ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to stimulate those involved in village development to question and rethink policy, by focusing attention on human development. The accelerated process of development could be seen as a process of social selection, favoring an entrepreneurial social character. Development policy must deal with villages like Santa Maria and those like Tierra Alta, and their needs are different. A pragmatic development policy must continually test humanistic principle against practical experience, by transforming intervention into participative study and experimentation. In the village society, when the exploitative entrepreneurs take over, the traditional productive hoarding peasants manage to adapt, but their best instincts for equity and respect are frustrated, while their cynical and egoistic tendencies are strengthened. The need for security refers of course to needs for nutrition, water, shelter and care in times of sickness, and protection from invasion and crime.
