Recent discussions on sustainable alternative economies led me to this
writer at the International Society for Ecology and Culture. It's a
good, long read, and I didn't wish to edit anything. This article was
originally published in The Nation Magazine, July15-22/96.
Natalia
*Breaking Up the Monoculture*
by Helena Norberg-Hodge,
Director, ISEC
Click here for Adobe Acrobat PDF version
<http://www.isec.org.uk/articles/breaking.pdf>
The president of Nabisco once defined the goal of economic globalization
as "a world of homogeneous consumption", in which people everywhere eat
the same food, wear the same clothing and live in houses built from the
same materials. It is a world in which every society employs the same
technologies, depends on the same centrally managed economy, offers the
same Western education for its children, speaks the same language,
consumes the same media images, holds the same values, and even thinks
the same thoughts: /monoculture/.
Through conquest, colonialism and western 'development', much of the
world's diversity has already been destroyed. Economic globalization
accelerates this process. Wherever you go in today's 'global village'
you'll find multi-lane highways, concrete cities, and a cultural
landscape featuring grey business suits, fast food chains, Hollywood
films, and cellular phones. In every corner of the planet, Barbie and
Madonna are familiar icons, and the Marlboro Man and Rambo define the
male ideal. From Cleveland to Cairo to Caracas, /Baywatch/ is
entertainment and CNN is news.
Although this sameness suits the needs of TNCs --- which benefit from
the efficiencies of standardized production and standardized consumption
--- in the long term a homogenized planet is disastrous for all of us.
It is leading to a breakdown of both biological and cultural diversity,
erosion of our food security, an increase in conflict and violence, and
devastation for the global biosphere.
The myth of globalization is that we no longer need to be connected to a
place on the earth. Our every need can be supplied by distant
institutions and machines. Our desires can be satisfied by maximizing
our choice of commodities from across the world. Our contact with other
people can be through electronic media. It is as though we could live
afloat in space, unconnected to a locale or community. Globalization is
creating a way of life that denies our natural instincts by severing our
connection to others and to nature. And --- because it is erasing both
biological and cultural diversity --- it is destined to fail.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Every place on the Earth is unique. Each has its own particular soils,
the product of eons of geological and biological activity, and its own
micro-climate, the result of complex interactions among wind regimes,
ocean currents, latitude, altitude, shelter and slope. This geological
and climatic diversity provides a generous range of environmental niches
for an even greater diversity of plants, animals, and microorganisms.
Over time, these all adapt to their local ecosystem, and in turn change
their surroundings by their presence. Living organisms and the places
they occupy are thus engaged in a continuous, interdependent
evolutionary dance, each step of which more tightly links biodiversity
to the diversity of place.
Human societies, too, have always been embedded in their local
ecosystems, modifying and being modified by them. Cultural diversity has
come to mirror the biological and geographic diversity of the planet. In
arid environments, for example, pastoral or nomadic societies are
entirely logical, since they enable people to use more of the sparse
resources of their region than would a settled way of life. In tropical
rainforests abundant resources are nearer to hand, and so different
adaptations --- often based on hunting, gathering, and swidden
agriculture --- have been the solution. Cultures near coastlines evolved
sophisticated sailing and boat-building abilities, offering a means of
transport and the ablity to gather resources from the sea. In
mountainous regions, cultures have adapted by growing hardy cereal
grains and raising animals --- like the yak and the llama --- that can
survive high altitudes and cold winters.
Through such local adaptations, people have met their needs generation
after generation, often altering their ecosystem without compromising
its stability. In many cases human cultures enhanced both food security
and ecosystemic stability by consciously increasing local biodiversity.
Farmers in the Peruvian Andes, for example, cultivate over 40 different
varieties of potato in an acre plot, far more than would be found
naturally. As recently as a generation ago, farmers on ChiloÎ Island off
the coast of Chile grew so many different strains of potato they could
eat a different kind each day of the year. And through centuries of
cultivation by traditional farmers in varied ecosystems, more than
17,000 different varieties of wheat have been created. The agricultural
biodiversity that exists today is the product of many generations of
such farmers selecting seeds for success in a particular place.
