The March of the Monoculture
Helena Norberg-Hodge
Director, ISEC
For many, the rise of the global economy marks the final fulfilment
of the great dream of a ‘Global Village’. Almost everywhere you travel
today you will find multi-lane highways, concrete cities and a cultural
landscape featuring gray business suits, fast-food chains, Hollywood films
and cellular phones. In the remotest corners of the planet, Barbie, Madonna
and the Marlboro Man are familiar icons. From Cleveland to Cairo to Caracas,
Baywatch is entertainment and CNN news.
The world, we are told, is being united by virtue of the fact that
everyone will soon be able to indulge their innate human desire for a Westernised,
urbanised consumer lifestyle. West is best, and joining the bandwagon brings
closer a harmonious union of peaceable, rational, democratic consumers
‘like us’.
This worldview assumes that it was the chaotic diversity of cultures,
values and beliefs, that lay behind the conflicts of the past: that as
these differences are removed, so the differences between us will be resolved.
As a result, villages, rural communities and their cultural traditions
around the world are being destroyed on an unprecedented scale under the
impact of globalising market forces. Communities that have sustained themselves
for hundreds of years are simply disintegrating. The spread of the consumer
culture seems unstoppable.
The Development Of The Consumer Monoculture
Historically, the erosion of cultural integrity was a conscious goal
of colonial developers. French government adviser on colonial affairs D.
Goulet, for example, urged that “traditional peoples must be shocked into
the realisation that they are living in abnormal, inhuman conditions as
psychological preparation for modernisation”.1 Or, as applied anthropologist
Goodenough explained:
“The problem is one of creating in another a sufficient dissatisfaction
with his present condition of self so that he wants to change it. This
calls for some kind of experience that leads him to reappraise his
self-image and re-evaluate his self-esteem.”
Towards this end, change agents were advised that they should:
“1. Involve traditional leaders in their programmes.
2. Work through bilingual, acculturated individuals who have some
knowledge of both the dominant and the target culture.
3. Modify circumstances or deliberately tamper with the equilibrium
of the traditional culture so that change will become imperative.
4. Attempt to change underlying core values before attacking superficial
customs.”2
It is instructive to consider the actual effect of these strategies
on the well-being of individual peoples in the South. For example, the
Toradjas tribes of the Poso district in central Celebes (now Sulawesi,
Indonesia) were deemed completely incapable of ‘development’ without drastic
intervention. Writing in 1929, A.C. Kruyt reported that the happiness and
stability of Toradjas society was such that “development and progress were
impossible” and that they were “bound to remain at the same level”.3
Toradja society was cashless and there was neither a desire for
money nor the extra goods that might be purchased with it. In the face
of such contentment, mission work proved an abject failure as the Toradjas
had no interest in converting to a new religion, sending their children
to school or growing cash crops. So, in 1905, the Netherlands Indies government
decided to bring the Poso region under firm control, using armed force
to crush all resistance. As a result of relocation and continual government
punishment and harassment, mortality rates soared among the increasingly
desperate and bewildered Toradjas. Turning to the missionaries for help,
the Toradjas became “converted” and began sending their children to school.
Eventually they began cultivating coconut and coffee plantations and began
to acquire new needs for oil lamps, sewing machines, and ‘better’ clothes.
The self-sufficient tribal economy had been superceded, as a result of
deliberate government action.
In many countries, schooling was the prime coercive instrument for
tampering with “underlying core values” and proved to be a highly effective
means of destroying self-esteem, fostering new ‘needs’, creating dissatisfactions,
and generally disrupting traditional cultures. An excerpt from a French
reader designed in 1919 for use by French West African school-children
gives a flavour of the kinds of pressure that were imposed on children:
“It is... an advantage for a native to work for a white man, because the
Whites are better educated, more advanced in civilisation than the natives...
