Anyhow, why does a smart guy like you, Wojtek, jump to such a strange assumption, that hydrotechnology is some sort of neutral force?
[WS:] I never did. I just do not believe in the Third Worldist mythologies about 'alternative' roads to development, skipping stages, etc. It is all populist and nationalist crap. There is only one way, the hard way, the way that the First World took. And that road has tremendous social cost that will not be popular with subsistence farmers. The Soviets understood that very well, and that is why they put the subsistence farmers under their boot. Terrible, but necessary. And it paid off. The USSR was propelled to the world superpower.
The rest of the world is full of wreckages of "third ways" pandering to local nationalist sensibilities and rural/populist sentiments. Cambodia is a prime example. African 'socialism' is another. They did not work. End of story. They only appeal to blasé Western intellectuals who love austerity and misery.
Of course one can take the bleeding heart approach and pity the subsistence farmers or displaced substance farmers, but the sad truth is that this is not self-sustaining mode of economic activity in the modern world. It sort-of was in the past, but at a terrible human cost: skyrocketing infant mortality rates, diseases, life expectancy of less than 40 years, patriarchy, and general idiocy of the rural life as the Old Man aptly dubbed it.
That mode of life is not sustainable today, when better alternatives are available. But moving to those alternatives requires massive modernization - basically building a modern industrial society. One cannot do it with sticks and hoes and subsistence farmers with no marketable skills. One needs investments in fixed capital that will sustain modern industry, and one needs to transform subsistence farmers to the urban/industrial working class. And that requires sacrificing subsistence farming and those who practice it. It is not pretty, it carries heavy social and economic cost and even cost human lives, but there is no way around it.
The choice is between sustaining the rural idiocy of subsistence farming with its high mortality rates, disease, hunger, patriarchy, low life expectancy, and susceptibility to climate changes or leaping forward to modernity - which will cause a lot of pain but has a future. There is no future in quaint ruralism and Third world populism - except perhaps for blasé Western intellectuals who love quaint austerity and misery.
The bottom line is that the Third world is over-populated and the surplus population will pay the highest price of that one way or the other. With the industrial development projects, there is at least some hope that this price will not go for nothing, and that future generations may reap some benefits from it. The subsistence farming and the populist mythologies that glorify it offer no such hope.
Wojtek