation in health care means no money, no service. The result is that the poor will have to die without treatment. Only the rich will survive from any illness.

For Bangladesh, the Human Poverty Index (HPI) remained stagnant as the country continued to lag behind even the South Asian average in terms of life expectancy, percentage of undernourished people, percentage of under-weight children, infant and under-five mortality rates etc. These are health indicators, which the innovations in technology cannot solve. These need broad-based social and development programmes for the eradication of poverty, which the HDR is not focussing at all. The corporations on the other hand are trying to capture the market of under-nourishment through their so-called scientific research in genetic engineering laboratories. The focus of these researches is on crops which will produce edible vaccines and will address the problems of malnutrition by incorporating genes for Vit. A, iron, zinc and other micro-nutrients. Those who suffer from nutritional deficiencies do not have adequate food. The corporate micro-nutrients cannot solve to fill up the hungry stomachs with their profit oriented food in the market.

The third issue that the HDR emphasises is on information technology. It warns the developing countries not to stay off the information superhighway. The Report further said that informations and communications technology could make an important development impact because it could overcome barriers to social, economic and geographical isolation, increase access to information and education and enable poor people to participate in more of the decisions that affect their life. However, the report also shows the high cost of technology use in poor countries compared to those of the rich countries. The monthly internet access charge in Nepal is 278 per cent of the average per capita monthly income in Nepal, 191 percent in Bangladesh, 80 percent in Bhutan and 60 per cent in Sri Lanka and only 1.2 per cent in the United States. The HDR emphasised on the need for introducing fibre optic system to have smooth, quick and cost effective Internet connectivity in the age of information and communications technology (ICT). Bangladesh has about 60 private Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and half a million Internet users with more than 100 per cent growth rate every year. But the capacity of all satellites is lesser than one fibre optic. It will take at least two years to get connectivity to the submarine cable.

The HDR referred to the expansion of cellular phones in the rural areas by the Grameen Bank. It is true that Grameen is providing an easy access of the corporations to the poorer families in Bangladesh for the introduction of technologies. Micro-credit, as they are now structured with cellular phones and seeds, enhances purchasing power of the poor to buy corporate products. Grameen made several deals with transnational companies such as Telenor of Norway, Marubeni of Japan to promote cellular mobile phones. Through these phones women are supposed to make business contacts for their small business. The experiences of the mobile phones in the villages are not showing any positive result. When the mobile phones were promoted as a 'tool' of poverty reduction, poor women with mobiles near their ear were shown with smiling face. Soon that has replaced the upper city elites with tie and shirt. The rhetoric of the IT technology and the poor disappeared without a trace. Grameen has not even been able to operate the mobile phone system in an effective manner in the cities. The rural areas are often in "network fail" condition. However, the inhumanity in such false projections is that poor women are already paying for the cell phones at the cost of not using the money for more important needs in the families. Cellular phones, and for that matter Information technology cannot meet hunger, nor can it eradicate poverty. The experiments so contributed to the indebtedness of the poor for reasons of using technology. The issue is not whether we need information technology or not, a different debate. The issue here is generation of ample nonsense and utter hypocrisy that links technology to poverty in a linear, uncritical manner simply to veil the complexity of the social, economic and political dynamics that generates poverty.

The HDR's warning that "if the developing community turns its back on the explosion of technological innovation in food, medicine and information, it risks marginalising itself." rather sheds doubts about the UNDP's real commitment in terms of human development and poverty eradication. If the developing country government turn it's back to the processes of monopoly control of few corporations over innovation and technology, they willend up becoming nothing more than marketing agent of the companies. The violent efforts to divide the world into segments of markets, for which UNDP has ranked to become their front soldier, must be resisted.

U B I N I G
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"Nayakrishi Andolon"

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