You who are intelligent and industrious, my children, always help the Whites
in their task. That is a duty.”4
Cultural Erosion Today
Today, as wealth is transferred away from nation states into the
rootless casino of the financial markets, the destruction of cultural integrity
is far more subtle than before. Corporate and government executives no
longer consciously plan the destruction they wreak — indeed they are often
unaware of the consequences of their decisions on real people on the other
side of the world. This lack of awareness is fostered by the cult of specialisation
that pervades our society: the job of a public relations executive is confined
to producing business-friendly sound bites, while time pressures and a
narrow focus prevent a questioning of their overall impact. The tendency
to undermine cultural diversity proceeds, as it were, on ‘automatic pilot’
as an inevitable consequence of the spreading global economy.
But if the methods employed by the masters of the ‘Global Village’
are less brutal than in colonial times, the scale and effects are often
even more devastating. The computer and telecommunications revolutions
have helped to speed up and strengthen the forces behind the march of a
global monoculture, which is now able to disrupt traditional cultures with
a shocking speed and finality which surpasses anything the world has witnessed
before.
Preying On The Young
Today, western consumer conformity it descending on the less-industrialised
parst of the world like an avalanche. ‘Development’ brings tourism, western
films and products and, more recently, satellite television to the remotest
parts of the earth. All provide overwhelming images of luxury and power.
Adverts and action films give the impression that everyone in the West
is rich, beautiful and brave, and leads a life filled with excitement and
glamour. In the commercial mass culture which fuels this illusion, advertisers
make it clear that westernised fashion accessories equal sophistication
and ‘cool’. In diverse ‘developing’ nations around the world, people are
induced to meet their needs not through their community or local economy,
but by trying to ‘buy in’ to the global market. People are made to believe
that, in the words of US advertising executive in China, “imported equals
good, local equals crap.”
Even more alarming, people end up rejecting their own ethnic and
racial characteristics — to feel shame at being who they are. Around the
world, blonde-haired blue-eyed Barbie dolls and thin-as-a-rake ‘cover girls’
set the standard for women. Already now, seven-year-old girls in
Singapore are suffering from eating disorders, and it is not unusual to
find East Asian women with eyes surgically altered to look more European,
dark-haired Southern European women with hair dyed blonde, and Africans
with blue- or green-coloured contact lenses aimed at ‘correcting’ dark
eyes. The one-dimensional, fantasy view of modern life becomes a slap in
the face for young people in the Third World. Teenagers in particular come
to feel ashamed of their traditions and their origins. The people they
learn to admire and respect on television are all ‘sophisticated’ city
dwellers with fast cars and designer clothes, spotlessly clean hands and
shiny white teeth. Yet they find their parents asking them to choose a
way of life that involves working in the fields and getting their hands
dirty for little or no money, and certainly no glamour. It is hardly surprising,
then, that many choose to abandon the old ways of their parents for the
siren song of a western material paradise.
For millions of youths in rural areas of the world, modern Western
culture appears vastly superior to their own. They see incoming tourists
spend as much as $1,000 a day — the equivalent of a visitor to the US spending
$50,000 a day. Besides promoting the illusion that all Westerners are multi-millionaires,
tourism and media images also give the impression that we never work —
since for many people in the ‘developing’ world, sitting at a desk or behind
the wheel of a car does not constitute work.
People are not aware of the negative social or psychological aspects
of Western life so familiar to us: the stress, the loneliness, the fear
of growing old, the rise in clinical depression and other ‘industrial diseases’
like cancer, stroke, diabetes and heart problems. Nor do they see the environmental
decay, rising crime, poverty, homelessness and unemployment. While they
know their own culture inside out, including all of its limitations and
imperfections, they see only a glossy, exaggerated side of life in the
West.
Ladakh: The Pressure To Modernise
My own experience amongst the people of Ladakh, or ‘Little Tibet’
in the trans-Himalayan region of Kashmir, is a clear, if painful, example
of the destruction of traditional cultures by the faceless consumer monoculture.