Globalization, which attempts to amalgamate every local, regional and
national economy into a single world system, requires homogenizing these
locally-adapted forms of agriculture, replacing them with an industrial
system --- centrally managed, pesticide-intensive, one-crop production
for export --- designed to deliver a narrow range of transportable foods
to the world market. In the process, farmers are replaced by energy- and
capital-intensive machinery, and diversified food production for local
communities is replaced by an export monoculture. Thousands of local
plant varieties disappear. In the US today, for example, 96% of the
acreage devoted to peas is planted in just two varieties; for other
vegetables --- like potatoes and snap beans --- as much as three
quarters of production comes from just three or four closely-related
strains. This trend is occurring worldwide. The same ChiloÎan farmers
that once grew several hundred varieties of potato now grow just three,
primarily for export. Biotechnology is accelerating this trend, as
natural genetic diversity is replaced by clones created and grown in
laboratories.
There is increasing awareness of the folly of destroying wilderness
areas, the wellspring of the earth's biodiversity. And it is clearly the
case that reductions in the planet's gene pool --- well underway --- may
eventually have catastrophic results in planetary pandemics among
vulnerable plants, animals and humans. But just as foolish is the way in
which global economic development is destroying traditional cultures and
the farmers whose seeds contain most of the planet's /agricultural
biodiversity/. The loss of agricultural biodiversity is of crucial
importance, among other reasons, because the pests that attack farm
products are continuing to expand their genetic diversity, even while
the diversity of our food supply narrows.
When a new food variety is first introduced its resistance to pests and
diseases may be high, but the natural genetic diversity of pests enables
them to adapt quickly. As a result, a new cereal variety generally lasts
only five or six years before pest problems become so great that it can
no longer be grown --- even using massive amounts of pesticides. When
this stage is reached, farmers must turn to the seed companies for a new
variety with an even stronger resistance. The bizarre result is that the
farmers who developed the original seeds often find they must now pay to
buy back a genetically altered version from W.R. Grace and others. This
was the cause for a demonstration by 500,000 farmers in India two years
ago. But neither Cargill nor W.R. Grace nor any other seed company can
constantly create new resistances out of thin air, even with the help of
genetic engineering. Ultimately they depend on the natural genetic
diversity that exists in the wild or in the strains originally
cultivated by traditional farmers.
Before long the credits built up in the gene banks by traditional,
location-specific farming will be exhausted. It will no longer be
possible to find sources of natural resistance to overcome the genetic
adaptation of pests. It could then become impossible to grow major crops
like wheat, rice and maize, and since so many people are now dependent
on these staples, starvation on a massive scale would follow.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Much of the cultural diversity that remains in the world today exists in
the South, where the majority still live in villages, partly connected
through a /diversified/, local economy to diverse, local resources.
Because of pressures from globalization, those economies are being
destroyed, and villagers are rapidly being urbanized and homogenized.
The Chinese government, for example, is planning for the urban
population to increase by 440 million people in the next twenty years
--- an explosion that is several times the rate of overall population
growth. This urbanization is largely the result of industrial
development, which replaces farmers with agribusiness and large-scale
machinery, and pushes whole communities off the land. Development also
centralizes job opportunities and political power in cities,
intensifying the economic pull of urban centers. Advertising and media
images, meanwhile, exert powerful /psychological/ pressure to seek a
better, more 'civilized' life, one based on increased consumption. But
since jobs are scarce, only a few succeed. The majority end up
dispossessed and angry, living in shantytowns in the shadow of
advertisements for the American Dream. Despite the disastrous
consequences, it is the effective policy of every government to promote
these trends.
Once in the cities, people have little choice but to rely on the same
scarce resources that people thousands of miles away depend upon. For
global corporations, these newly-urbanized millions represent a highly
lucrative and efficient market, easy to speak to through advertising.
_Time_ magazine quotes an ad executive in Beijing as saying that the
message being drummed into Third World populations is: "imported equals
/good/, local equals /crap/". Corporations and government agencies
promoting globalization are conscious of this relationship between
urbanization and profit: U.S. grain exporters publicly boast that the
rapid urbanization of the Asia-Pacific Rim will lead to a $14 billion
increase in profits in the next five years as urban populations
increasingly depend on /global/, rather than /local/ resources.
