By Daniel Ruiz Sandoval
In 1966 E.F. Schumacher explained in an essay titled “Buddhist Economics” the essential differences between western (materialist) and eastern (Buddhist) economic views. Although this classification no longer holds due to the emergence of the “East Asian Economic Miracle”, we will hold to the terms “materialist” and “Buddhist”. While the materialist view sees labor merely as a cost or an inconvenience, the Buddhist sees it as a chance to utilize and develop one’s own faculties; to overcome ego-centeredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. While the materialist is interested in goods, the Buddhist is interested in liberation from attachment to goods. For the modern economist, a person that consumes more is better off, but for the Buddhist economist the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption. By the same token, “people who live in highly self-sufficient local communities are less likely to get involved in large-scale violence than people whose existence depends on world-wide systems of trade”. This approach leads directly to a way of life based on minimum use of natural resources, which implies supplying goods from the nearest possible source. These basic principles lie at the hart of the environmental movement but if we look closer into the recent developments taking place in the alternative “green economy” we will find a couple of paradoxes.
The interaction between the local economies and the world market is not new. Tea was one of the first commodities to be exchanged over long distances. Coffee, pepper, sugar and taints, among others, have been traded world wide for several centuries. What is new is the pervasiveness of the world trade web, which seems to reach every aspect of our lives and every location around the world. The destructive effects of the global economy are well known. The concentration of decision making power in a few “global cities” has had disastrous consequences for many communities and entire countries. In this context we find two recent developments that both counteract and draw strength from the global economy: Fair Trade and Organic Agriculture. Fair trade on the one hand, aims at balancing the traditional long distance exchange of commodities in terms of providing dignified living conditions for the farmer; organic agriculture on the other, attempts to eliminate the environmental effects of large scale agribusiness based on extensive use of agrichemicals. These two movements however, rely on the mechanisms of the global economy to achieve their objectives. From the point of view of total production value and employment, the organic agriculture movement is tightly linked to export crops such as coffee. Fair trade successfully links social justice and environmental responsibility at the production site, however it operates on the same geographical pattern of the global economy and, one may even say, the same trade routes that have prevailed for centuries in the world agricultural market. The same holds for the transportation means based on fossil fuels.
Although “organic agriculture” was the dominant practice in most countries before the agrichemical revolution of the mid twentieth century, the recent drive towards organic food, and its related certification maze, originated in northern countries as a response to chronic and degenerative diseases such as cancer and hypertension. In this way the north kept the lead in terms of defining the type of crop to be produced in the south, prompting the gradual transformation of production techniques in exporting countries. Even when organic agriculture effectively eliminates the environmental impacts related to conventional agricultural production, recent studies indicate that export oriented organic agriculture tends to reinforce inequalities among big-scale agribusiness and small land holders that prevail in the conventional export oriented market. Certification mechanisms have evolved as well into global supervisory bodies that exercise considerable power upon producers by conditioning access to the more profitable organic market.
The paradox of this two folded riddle is that isolated agricultural communities in southern countries depend on northern high income consumers to sustain environmental and socially viable livelihoods. The debate over the benefits of strong local economies should therefore take into account the fact that some goods can only be produced in some parts of the world. If all goods were to be produced locally that would lead to more intensive energy use in order to produce crops not suited for the northern climate. The problem remains as to determine what goods should be produced locally and what goods should be brought from other regions.
Apparently, just as there is a conventional global economy, there is an alternative “green world market” which may or may not be sustainable or fair in the long run, but that, in any case, occupies a central place in the contemporary environmental movement world wide. From this perspective, reliance on the local economy appears more as a precautionary step in anticipation of the energy crunch that is already in sight, than as a central principle guiding recent developments in the environmental field, and opens another exciting question: Would fair trade and export oriented organic agriculture survive a major energy crisis?
