One fundamental inequality in today's world is the economic and cultural divide between the developed North and the developing South. Challenging that inequality will involve huge changes in both the South and the North. In the South, and all over the world, the hungry and the poor should have enough to eat and should enjoy economic and cultural self-sufficiency. In the North, and all over the world, the overfed and the rich should live more simply and should still enjoy economic and cultural self-sufficiency.
In the last edition of EDucate! (Issue No. 2, Vol No. 2) the article “The Case for Local Food” by Helena Norberg-Hodge explains how building local food economies would provide everyone with enough to eat, strengthen local communities, and nurture the land. Now there is an expanded discussion of local food economies in a new book “Bringing the Food Economy Home: Local Alternatives to Global Agribusiness”, by Ms. Norberg-Hodge and others. The book is an accessible and comprehensive introduction to the thinking behind the burgeoning ‘local food’ movement.
The bulk of the book is an extended explanation of how the global food system contributes to many of the problems which the world faces today, from global warming to the decline of rural economies, from extinction of species to loss of democracy, from water scarcity to unsafe food. It shows, both with common sense and with facts and figures, that world-wide economic and environmental havoc are an inevitable consequence of ‘global food’.
An example particularly relevant to the South is the story, told by Vandana Shiva, of the effects of the Green Revolution and genetically modified ‘Golden Rice’ on the rice farms of India. Ms. Shiva explains that the intensive input methods of industrial agriculture both use too much water and make people sick, and she argues that health, freedom and true food security depend on the biodiversity which results from small-scale farming. The book's fundamental argument is that, because of the widespread impact of the global food system, local food is one of the most effective entry points for solving the world's interconnected problems. The benefits of localization include stronger links between farmers and consumers, strengthening communities in both the country and the city, direct participation in economic structures, healing and nurturing the environment, and reducing the disparities between the North and the South.
This movement towards local food is especially important in the North, because, as the book points out, in the South a much greater proportion of the population still lives on or close to the land. However, there are lessons for the South. For example, many Southern governments still use subsidies for chemical fertilizers and for pesticides to encourage large-scale agriculture for export, not small-scale diversified farms to feed their own people.
The book describes a variety of ‘ideas that work’. Most of the examples are from the North, such as Community Supported Agriculture schemes in North America and the United Kingdom and the Japanese consumer cooperatives which link urban households with organic farms. However, one extremely provocative story comes from Cuba, which in the 1990s shifted “away from chemical-intensive monoculture for export, toward the production of diverse, organic food for local consumption”. Cuba's story demonstrates how quickly an entrenched agricultural system can be changed when an entire society – government, rural peoples, and urban dwellers – joins in developing a local food economy, and it shows the tremendous benefits which result.
In its conclusion, the book points out that localization of our food systems will require changes at the international, national, and local levels. It offers an overview of what those changes might be, such as renegotiation of international trade treaties, shifting national subsidies to promote local food, buy-local campaigns and other community initiatives. Actively supporting ‘local food’ at all these levels is a powerful way for each of us to begin bridging the economic and cultural divide between the North and the South.
