OUR LOCAL ECONOMY
by Satish Kumar
All of us have a place where we live. That place sustains us, and we should sustain it. Better than centralized government would be a confederation of self-governing, self-reliant communities where people fulfilled their needs from the products of their own localities. When all people are looking after their own patch of land, then every place will be looked after. In a local economy, people derive maximum benefit from the bounty of their own locality and refrain from desiring, obtaining, and controlling the resources of other localities. They do not permit damage to the local people or environment.
"Not in my back yard" is a perfect slogan, as every yard is somebody's back yard. If every back yard is protected, no yard will be damaged. This means local apples, local butter, local vegetables, local cheese, local crafts, local industry, local shops, local schools, local hospitals, and in all other matters turning to local goods and services before others. Maximum economic and political power, including the power to decide what is imported into or exported from the local community, should remain in the hands of the local government.
Federal governments put severe restrictions on immigration but allow the dumping of goods in countries where the same goods are plentifully available. For example, New Zealand butter is dumped in England while the English produce a mountain of butter themselves. California wine is pushed on the French, who know not what to do with their own lakes of wine. Japanese cars are forced on the American people while American cars sit unsold, occupying vast acres of parking lots. Meanwhile, the transportation of butter, wine, cars, and other goods is causing depletion of the ozone layer and global warming. Who, other than the giant corporations, benefits from this massive movement of goods?
Recently the Wuppertal Institute in Germany asked: How many miles does a container of strawberry yogurt travel before it reaches the kitchen table of a German household? They discovered that the yogurt -- including the plastic container, the label printed on it, the sugar, milk, and strawberries--had traveled eleven hundred miles. If that yogurt had been part of the local economy, it would hardly have traveled at all.
Economist E. F. Schumacher related the following incident to me: He once observed a large truck bringing biscuits made in Manchester to London. A few minutes later, he observed another truck taking biscuits made in London to Manchester. Schumacher started to ponder the economic rationale behind this. What could it be? If the specialty of a Manchester biscuit was desired in London, the biscuit manufacturer could send the recipe to London on a postcard. Schumacher could not understand what benefit was derived from congesting the highways, polluting the air, and making truck drivers sit alone for the better part of their lives, all in the service of moving biscuits around. In some desperation, he said to himself, "Oh, well, I'm an economist, not a nutritionist. Perhaps the nutritional value of these biscuits is increased by transportation!" This was in the early 1970s, before globalization of the economy, the stranglehold of GATT and NAFTA, and obsession with world trade. Schumacher was not against trade. If there was something in Manchester that could be made only there, then it was reasonable to exchange it for something that could be made only in London. But to ferry identical goods around in the name of free trade is economic insanity. The trade between nations and regions should be minimal, like icing on a cake.
World trade is the most irrational system yet devised. Everyone loses except the global corporations, and the environment suffers most of all. The globalization of the economy is colonialism pure and simple, but it wears the mask of free trade, progress, development, science, technology, modernity, and the promise of utopia. Today there is a net flow of resources and wealth from the poor countries of the South to the rich countries of the North.
The answer to globalization is the development of local economies. Whatever is made or produced in a locality must be used first and foremost by the people of that locality. Each local community should be a microcosm of the macroworld. This principle is not against cities, but it is against sprawling suburbs and megalopolises. If all cities were of one to two million people and flanked by greenbelts and sufficient amounts of supporting farmland, then New York would not depend on lettuce imported from California, and London would not depend on potatoes imported from Egypt. This is not about personal self-sufficiency or family self-sufficiency, but self-sufficiency of the bioregion.
In conjunction with the principle of manual work, we should form an economy based not on centralized and mechanized modes of production, but on decentralized, home-grown, handcrafted ones. In other words, not mass production but production by the masses. m Reprinted with permission from Path Without Destination: The Long Walk of a Gentle Hero by Satish Kumar.
