Tokyo
I'm seeing old friends from my days in
Third World development. I don't know whether I've ever written a
summary of my experience. Three projects were failures and one was
almost successful. The lesson was clear.
The most horrifying failure was an
Indian project to raise the earnings of rural untouchables who
collected leather from dead animals and sold it in raw dried form for
processing in Calcutta. The development project paid for the building
of treatment/drying buildings and environmentally safe settling
ponds for the hazardous acids used in the processing (hundreds of
such buildings were built around India.) I saw the project in the
third year after the Calcutta processors had refused to buy the
pre-treated leather and were starving out the untouchables to stop
them from doing the pre-processing. The Calcutta processors had
succeeded in starving the untouchables and had gained political
control of the untouchables' communal organization. Tragic disaster.
The next approach was to change the entire supply chain simultaneously. This was done with wool, starting with improvements in the sheep pastures and going all the way to improving the design of final export wool sweaters. The project succeeded in Guatemala and failed everywhere else it was tried.
I went to Guatemala to find out why and was fortunate to meet a retired State Department official in a swimming pool. She explained, confidentially, that nearly every development project was tested in Guatemala because it was easy to fly there from Washington D.C. The Guatemalans had learned to be good test subjects and take the money and make the projects appear to succeed. However, after the Washington bureaucrats left, the Guatemalans always went back to their old ways. I then saw much evidence of old dead projects, to confirm what I had been told.