When I first arrived in the area 23 years ago, the vast majority of Ladakhis
were self-supporting farmers, living in small scattered settlements in
the high desert. Though natural resources were scarce and hard to obtain,
the Ladakhis had a remarkably high standard of living, with beautiful art,
architecture and jewelry. Life moved at a gentle pace and people enjoyed
a degree of leisure unknown to most of us in the West. Most Ladakhis only
really worked for four months of the year, and poverty, pollution and unemployment
were alien concepts.
In 1975, I remember being shown around the remote village of Hemis
Shukpachan by a young Ladakhi called Tsewang. It seemed to me, a newcomer,
that all the houses I saw were especially large and beautiful, and I asked
Tsewang to show me the houses where the poor lived. He looked perplexed
for a moment, then replied, “We don’t have any poor people here.” In recent
years, external forces have caused massive and rapid disruption in Ladakh.
Contact with the modern world has debilitated and demoralised a once-proud
and self-sufficient people, who today are suffering what can best be described
as a cultural inferiority complex.
In traditional Ladakhi culture, virtually all basic needs — food,
clothing and shelter — were provided without money. Labour was free of
charge, part of an intricate and longe-established web of human relationships.
Because Ladakhis had no need for money, they had little or none. So when
they saw outsiders — tourists and visitors — spending what was to them
vast amounts of cash on inessential luxuires, they suddenly felt poor.
Not realising that money was essential in the West — that without it people
often go homeless or even starve — they didn’t realise its true value.
They began to feel inadequate and backward. Eight years after Tsewang had
told me the Ladakhis had no poverty, I overheard him talking to some tourists.
“If you could only help us poor Ladakhis”, he was saying, “we’re so poor.”
Tourism is part of the overall process of development which the
Indian government is promoting in Ladakh. The area is being integrated
into the Indian, and hence the global, economy. Subsidised food is imported
from the outside, while local farmers, who had previously grown a variety
of crops and kept a few animals to provide for themselves, have been encouraged
to grow cash crops. In this way they are becoming dependent on forces beyond
their control — huge transportation networks, oil prices, and the fluctuations
of international finance. Over the course of time, inflation obliges them
to produce more and more, so as to secure the income that they now need
in order to buy what they used to produce themselves. In political terms,
individual Ladakhis once wielded real influence and power within their
own village-scale economy. Now each is just one within a national economy
of 800 million, and one within a global economy of six billion. Their influence
and power have been reduced to zero.
As a result of external investments, the local economy is crumbling.
For generation after generation Ladakhis grew up learning how to provide
themselves with clothing and shelter; how to make shoes out of yak skin
and robes from the wool of sheep; how to build houses out of mud and stone.
As these building traditions give way to ‘modern’ methods, the plentiful
local materials are left unused, while competition for a narrow range of
modern materials — concrete, steel and plastic — skyrockets. The same thing
happens when people begin eating identical staple foods, wearing the same
clothes and relying on the same finite energy sources. For global corporations,
making everyone dependent on the same resources creates efficiency; but
for consumers it creates artificial scarcity, and heightens competitive
pressures.
As they lose the sense of security and identity that springs from
deep, long-lasting connections to people and place, the Ladakhis are starting
to develop doubts about who they are. The images they get from outside
tell them to be different, to own more, to buy more and thus be ‘better’
than they are. The previously strong, outgoing women of Ladakh have been
replaced by a new generation — unsure of themselves and desperately concerned
with their appearance.
And as their desire to be ‘modern’ grows, Ladakhis are turning their
backs on their traditional culture. I have seen Ladakhis wearing wristwatches
they cannot read, and heard them apologising for the lack of electric lighting
in their homes — electric lighting which, in 1975 when it first appeared,
most villagers laughed at as an unnecessary gimmick. Even traditional foods
are no longer a source of pride: now, when I’m a guest in a Ladakhi village,
people apologise if they serve the traditional roasted barley, ngamphe,
instead of instant noodles.
