The real task may be formulated in four propositions:

First, that workplaces have to be created in the areas where the people are living now, and not primarily in metropolitan areas into which they tend to migrate.

Second, that these workplaces must be, on average, cheap enough so that they can be created in large numbers without this calling for an unattainable level of capital formation and imports.

Third, that the production methods employed must be relatively simple, so that the demands for high skills are minimised, not only in the production process itself but also in matters of organisation, raw material supply, financing, marketing, and so forth.

Fourth, that production should be mainly from local materials and mainly for local use.

These four requirements-can be met only if there is a ‘regional’ approach to development and, second, if there is a conscious effort to develop and apply what might be called an ‘intermediate technology’. These two conditions will now be considered in turn.

‘The first relates to the recent tendency (fostered by the policy of most African, Asian and Latin American governments of having oil refineries in their own territories, however small their markets) for international firms to design small petroleum refineries with low capital investment per unit of output and a low total capacity, say from 5,000 to 30,000 barrels daily, These units are as efficient and low-cost as the much bigger and more capital-intensive refineries corresponding to conventional design. The second example relates to “package plants” for ammonia production, also recently designed for small markets. According to some provisional data, the investment cost per ton in a “package plant” with a sixty-tons-a-day capacity may be about 30,000 dollars, whereas a conventionally designed unit, with a daily capacity of 100 tons (which is, for a conventional plant, very small) would require an investment of approximately 50,000 dollars per ton.’

The idea of intermediate technology does not imply simply a ‘going back’ in history to methods now out-dated although a systematic study of methods employed in the developed countries, say, a hundred years ago could indeed yield highly suggestive results. It is too often assumed that the achievement of western science, pure and applied, lies mainly in the apparatus and machinery that have been developed from it, and that a rejection of the apparatus and machinery would be tantamount to a rejection of science. This is an excessively superficial view. The real achievement lies in the accumulation of precise knowledge, and this knowledge can be applied in a great variety of ways, of which the current application in modern industry is only one. The development of an intermediate technology, therefore, means a genuine forward movement into new territory, where the enormous cost and complication o~ production methods for the sake of labour saving and job elimination is avoided and technology is made appropriate for labour surplus societies,Excerpted from pages 556-559 of ‘Small is Beautiful’ by EF Schumacher