A pick-your-flavor tour of the planet's cuisines is one of the many delights of Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio's latest book, Hungry Planet, a survey of global food choices. Photographer and journalist traveled to 24 countries to pose families with a week's worth of food.
Results reveal a global food chain of processed food binding people almost everywhere. Menzel's photos encourage disquieting realizations (the universality of Coca-Cola, for example) and some surprising insights (Europeans eat as much packaged foods as Americans, and everyone on earth enjoys a good banana). Deft reporting by D'Aluisio explores complex issues such as the global obesity epidemic. Like any good travelogue, Hungry Planet is most important not for what it illustrates about other people but for what it tells us about ourselves. Perhaps this book will get Americans to look more closely at what's on our own plates.
Jason Mark wrote this review as part of the 10 Most Hopeful Trends, the Spring 2006 issue of YES! Magazine.
Critics of "go local" movements warn that buying local deprives people in the Global South of jobs that could lift them out of poverty. But are multinationals really helping?
There's only one thing worse for the poor in the Global South, we're told, than a job in a sweatshop: It's the alternative'no job. That's basically what New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof argued recently. If true, then "buy local" campaigns in the North that cut imports could harm the planet's poorest people.
But before accepting this heart-rending story, let's ground ourselves in the real global economy.
Shedding corporate-media filters, we see that the poor are not languishing in their sad villages and grimy shantytowns just waiting to be saved by corporate giants from abroad. Many poor people are themselves creating the real job growth in much of the Global South. They are the small shopkeepers, street vendors, and home-based workers whose jobs make up what's called the "informal economy" not counted by authorities.
In Latin America, 85 percent of new jobs created during the 1990s were in this sector, not the corporate one. Informal jobs account for more than half of all jobs in Latin America and the Caribbean, and as much as 80 percent in parts of Asia and in Africa.
"The informal economy is anything corporations can't make money on,' social entrepreneur Josh Mailman quipped to me recently. 'That's why it's invisible.'
Many of the jobs the poor are creating are not what the wealthy minority abroad might imagine'one individuals scrambling, say, to power a pedicab in Dhaka or sell fruit on streets of Caracas.
Millions are working together, through microcredit institutions and people's movements, to further both economic and social goals. Among the biggest are Bangladesh's largely self-financing Grameen Bank, BRAC (formerly the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee), and the Association for Social Advancement, whose combined microloans have gone to roughly 16 million poor people, mostly women, enabling many to create their own village-level enterprises.
Grameen-mostly owned by its borrowers'reports that more than half the families of its borrowers have "crossed the poverty line." Assuming Bangladesh's other two large micro-credit efforts come close to this success rate, rural Bangladeshis' self-directed initiatives have freed more than four times as many from poverty as the number employed in export garment factories, where insecure jobs offer 8 to 18 cents an hour.
Overall, the number of microcredit users worldwide'many of whom are creating their own work'is roughly four times the 23-million people directly employed by all multinational corporations.
BRAC alone employs almost 100,000 people, not in order to return a profit to an investor but, as BRAC says, "with the twin objectives of poverty alleviation and empowerment of the poor." With its members' groups now in more than 140,000 Bangladeshi village organizations, BRAC is creating not only health services and schooling but its own small enterprises, too'from fisheries to printing to a tissue-culture lab to an iodized salt plant. They operate mostly for local consumption and are controlled by BRAC itself.
We citizens of the North think of global capital as the only jobs-generator. But more people in the world are members of cooperatives'around 800 million'than own shares in publicly traded companies. Many are helping build locally controlled economies. Over the last three decades, women in India have, for example, built a network of cooperative dairies raising the incomes of more than 11 million households. Compare that to the 1 to 2 million jobs created by the high-tech corporate sector in India.
Worldwide, co-op membership doubled in the last 30 years, according to the Geneva-based International Co-operative Alliance. In Colombia, the Saludcoop health care cooperative is the nation's second largest employer, providing services to a quarter of the population.6
And to those who still see global capital as the poor's savior, I am tempted to respond, "Let's get real!" Even if it were a path to real advancement, U.S. direct investment in the poorest continent, Africa, is close to zilch anyway-representing about 1 percent of all U.S. direct investments abroad.