Ironically, then, modernisation — so often associated with the triumph
of individualism — has produced a loss of individuality and a growing sense
of personal insecurity, as people feel pressured to conform and to live
up to an idealised image. By contrast, in the traditional village, where
everyone wore essentially the same clothes and looked the same to the casual
observer, there was more freedom to relax. As part of a close-knit community,
people felt secure enough to be themselves.
Creating Divisions
In Ladakh, as elsewhere, the breaking of local cultural, economic
and political ties isolates people from their locality and from each other.
Life speeds up and mobility increases — making even familial relationships
more superficial and brief. At the same time, competition for scarce jobs
and for political representation within the new centralised structures
increasingly divides people. Ethnic and religious differences began to
take on a political dimension, causing bitterness and enmity on a scale
hitherto unknown. With a desperate irony, the monoculture — instead of
bringing people together — creates divisions that previously did not exist.
As the fabric of local interdependence frays, so do traditional
levels of tolerance and cooperation. In villages near the capital, Leh,
disputes and acrimony within previously close-knit communities, and even
within families, are increasing. I have even seen heated arguments over
the allocation of irrigation water, a procedure that had previously been
managed smoothly within a cooperative framework. The rise in this kind
of new rivalry is one of the most painful divisions that I have seen in
Ladakh. Within a few years, growing competition actually culminated in
violence between Buddhists and Muslims. This in a place where those two
groups had lived peacefully side by side for 600 years, and where, previously,
there had not been a fight in living memory.
The rise of divisions, violence and civil disorder around the world
are the consequence of attempts to incorporate diverse cultures and peoples
into a single global monoculture. These divisions often deepen enough to
result in fundamentalist reaction and ethnic conflict. Ladakh is by no
means an isolated example. In Bhutan, where different ethnic groups had
also lived peaceably together for hundreds of years, two decades of economic
development have resulted in the widespread destruction of decentralised
livelihoods and communities. Unemployment, once completely unknown, has
reached crisis levels. Just as in Ladakh, these pressures have created
intense competition between individuals and groups for places in schools,
for jobs, for resources. As a result, tensions between Buddhists and Bhutanese
Hindus of Nepalese origin have led to an eruption of violence and even
a type of ‘ethnic cleansing’.
Elsewhere, Nicholas Hildyard has written of how, when confronted
with the horrors of ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia or Rwanda, it is often
taken for granted that the cause must lie in ingrained and ancient antagonisms.
The reality, however, as Hildyard notes, is different:
“scratch below the surface of inter-ethnic civil conflict, and the
shallowness and deceptiveness of ‘blood’ or ‘culture’ explanations are
soon revealed. ‘Tribal hatred’ (though a real and genuine emotion for some)
emerges as the product not of ‘nature’ or of a primordial ‘culture’, but
of a complex web of politics, economics, history, psychology and a struggle
for identity.”5
In similar vein, Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics at
the University of Ottawa, argues that the crisis in Kosovo had its roots
at least partly in the macro-economic reforms imposed by Belgrade’s
external creditors such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Multi-ethnic Yugoslavia was once a regional industrial power with relative
economic success. But after a decade of Western economic
ministrations and five years of disintegration, war, boycott, and
embargo, the economies of the former Yugoslavia lay in ruins. Chossudovsky
writes:
“In Kosovo, the economic reforms were conducive to the concurrent
impoverishment of both the Albanian and Serbian populations contributing
to fuelling ethnic tensions. The deliberate manipulation of market forces
destroyed economic activity and people’s livelihood creating a situation
of despair.”6
It is sometimes assumed that ethnic and religious strife is increasing
because modern democracy liberates people, allowing old prejudices and
hatreds to be expressed. If there was peace earlier, it is thought to have
been the result of oppression. But after more than twenty years of firsthand
experience on the Indian subcontinent, I am convinced that ‘development’
not only exacerbates existing tensions but in many cases actually creates
them. It breaks down human-scale structures, it destroys bonds of reciprocity
and mutual dependence, and encourages people to substitute their own culture
and values with those of the media. In effect this means rejecting one’s
own identity, rejecting one’s self.