But what happens when rural life collapses, and people who once relied
on nearby resources become tied to the global economy? Consider
traditional architecture, in which structures were built from local
resources: stone in France, clay in West Africa, sun dried bricks in
Tibet, bamboo and thatch in the Philippines, felt in Mongolia, and so
on. When these building traditions give way to 'modern' methods, those
plentiful local materials are left unused --- while competition
skyrockets for the monoculture's narrow range of structural materials,
such as concrete, steel, and sawn lumber. The same thing happens when
everyone begins eating identical staple foods, wearing clothes made from
the same fibers, and relying on the same finite energy sources. Because
it makes everyone dependent on the same resources, globalization creates
efficiency for corporations, but it also creates artificial scarcity for
consumers, thus heightening competitive pressures.
In this situation those on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder are
at a great disadvantage. The gap between rich and poor widens, and
anger, resentment, and conflict increase. This is particularly true in
the South, where people from many differing ethnic backgrounds are being
pulled into cities where they are cut off from their communities and
cultural moorings, and face ruthless competition for jobs and the basic
necessities of life. Individual and cultural self-esteem are eroded by
the pressure to live up to media and advertising stereotypes, whose
images are invariably based on an urban, Western consumer model: blonde,
blue-eyed and clean. If you are a farmer or are dark-skinned, you are
made to feel primitive, backward, inferior. As a consequence, women
around the world use dangerous chemicals to lighten their skin and hair,
and the market for blue contact lenses is growing in markets from
Bangkok to Nairobi and Mexico City. Many Asian women even have
operations to make their eyes look more Western.
Uprooting people from rural communities by selling them an unattainable
urban white dream is responsible for a dramatic increase in anger and
hostility --- particularly among young men. In the intensely
demoralizing and competitive situation they face, differences of any
kind become increasingly significant, and ethnic and racial violence are
the all but inevitable results.
I have witnessed the impact of economic development over several decades
in the Himalayas, in both Ladakh and Bhutan. In Ladakh a Buddhist
majority and a Muslim minority lived together for 600 years without a
single recorded instance of group conflict. In Bhutan, a Hindu minority
had coexisted peacefully with a slightly larger number of Buddhists for
an equally long period. In both cultures, just fifteen years' exposure
to outside economic pressures has resulted in violence that left many
people dead.
In the industrialized world the assumption is that violent conflict is
mainly the result of /differences/ between people. By implication, the
notion is that /homogenization is civilizing/. This attitude is even
quite prevalent in the South, where the West's homogenized, secular
society is held up as the ideal. On the other hand, when groups of
people manage to maintain their /own/ cultural identity, the result is
called 'tribalism', with its underlying connotations of savagery and
violence. The basis for these beliefs often comes from comparing the
'civilized' colonies of the Third World with the chaos after the
colonial powers departed. This Western analysis doesn't take into
account the way colonialism universally destroyed the indigenous
economic and cultural bases and their systems of governance, as well as
the diversified economies that allowed people to produce for their own
needs. It may well be that the authoritarian hand of the colonial powers
held in check the conflict, violence and resistance that would naturally
accompany such upheaval, but the roots of the violence are in the
suppression of successful cultures and economies. It has little to do
with any innate intolerance of differences.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Most Western planners have come to believe that the best way to provide
for people's needs in the future is to draw them into urban centers.
Even the United Nations Development Program promotes urbanization,
claiming that urban populations can be supplied more efficiently with
food, water, jobs and other necessities of life; and that urbanized
populations require fewer resources per capita. But when the real costs
of urbanization in the global economy are accounted for, however, it
becomes obvious that urban centers are extremely resource intensive.
Food and water, building materials and energy must all be brought in
from great distances via vast energy-consuming infrastructures; their
concentrated wastes must be hauled away again or incinerated at great
environmental cost. From the most affluent sections of Paris to the
slums of Calcutta, urban populations depend on long-distance transport
for food, so that every pound of food consumed is accompanied by several
pounds of petroleum consumption, pollution, and waste. The urbanized
economy is not a product of efficiency, but of massive subsidies --- tax
breaks and direct payments to global corporations and public financing
of long-distance transport and communications infrastructures, huge
energy installations, facilities for specialized education, and the
massive military power to keep recalcitrant communities in line.
