Integrated Development

As a student of agriculture in the 1930s, and later as a field instructor, says Weitz, "I understood that the study of agriculture cannot be just technical, but has to be part of development."

Regional development. That became the key phrase. Already in the 1930s, the Jewish Agency - the "shadow government" of the still unborn State of Israel and today still deals with immigrant absorption - embraced the premise that an independent state could only succeed if it already had a solid agricultural base. Land was purchased and farming villages established. After Independence in 1948, the Agency continued to be responsible for rural development throughout Israel. Ra'anan Weitz became Deputy Director, and ultimately Director, of its Settlement Department. I asked Prof. Weitz what challenges he faced in those first years.

"I was given responsibility for the grand plan of Israel's rural development. The concept I introduced was that rural development cannot depend on agriculture alone, but has to be integrated with appropriate industry and - especially - support services." He mused for a moment, then added: "And so, as part of my position and my profession, I made it a personal goal to get involved in aid and assistance to developing countries, especially from the aspect of rural development." MASHAV! I immediately thought: outreach to developing countries. But Prof. Weitz had not finished elaborating on the basic concept.

Already at the beginning of the century, noted Weitz, Jewish pioneers had rejected the subsistence farming that was typical of the peasant societies of the Middle East and parts of Eastern Europe (from which many of them had come). Their experiments with new social forms produced the "kibbutz" (collective farming village) and later the "moshav" (cooperative village of family farms). These new villages practised diversified farming, with the resultant integrated economy that became the basis for further development, both up to and after Independence.

Weitz explained: "Every agricultural unit deals with all branches of cultivation and livestock - grain, vegetables, fruit, fodder, dairy animals, poultry. This is very different from the traditional farming of just raising enough to feed your family. But even diversification is only an intermediate stage, necessary but intermediate on the way to specialized agriculture."

The problem, he continued, is that "the moment agriculture develops, it employs fewer and fewer people, and the villages cannot exist on farming alone. They have to move into additional areas like industry, services, tourism. That demands a radical change in the physical infrastructure and in development policy as a whole. It took Europe 100 years to make the transition.

"This highlights one of the pitfalls of the technical aid the rich and developed world gives to the poor and developing world. Many developing nations are only now emerging from traditional farming to modern market-oriented agriculture, and they have to realize that they cannot leap immediately to expensive technology that does not provide employment. They have to go through the stage we went through over 25 years, though they can do it more quickly. They have to learn diversified farming first, though in the knowledge that they will eventually move to specialized agriculture.

"Israel is in a unique position to reach out to developing nations, because it has itself been through the experience of nation-building relatively recently. We need to teach them not what we're doing today, but what we did in the 1950s, when we had to deal with land development and settling people on the land who knew nothing about farming. We did the right thing then. The fact is that for over two decades we had an economic growth of 9% a year - even higher than that of Japan!"

When we talk about technical and professional cooperation with developing countries, Israel has the edge, Weitz asserts: "We 'deliver the goods' in a more concrete and practical manner. Our people are first- or second-generation 'doers' - they've 'been there' themselves. Countries like Germany, Britain, Canada and the U.S.A. have 'been there' too, but generations ago. Therefore there is a special appreciation for our work."

I went back to history. The very 'raison d'etre' of MASHAV, founded by Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is organizing courses in Israel for participants from developing countries, despatching Israeli experts to help in the field in those countries themselves, implementing projects and cooperating on research programs. Ra'anan Weitz has long been involved in exactly that kind of work, usually in partnership with MASHAV.

How did it all begin? Weitz: "In 1955, U Nu, the prime minister of Burma and a personal friend of Ben-Gurion [Israel's first prime minister], visited Israel. Ben-Gurion asked me to show him the country, especially the new rural areas. U Nu got excited by what we were doing. He said 'This is what Burma needs to do'."

There were two enormously ambitious national projects then in full swing in Israel. The National Water Carrier was designed to integrate all the country's water resources, and pipe water from the verdant north to the arid south. What impressed U Nu, however, was the Lachish Project, which, in a few short years, developed a semi-arid region in the south of Israel, and settled in it tens of thousands of refugee new immigrants. New farming villages were clustered around a rural centre, while each cluster was, so to speak, a "satellite" of an urban hub designed to provide regional services and infrastructure. Lachish became Israel's show piece: "It was the model that served all the contingents that visited," said Prof. Weitz.

"U Nu accepted my suggestion to set up between five and ten new villages in one region of Burma - a large project by their standards - and send the core of the settler group to Israel for a year to train in some of our veteran moshav-type villages, and return home as instructors. They did that, and we sent expert Israeli instructors back to Burma with them as well - an agronomist, a water engineer, an irrigation expert, a sociologist, and so on. That [interdisciplinary aspect] is part of the 'integrative approach' as well.