Ultimately, while the myth makers of the ‘Global Village’ celebrate
values of togetherness, the disparity in wealth between the world’s upper
income brackets and the 90 percent of people in the poor countries represents
a polarisation far more extreme than existed in the 19th century. Use of
the word ‘village’ — intended to suggest relative equality, belonging and
harmony — obscures a reality of high-tech islands of privilege and wealth
towering above oceans of impoverished humanity struggling to survive. The
global monoculture is a dealer in illusions: while promising a glittering,
wealthy lifestyle it can never provide for the majority, it is destroying
the sustainable ways of living that traditions and local economies provided.
For what it destroys, it provides no replacement but a fractured, isolated,
competitive and unhappy society.
1 John Bodley, Victims of Progress, Mayfield Publishing, 1982, p.
111.
2 Quoted, ibid, p. 111-112.
3 Ibid, p. 129.
4 Ibid, p. 11.
5 Nicholas Hildyard, “Briefing 11: Blood and Culture: Ethnic Conflict
and the Authoritarian Right”, The Cornerhouse, 1999
6 Chossudovsky, Dismantling Yugoslavia, Colonising Bosnia, Ottawa,
1996, p.1
Globalisation versus Community
by Helena Norberg-Hodge
Director, ISEC
Society today is faced with a choice between two diverging paths. The path endorsed by government and industry leads towards an ever more globalised economy, one in which the distance between producers and consumers will continue to grow. The other path is being built from the grassroots, and leads towards strong local economies in which producer-consumer links are shortened. I believe that moving in the latter direction may be one of the best ways of solving a whole range of serious social and environmental problems, from rising rates of crime and violence to the greenhouse effect. This may sound absurdly simplistic, but it is a conviction based on long-term observations in societies at very different levels of dependence on the global economy — including heavily-industrialised America, socialist Sweden, rural Spain, and most importantly, Ladakh, a traditional culture on the Tibetan Plateau.
When I first came to Ladakh the Western macro-economy had not yet arrived, and the local economy was still rooted in its own soils. Producers and consumers were closely linked in a community-based economy. Two decades of development in Ladakh, however, have led to a number of fundamental changes, the most important of which is perhaps the fact that people are now dependent on food and energy from thousands of miles away. The effects of this increasing distance between producers and consumers are worth looking at as we consider our own future.
The path towards globalisation is dependent upon continuous government investments. It requires the building-up of a large-scale industrial infrastructure, including roads, mass communications facilities, energy installations, and schools for specialized education. Among other things, this heavily subsidised infrastructure allows goods produced on a large scale and transported long distances to be sold at artificially low prices—in many cases at lower prices than goods produced locally. In Ladakh, the Indian government is not only paying for roads, schools and energy installations, but is also bringing in subsidised food from India’s breadbasket, the Punjab. Ladakh’s local economy — which has provided enough food for its people for 2,000 years — is now being invaded by produce from industrial farms located on the other side of the Himalayas. The food arriving in lorries by the ton is cheaper in the local bazaar than food grown five minutes walk away. For many Ladakhis, it is no longer worthwhile to continue farming.
In Ladakh this same process is affecting not just food, but a whole range of goods, from clothes to household utensils to building materials. Imports from distant parts of India can often be produced and distributed at lower prices than goods produced locally — again, because of a heavily subsidised industrial infrastructure. The end result of all this long-distance transport of subsidised goods is that Ladakh’s local economy is being steadily dismantled, and with it the local community that was once tied together by bonds of interdependence.
