(With love, to all my friends and fellows in developing countries like us.)
I read somewhere that in some African communities, some parts of local populace won't be equipped with basic skills in farming. They need to import food and other products from other sources! That is why 'China'.
Almost the same is true with us, save in those sectors like agriculture and raw material trading. All our money goes to trade or buy from China. It is time to find the faults and weak points in this strategy and also within ourselves, and to take steps to correct them. Nobody, there is no nation or private investor in this world who is here to do us a plain favor. (And nobody is responsible for fixing our failures except for ourselves.)
"Engineering is Research''
Engineering is research. Without it, the system will just produce cookie -cutter engineers. Here the problem is, without the sufficient practical doings, research and field experiences, only learning mainly from the prescribed texts and other literatures, the newly educated younger generation engineers won't be qualified even as the cookie -cutter ones. That is the problem with the engineering education in the poor countries.
Where will they find enough funding to pour into the areas of R and D in science and engineering? So, if we do nothing to fix this, then the raw material’s trade, the agriculture trade, the low-tech businesses will be dependent on importing everything from, ah yes.... China.
There will be no self-sufficiency in terms of almost everything, and all the money will go to, again, China. And this will then become a vicious circle. That is the trend that many third world countries are experiencing.
I, as a civil engineer in the field of irrigation and a current vice -president of the Engineering Council, Tamu District branch, Myanmar, here in this posting, deriving from my personal experiences and learnings, I will let out everything and express my visions and concerns on that.
Go to any shopping mall in Myanmar. Pick up anything on display at any store. Chances are they will be mostly made in China, be it a nail cutter, a hat, a canned juice or an apple, or an electronic device. What have we Burmese been doing all along? Most of the time, after our independence, that is well over sixty years now, we have been fighting among ourselves, engaging in no modern developments, developing no truly mechanized agricultural practices, or developing trade in our raw materials.
Only in the last decade or so did we truly start to modernize our agricultural sector, formulating deep seaport projects and industrial zones, mostly by the help of China and Japan. And those of the former are so controversial, just as they are in other places in the world.
We have almost no successful industry in our country that has been developed by ourselves. Maybe, the cloth industry is the one and only thing mentionable exception. In the agricultural sector, we have a long road ahead of us to go in terms of financing, land consolidation, land reclamation, farming practices, irrigation, marketing, contracts, quality exporting, and everything else to be able to catch up to the status of our Asian brothers like Thailand or Vietnam, let alone countries like Australia or Japan. And unfortunately, our agricultural sector is where 70% of our population, 52 million in total, are engaging in and relying upon. The annual revenue we get from our agricultural exports and farm products, when compared to that of Thailand or Vietnam will be laughable. The assets of the CP livestock mogul of Thailand, 'Chearavanont ' is 20.7 billion in 2019. The whole GDP of our country for that same year was 69 billions. (ref:wikipedia)
What we will need for sure will be to accept the fact that, “yes, we need to start from the bottom and then move upward. We need to upgrade our skills and knowledge levels. (That was what the world bank pointed out to us in the report last year.) We need to choose our family businesses.
According to many famous economists, 'agriculture, hydropower production, tourism and construction' are the four sectors which will bring us the social stability to take us to the level of a middle income country. Thinking of things like producing electronic devices and exporting them to our neighboring countries will be like thinking of “selling ice to Eskimos”, for they are China and India. Even for the above mentioned four sectors, we need skills and know-how, because adequate engineering knowledge is the backbone of development for our country. That again will call for Research & Development funding.
China has been using a good deal of money, $370 billion dollars in 2018 for R&D. That is nearly $100 billion lower than the U.S does. Then came Japan, spending $170 billion dollars in that same year. Unsurprisingly, Germany, France, and Russia all followed in serial. The point is, if you don't use sufficient funding for the R&Ds, you will be gaining nothing.
It is time for us to make a commitment to focus on that and look for a solution that will solve the problems of “knowing nothing and producing nothing valuable”.
And this is the topic I am presenting to the seniors and other fellow engineers at a forum of the Council.
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