Benefits for North and South
Relocalizing economies in the North isn't an all-or-nothing proposition. Importing tropical products like coffee and bananas from the Global South makes sense, as does importing artisanal goods, linking cultures by spreading beauty and appreciation of difference. The real challenge is ensuring that exports don't undermine basic food security and that producers for export get a fair return.
That means, in part, expanding the fair trade movement, which is already making a huge difference in the lives of over 1 million farmers and farm workers. It also means challenging monopoly power among food processors as well as encouraging more local processing so that a bigger share of the end-value stays in producer communities. (Today, just a tenth of the value of coffee stays in coffee-producing countries, down from almost a third of the value just ten years ago.)
Getting serious about ending poverty in the Global South does not mean abetting the reach of global corporations. Instead, we can work to remove the barriers U.S. corporate-driven policies place in the way of thriving local economies abroad'policies like NAFTA and U.S. farm subsidies that have drowned Mexican corn farmers in a flood of subsidized U.S. corn.
In building local, living economies here, we stand shoulder to shoulder with the citizens of the Global South.
Frances More Lappe wrote this article as part of YES! Magazine's Go Local! issue. Frances Moore Lappe is a YES! contributing editor. She is the author of Democracy's Edge: Choosing to Save Our Country by Bringing Democracy to Life.
For the footnotes on this article click here.The image shows how rural women leaders come together for a microcredit planning meeting in Chennai, southern India. Photo by Catherine Bailey.
First, you'll want to know about the practical stuff, like the new Bolivian visa and throwing your toilet paper in the wastebasket and not in the toilet. In addition, as a socially conscious gringo, you don't want to come off as a cultural imperialist.
As part of the privileged minority who can actually afford to travel to distant places, it's sometimes difficult to see the assumptions we carry around with us. These assumptions cause us to unwittingly make mistakes, like talking to a person who can't afford to leave their home town about all the places we've traveled, expecting Latin America to run on "gringo time," expecting others to speak English, or becoming unduly upset at the "double pricing" system for foreigners and locals.
The more you can learn about the practical and cultural aspects of Latin America before you go, the better.
2. Learn the Language
Learning Spanish will make a world of difference in your experience of Latin America as well as Latin Americans' experience of you. If you are planning on studying Spanish in Latin America, try to find a school that pays its teachers a fair wage. Some, unfortunately, do not: your dollars go into the pockets of owners and administrators.
3. Work
Your chances of finding work in Latin America are enhanced if you are bilingual and skilled in business, technology, international relations, development, tourism, or media. ESL teachers are also in high demand. Although there are people in both hemispheres who believe teaching English in Latin America encourages cultural imperialism, many Latin Americans feel learning English is a practical way to develop new cultural and economic options.
4. Volunteer
There are two ways to volunteer in Latin America. One is to sign up with a volunteer organization, which will often charge you a placement fee. The second way is to go directly to an organization that interests you and volunteer your skills. Skills most in demand are ESL teachers, doctors, nurses and other healing professionals, as well as outreach people who can help small businesses and organizations obtain funding or contacts in the United States. Other skills that have been put to good use are environmental and agricultural expertise, technical skills, and video and arts teaching.
5. Stay in Someone's Home
Whether you are just passing through, volunteering for a few weeks, or living abroad for work, there is no better way to really experience and understand a foreign country than to stay in someone's home. You and your host learn about each other's daily customs and have more informal time to exchange thoughts and ideas. You also bring your dollars directly to the community.
Lisa Gale Garrigues wrote this piece for the Latin America Rising issue of YES! Magazine. Lisa is a contributing editor for YES! She has lived and traveled extensively in Latin America and occasionally writes about her travels at lisagarrigues.blogspot.com.
How do you introduce sustainability into a powerful, well-established industry? That's a question I was pondering in 1994 as I watched forest communities torn apart by wars between timber companies and environmentalists.
At the time, I was working at the Ford Foundation, and the newly formed nonprofit Forest Stewardship Council caught my attention. The Council planned to certify sustainable forestry practices, thereby providing consumers with the tools to choose sustainably harvested wood. It seemed to me a powerful idea, and I got deeply involved in making this idea into a reality.