This trend is exacerbated by other changes that have accompanied economic development. Traditionally, children learned how to farm from relatives and neighbours; now they are put into Western-style schools that prepare them for specialised jobs in an industrial economy. In Ladakh, these jobs are very few and far between. As more and more people are pulled off the land, the number of unemployed Ladakhis competing with each other for these scarce jobs is growing exponentially. What’s more, the course of the economy, once controlled locally, is increasingly dominated by distant market forces and anonymous bureaucracies. The result has been a growing insecurity and competitiveness — even leading to ethnic conflict — amongst a once secure and cooperative people. A range of related social problems has appeared almost overnight, including crime, family breakup and homelessness. And as the Ladakhis have become separated from the land, their awareness of the limits of local resources has dimmed. Pollution is on the increase, and the population is growing at unsustainable rates.
Conventional economists, of course, would dismiss these negative impacts, which are not so easily quantifiable as the monetary transactions that are the goal of economic development. They would also say that regions like the Punjab enjoy a ‘comparative advantage’ over Ladakh in food production, and that it makes economic sense for the Punjab to specialise in growing food while Ladakh specializes in some other product, and that each tradewith the other. But when distantly produced goods are heavily subsidised, often in hidden ways, one cannot really talk about comparative advantage, or for that matter ‘free markets’, ‘open competition in the setting of prices’, or any of the other principles by which economists and planners rationalise the changes they advocate. In fact, we should instead be talking about the unfair advantage that industrial producers enjoy, thanks to a heavily subsidised infrastructure geared toward large-scale, centralised production.
The changes in this remote region in the Himalayas are part of the same process that has been affecting us here in the West as well, although it has been going on a lot longer and has proceeded a lot further. It is a trend that I have witnessed in Europe over the years with the expansion of the Common Market, and in America, where ‘bigger’ has long been assumed to be ‘better’. Trillions of dollars have been spent all over the industrialized world creating superhighways and communications infrastructures that facilitate long-distance transport. Still more is being spent on highly specialized education that makes possible and promotes industrial technologies—from satellite communications to chemical- and energy-intensive agriculture. In the last decade, vast sums of taxpayers’ money have been spent on research for biotechnology—with the aim of allowing food to be transported even greater distances, survive even greater doses of pesticides, and ultimately to be produced without the troublesome need for farmers. The ‘unfair advantage’ these many subsidies give to large-scale producers and marketers is making it all but impossible for family farmers to compete with industrial agribusinesses, for the small shopkeeper to compete with huge supermarkets, or for any small producer to compete with corporations that can be located wherever production costs are lowest.
Large corporate producers are given further advantages by policies that promote ‘free trade’. The premise underlying trade agreements like Maastricht, GATT, and NAFTA is that we will all be better off if we continue to increase the distance between producers and consumers. As a consequence, Spanish markets sell Danish butter, while Danish stores sell butter produced in France; England exports roughly as much wheat as it imports; the average pound of food in America travels 1,500 miles before it reaches the kitchen table, and the total transport distances of the ingredients in a pot of German yogurt totals over 1,000 miles — even though all are available within 50 miles.
Governments around the world, without exception, are promoting these trends in the belief that their ailing economies will be cured by throwing themselves open to economic globalisation. Ironically, these policies undermine the economies not only of local and regional communities, but even of the nation-states that so zealously promote them. The mobility of capital today means that the comparative advantage once enjoyed by states or regions has been usurped by transnational corporations, which are in the best position to take ‘unfair advantage’ of free trade and the many hidden subsidies implicit in a publically-financed industrial infrastructure. The result has been global joblessness, the erosion of community, an acceleration in the depletion of natural resources and breakdown of the environment, and the further centralisation of political and economic power in huge transnational corporations.
But as I indicated at the outset, there is an alternative path, a significant counter trend that, despite a lack of support from government or industry, continues to flourish. Throughout the world, particularly in the industrialised countries, increasing numbers of people are recognising the importance of supporting the local economy. And within this countercurrent, attempts to link farmers and consumers are of the greatest significance. Something called Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is sweeping the world — from Switzerland, where it first started 25 years ago, to Japan where the movement affects many thousands of people. Without support from above, people at thegrassroots are taking the CSA idea and succeeding. In America, where all but 2% of the population has already been pulled off the land, the number of CSAs has climbed from only two in 1986 to 200 in 1992, and is closer to 1,000 today. Significantly, in a country where small farmers linked to the industrial system continue to fail every year at an alarming rate, not a single CSA in the US has failed for economic reasons.