"It was all coordinated through the Israeli Foreign Ministry. All of a sudden our diplomats were dealing with issues of development that had nothing to do with diplomacy! That's how the whole thing began." [In 1958 MASHAV was founded as an arm of the Foreign Ministry to coordinate similar courses and projects.]

I asked Prof. Weitz whether conditions in other countries parallel those in Israel enough to copy the Israeli experience? "Not just parallel," he replied, "but amazingly similar! Most developing countries today are as we were in the 1950s. I was the first Israeli to be officially invited to the People's Republic of China. It was in 1986, for an International Symposium on the Strategy of Rural Development. I was really amazed at how similar their basic problems were to those of Israel in 1949. The argument back then was over the direction of Israeli agriculture. One view was that we needed to concentrate on growing what we needed for our own subsistence, i.e. grain. But we don't have enough land per family to grow the grain we need. I took an opposing view, which was eventually accepted, that we should exploit our local conditions to produce the most economically viable crops, and we'd sell some of that to buy grain.

"I discovered, to my surprise, that the fields of China are not like those of a developing country. They're beautiful, with very high yields. There is enough food for everyone in China, but the country is poor, because they grow mainly grain. With economic growth, there will be changes, of course. The Chinese adopted some of our ideas, but they couldn't use them all. Our approach is one of 'regional integration,' that is, there has to be coordination among national bodies at the regional level in order to run agriculture, industry and services together. In a country like China, government is concentrated in the capital, and every sector, every ministry, is organized 'vertically.' Regional coordination becomes virtually impossible, because all coordination is done in the capital, and any plan has to travel up the 'ladder,' and it can take 2-3 years until it gets approved."

The regional 'integrative' philosophy Prof. Weitz describes was developed by the Settlement Study Centre - since renamed the Development Study Centre - which Weitz himself founded in his native city of Rehovot, southeast of Tel Aviv, and has become known as the Rehovot Approach. The Centre was an outgrowth of the National and University Institute of Agriculture, which in turn is an umbrella for Hebrew University's Faculty of Agriculture in Rehovot and the various government agricultural experimental stations. "The task of the Centre," says Weitz, "is to study the relationship between the person or human organizations and the technological changes in agriculture, in the light of economic growth." The integrative philosophy has become known as the Rehovot Approach.

The Approach has won other adherents abroad. The development of a region in Venezuela assisted by Israeli experts has surged ahead of neighbouring regions. In northeastern Brazil, the University of Ceara opened a new department (with Professor Weitz as a guest lecturer) to teach the Rehovot Approach. Over 25 years, says Weitz, the agriculture of the Ceara region has changed decisively, and the regional centre of Forteleza has grown from little more than a village to a city worthy of the name.

I asked about the relationship of the Centre and MASHAV, and for that matter the Jewish Agency's Settlement Department, all of which have been involved in working with developing nations.

"At the beginning the Settlement Department was very active, because no one else was doing it. When MASHAV was founded I took the Department out of this activity, and [later] got the Centre involved instead. But I didn't want the Centre to have to deal with issues that would distract it from its professional tasks, and that is where MASHAV comes in. It helps find the international funding for the Centre to run its courses, in Spanish for Latin American countries, and in English for participants from Asia and Africa."

Perhaps the most far-reaching of the courses run by the MASHAV/DSC partnership is the one on Integrated Rural Regional Planning. It runs in Israel for six months, and then the whole group of course participants together with its Israeli instructors, moves to a developing country for another two months. (In recent years the course is given in Israel for five months and in the recipient country for one more month.) "Together with the host country," says Weitz, "we select a region that needs planning, and the participants, professionals in various areas of development in their own countries, are taught planning according to the local conditions of a developing country."

"The idea is to work with people in the provinces to plan their own development programs. Fifteen years ago, I thought of computerizing our system, to integrate all the factors and find the best solutions. We got IBM interested, and I told them from the beginning: 'We work within the regions, and this aid has to be for the regions. The program needs to be designed for the PC.' But IBM designed a program for the mainframe, and never transferred it to the PC. So we designed our own program, sophisticated but simple, once the second-generation, more powerful PCs became available. We established a computerized laboratory, and we teach every participants to work with this program. The aim is for every region to find the most economically viable alternative for each sector such as agriculture, industry, tourism, technical services and social services, according to local conditions. This is what Israel needed in the 1950s and didn't have!"

"We've always had a close personal relationship with MASHAV, from the director down to the most junior planner," concluded Ra'anan Weitz. "Unlike MASHAV's own institutions, the Centre is independent, and yet it's more closely connected to MASHAV than its own institutions! Together we are at the frontline in the war against poverty. There is no doubt about it!"