There’s Nothing Pure About Poverty
By Pratik Chougule

KOLHAPUR, INDIA—The dirt road came to an end, and my uncle stopped the car. We would have to walk the rest of the way to reach the farm. My uncle was excited to show me his friend Patil’s sugar farm in a rural area on the west coast of India. We walked along a narrow path for half a mile amidst tall sugar cane stalks. Eagerly awaiting us was Patil, a well-dressed man in a cowboy hat. Learning that I was visiting from America, he proudly removed his hat and explained that it was from Texas.

 

After showing us around, Patil led us to a group of four young men cutting sugar cane with long knives. He explained that the workers were following methods his family had perfected over many generations. After cutting the cane by hand, the men put small pieces into a giant frying pan which hung over a large brick oven. The fire underneath was fueled by leftover cane stalks and husks. In the intense heat, the pieces of sugar cane melted, leaving a sugary liquid in the pan which another man stirred in an exact, continuous motion.

 

Once the pan was full of syrup, five men working together would tip it upside down, allowing the liquid sugar to pour into a rectangular hole in the ground. The cooled liquid would then be ladled into small buckets and shipped to town. The cycle continued non-stop without a tidbit of sugarcane wasted. The entire system was as efficient as human sweat and cottage ingenuity could make it.

 

Nonetheless, Patil was mired in an interminable cycle of debt. As I listened to him describe the process, I realized that his sugar production involved no machinery, no electricity, no automated power, no fossil fuels. The entire farm lacked any such technology. It functioned by processes passed from generation to generation, and had I visited 50 or 100 years ago, very little would have been different.

 

Then I remembered my history lecture at Brown University shortly before vacation, in which my professor had condemned technology, capitalism, and industrialization for their corrupting effects on Third World communities. He argued that people in the developing world were happy to live in pre-industrial villages, and that the introduction of American technology represented a new form of cultural imperialism. In this sense, Patil’s farm represented a liberal utopia—virtually untouched by the technological advances of the West.

 

My experience on the farm allowed me to recognize firsthand the sheer ignorance—and selfishness—of a philosophy that is dominant on our nation’s campuses. My professors and classmates enjoy the fruits of modern economic prosperity for themselves, while romanticizing the virtues of pre-industrial living for others in the Third World. They consider themselves defenders of developing nations, protecting them from the evils of Western capitalism. Yet they do the foreign poor no favors.

 

As my uncle showed me, Patil’s method of processing, however careful and parsimonious, is simply incapable of yielding enough sugar to earn a liveable income. Due to a lack of modern equipment and energy, Patil was drowning in debt, unable to invest in his property, and incapable of providing adequately for his family. Contrary to the notions of well-fed Western theorists, life without technology and capital and fossil fuels is not something Third Worlders choose, it is a problem they are stuck with. Where they must scrape by without these modern tools, they struggle to feed their families, and ultimately end up trapped in a life of misery and indignity.

 

In his embrace of his Texan hat, Patil displays the truer yearning of poor Third Worlders: for the tools of economic progress that we in the West take for granted. By indoctrinating future American business and political leaders with myths of economic “imperialism,” our universities only squelch the chances for Patil and millions of other impoverished people to find a better life.

 

 

Pratik Chougule is an international relations student at Brown University