Auto-centered development and indigenous technics: Slaheddine el-Amami and Tunisian delinking

ABSTRACT

Until his early death in 1985, at age 51, the Tunisian agronomist Slaheddine el-Amami carried out a path-breaking research program at what was then the Centre de Recherche et de Génie Rural. He wrote technical studies ranging from the agricultural capacities of the unjustly-marked-as-barren Kerkennah Islands, to possibilities for drip irrigation, to attempts to quantify the energy use of Tunisian agriculture, to a wide-ranging investigation of indigenous hydraulic systems. There is little explicit mention in this work of a then-dominant strand of heterodox Arab and Third Worldist social science – the emphasis on delinking, or removal from Western commodity, technical and financial flows. Yet through an examination of his work in the context of the delinking paradigm, as put forth by scholars like Samir Amin, Fawzy Mansour and Mohamed Dowidar, I show the use and need for independent agronomic expertise to be deployed within analytical paradigms such as delinking, forged by heterodox political economists. Through delinking, countries could proceed on a path of auto-centered development. The possibility and time frame of delinking is necessarily a socio-technical question linked to indigenous capacities, technical and natural, and the social relations with which they are woven. It is also a question of creating and mobilizing a surplus in the agricultural sector. Through examining Amami’s life’s work, I show the use and need for interdisciplinary methods and research programs, which must braid the social and natural sciences – if not simply take threads from each to create a holistic knowledge – in order to arrive at appropriate developmental programs. Such knowledge and programs were appropriate in that they offered ways of working agriculture without capital-intense inputs – thus resolving rather than aggravating current account imbalances and labor surpluses. They also relied on a decentralization of planning, based on the skills and knowledges of the direct producers. In analyzing such knowledge, systematized in the work of Amami, I will also show how moving from underdevelopment to development requires a mélange of knowledges. Crucial and neglected are those knowledges which have been developed to inform sustainable ways of living on land-bases, in order to produce the rural surplus which is the sine qua non of a successful move beyond developmental malaise in the Global South. I will then link this to the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) Synthesis Report, showing this paradigm’s continuing relevance.

KEYWORDS:

• Samir Amin
• delinking
• agro-ecology
• political ecology
• Tunisia
• Slaheddine el-Amami

Acknowledgements

Much thanks to Divya Sharma, Phil McMichael, Aaron Jakes and Habib Ayeb, as well as two anonymous reviewers from the Journal of Peasant Studies, for generous and probing comments, suggestions and criticisms; and to the Thimar Collective for inviting me to present these ideas at a workshop in Beirut.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Max Ajl is a PhD candidate in the Department of Development Sociology at Cornell University. His research focuses on Tunisian food systems, state formation and the political ecology of agricultural change, as well as the transition from colonial under-development to post-colonial planning. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 It has since become the National Research Institute of Rural Engineering, Water and Forests, or INGREF.

2 The IAASTD was an effort to take stock of the centrality of food production and consumption, including traditional and small-scale methods, to overall environmental and social health.

3 Biographical data drawn from Slaheddine el-Amami (n.d.).

4 For the distinction between monotechnics and polytechnics, see Mumford (1970).

5 Boudhiaf’s concern was the lack of full use of the Green Revolution techniques. I raise him here to highlight such capitalist absentee plots’ internal logic.

6 This author can confirm on the basis of many anecdotal conversations that such work is poorly known among a younger generation of Tunisian radicals.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Mario Einaudi Center, Cornell University.