What do many people think development is?

In this brief introduction, I want to look at the area of technological innovation and industrial development. In a lot of the discussions on this topic, there seems to be a general assumption that development is a sort of race. The industrialized countries are ahead and the developing countries are further behind and they are going to follow the same path. There’s the assumption that the pattern of development they follow has to be the same or at least very similar to the one that the industrialized countries have already gone through. Let’s take the example of fanning. Many developing countries are going for heavy industrial-type agriculture, or Machine-based agriculture, using, for example, tractors and harvesters rather than donkeys, oxen and horses. Now animals such as cattle donkeys may in fact be eminently more suitable to local conditions than industrialized Machines. But because there is the idea that development equals in this case Machinery, then Machinery is what they want. And of course it’s worth pointing out that it’s in the developed world’s interest to persuade the developing world, the Third World to adopt industrialized methods rather than to adapt them to their conditions and then not incidentally to sell them as much as possible of their own products.