Bringing producers and consumers closer together has an amazing number of positive implications. Perhaps the most significant of these is that we thereby rebuild real community. Community is based on close connections between people, and an understanding of their dependence on one another. As we all can see when we visit a small shop in a village, people know each other and talk to one another. Nearby farmers that sell to the shop — and know the people who will be buying their produce — are far less likely to put toxic chemicals on their crops. Conversely, people who know the person who grows their food are more apt to help him out in difficult times, as did the CSA group in Kentucky that helped their farmer get his harvest in before an early frost.
The stronger sense of community that stems from shorter producer-consumer links in turn has important psychological benefits. My own experience in Ladakh, as well as research here in the West, makes it clear that the rise in crime, violence, depression, even divorce, is to a very great extent a consequence of the breakdown of community. Conversely, children growing up with a sense of connection to their place on the earth and to others around them — in other words, children who are imbedded in a community — grow up with a stronger sense of self-esteem and healthier identities.
Environmentally, the benefits of CSAs are enormous. The forces within the industrial system that pressure farmers to practice monocropping are reversed, since CSA farms need to grow a wide variety of produce to meet the needs of their members. In other words, CSAs lead to an increase in biodiversity since consumers need a range of products, unlike the large scale food distributors that demand large supplies of one crop. And almost all consumers that have the opportunity to communicate directly with the farmers that produce their food make it clear that they prefer a reduction in the amount of chemicals in their food — again turning market pressures towards practices that benefit rather than harm the environment.
Vegetable varieties can also be chosen for their suitability to local conditions and for their taste and nutritional value, rather than their ability to withstand the rigours of long distance transport or their conformity to supermarket standards — the cucumbers need not be perfectly straight, nor the apples perfectly round. The absence of packaging means a significant reduction in the huge amount of non- reusable, non-biodegradable waste that is daily thrown into waste dumps all over the world. Meanwhile, the shorter transport distance means a reduction in the use of fossil fuels, less pollution, and lowered amounts of greenhouse gases released to the atmosphere. The Community Supported Agriculture movement has provided real grassroots momentum for shorter producer-consumer links. But lasting progress will require changes at the policy level as well. The unfair advantage now given to large-scale producers and marketers continues to threaten the success of all kinds of enterprises and inititative — including CSAs. For national economies and local communities to flourish we need to rethink ‘free trade’ policies that favor transnational corporate producers, and instead aim at a better balance between long-distance trade and local, regional and national production. Most importantly we need to lobby for energy taxation on the production and transportation of goods. We should also critically question further direct and indirect subsidies for transport infrastructures and large-scale corporate production. We need to oppose government support of biotechnology and other environmentally risky, job-destroying technologies.
Finally, we have to actively promote shorter links between producers and consumers — a process we can start today by publicising the incredible social and environmental benefits of CSAs. We can honestly tell people that eating fresh, delicious food may be one of the most effective ways of saving the world!
Links to other Helena Norberg-Hodge
interviews & articles:
- http://www.unitedearth.com.au/HNHinterview.html
- http://www.newint.org/issue282/endpiece.htm
- http://www.asiasource.org/news/special_reports/hodge.cfm
- http://zena.secureforum.com/znet/ZMag/articles/barhodge.htm
- http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC17/NHodge.htm
- http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC31/NorbergH.htm
- http://www.gn.apc.org/resurgence/articles/norberg_naess.htm
- http://www.gn.apc.org/resurgence/articles/norberg_hodge_cola.htm
- http://www.gn.apc.org/resurgence/articles/norberg_hodge_buddi.htm
- The International Society for Ecology
& Culture (ISEC)
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