How "efficient" is the global economy when it means transporting staple
foods around the world that could just as well be produced locally? In
Mongolia, a country where there are some 25 million milk-producing
animals, the butter in the markets today is primarily German; the water,
meanwhile, is bottled in Hong Kong. In the marketplaces of France --- an
apple-producing country --- one can find as many New Zealand apples as
local ones. Even a child can see that it can't be efficient to transport
these foods thousands of miles around the planet, using up fossil fuels,
polluting the air and adding to global warming. In fact, if "efficiency"
is the yardstick, the goal should be to promote economies which are
diversified enough to meet people's needs within the shortest distance
possible, depending on long-distance transport only for goods that
cannot be produced locally.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The economic steamroller that is levelling diversity and diversified
production in the South is also wreaking havoc in the North, where
structural unemployment and the erosion of democracy are the most
obvious effects. A system that so threatens the interests of virtually
every sector of society obviously contains the seeds of its own
destruction. However, the systemic impact of this economic
centralization is so destabilizing and life-threatening that only the
most hardened cynic would sit by and wait for it to destroy itself.
There is still time to shift direction, restore diversity and begin
moving towards sustainable, healthy societies and ecosystems. How to
begin? In principle, the answer is straightforward: we need to convince
our governments to shift support and subsidies away from globalization
towards economic diversification and localization. This does not mean an
end to all trade or intercultural communication, as some have unfairly
charged. Nor does it mean that industrialized society must change from a
culture of cities to villages.
However, the idea of localization runs counter to today's general belief
that fast-paced urban areas are the locus of "real" culture, while
small, local communities are isolated backwaters, relics of a past when
small-mindedness and prejudice were the norm. The past is assumed to
have been 'brutish', a time when exploitation was fierce, intolerance
rampant, violence commonplace --- a situation that the modern world has
largely risen above. These assumptions about what constitutes progress
are so deeply embedded that they often operate at a subconscious level.
Disturbingly, they echo the elitist and often racist belief that
modernized people are superior --- more highly evolved --- than their
underdeveloped rural counterparts. Such beliefs are widespread even
among rural populations themselves. This is not surprising: the whole
process of industrialization has meant a systematic removal of political
and economic power from rural areas, and a concomitant loss of
self-respect. In small communities today people are often living on the
periphery, while power---and even what we call 'culture'---is
centralized somewhere else.
Among people in the industrialized world, rural life has been thought
inferior for many generations, but most Westerners have a highly
distorted notion of what life in small communities can be. And even
though much of the Third World is made up of villages, colonialism and
development have left an indelible mark. Modern interpretations of such
places inevitably stem from an industrial worldview. There is only the
briefest mention of cultures and economies that existed before the
colonial invaders, nor are there statistics to compare pre-industrial
and pre-colonial times with what followed. Recently, however, Southern
scholars have begun to unearth this information --- finding, for
example, evidence about the remarkably high yields in agriculture before
the colonial invasions. As for the localized oppression and exploitation
experienced in yesterday's smaller-scale societies, people in many parts
of the South know very well that being under the boot of today's distant
faceless oppressors is far worse.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Making the shift from globalization to relocalization would benefit from
two complementary but very different sorts of strategies: those that
/counter/ further globalization, as well as those that can bring real
and lasting /solutions/. Because of the urgent need to halt the runaway
global economy, efforts to counter globalization need to be implemented
as rapidly as possible; they would best be broad-based and highly
internationalized, linking North and South as well as social and
environmental movements in order to pressure governments to take back
the power that has been handed over to corporations.
But such efforts would not in themselves restore health to economies and
communities: long-term solutions to today's social and environmental
problems would also require small, local initiatives that are as diverse
as the cultures and environments in which they take place. Many such
efforts are already underway --- from community banks and local
currencies to community-supported agriculture projects, localized
education systems, rediscovered traditional knowledge, and more. Unlike
halting the global economic steamroller, these small-scale steps require
a slow pace and a deep and intimate understanding of local contexts, and
would best be designed and implemented by local people themselves. If
given the support they need to flourish, these location-specific
initiatives would inevitably foster a return to cultural and biological
diversity and long-term sustainablility.
/For further information about the issues this article raises, please
contact ISEC. <http://www.isec.org.uk/pages/contact.html>/
ISEC
Foxhole, Dartington, Devon TQ9 6EB, UK
tel: 01803 868650
fax: 01803 868651
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
or
ISEC
PO Box 9475, Berkeley, CA 94709, USA
tel: 510-548-4915
fax: 510-549-4916
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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