The forestry story is just one of the successes Michael Conroy recounts in Branded! He tells how fish, apparel, coffee, gold, and tourism are all sectors where the certification revolution is taking hold'with more to come.
Conroy draws on his insider knowledge from his work at both the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to tell of campaigns that force brand-conscious corporations to become more socially and environmentally responsible. In reading this book, you'll find yourself cheering the people who use the marketplace to confront these giant corporations'and win.
Certification cannot solve all the devastating impacts of the global economy, but Conroy's well-researched account shows it to be a valuable tool in building a just and sustainable world.
Fran Korten wrote this review as part of Liberate Your Space, the Winter 2008 issue of YES! Magazine. Fran is Executive Director of the Positive Futures Network, publishers of YES! Magazine.
:: If you're really paying attention, it's hard to escape a sense of outrage, fear, despair. Author, deep-ecologist, and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy says: Don't even try. ::
How do we live with the fact that we are destroying our world? What do we make of the loss of glaciers, the melting Arctic, island nations swamped by the sea, widening deserts, and drying farmlands?
Because of social taboos, despair at the state of our world and fear for our future are rarely acknowledged. The suppression of despair, like that of any deep recurring response, contributes to the numbing of the psyche. Expressions of anguish or outrage are muted, deadened as if a nerve had been cut. This refusal to feel impoverishes our emotional and sensory life. Flowers are dimmer and less fragrant, our loves less ecstatic. We create diversions for ourselves as individuals and as nations, in the fights we pick, the aims we pursue, and the stuff we buy.
Of all the dangers we face, from climate chaos. to permanent war, none is so great as this deadening of our response. For psychic numbing impedes our capacity to process and respond to information. The energy expended in pushing down despair is diverted from more crucial uses, depleting the resilience and imagination needed for fresh visions and strategies.
Zen poet Thich Nhat Hanh was asked, 'what do we most need to do to save our world?? His answer was this: 'What we most need to do is to hear within us the sounds of the Earth crying.?
Cracking the Shell How do we confront what we scarcely dare to think? How do we face our grief, fear, and rage without 'going to pieces??
It is good to realize that falling apart is not such a bad thing. Indeed, it is as essential to transformation as the cracking of outgrown shells. Anxieties and doubts can be healthy and creative, not only for the person, but for the society, because they permit new and original approaches to reality.
What disintegrates in periods of rapid transformation is not the self, but its defenses and assumptions. Self-protection restricts vision and movement like a suit of armor, making it harder to adapt. Going to pieces, however uncomfortable, can open us up to new perceptions, new data, and new responses.
Speaking the truth of our anguish for the world brings down the walls between us, drawing us into deep solidarity. That solidarity is all the more real for the uncertainty we face.
In our culture, despair is feared and resisted because it represents a loss of control. We're ashamed of it and dodge it by demanding instant solutions to problems. We seek the quick fix. This cultural habit obscures our perceptions and fosters a dangerous innocence of the real world.
Acknowledging despair, on the other hand, involves nothing more mysterious than telling the truth about what we see and know and feel is happening to our world. When corporate-controlled media keep the public in the dark, and power-holders manipulate events to create a climate of fear and obedience, truth-telling is like oxygen. It enlivens and returns us to health and vigor.
Belonging to All Life Sharing what is in our heartmind brings a welcome shift in identity, as we recognize that the anger, grief, and fear we feel for our world are not reducible to concerns for our individual welfare or even survival. Our concerns are far larger than our own private needs and wants. Pain for the world'the outrage and the sorrow'breaks us open to a larger sense of who we are. It is a doorway to the realization of our mutual belonging in the web of life.
Many of us fear that confrontation with despair will bring loneliness and isolation. On the contrary, in letting go of old defenses, we find truer community. And in community, we learn to trust our inner responses to our world'and find our power.
You are not alone! We are part of a vast, global movement: the epochal transition from empire to Earth community. This is the Great Turning. And the excitement, the alarm, even the overwhelm we feel, are all part of our waking up to this collective adventure.
As in any true adventure, there is risk and uncertainty. Our corporate economy is destroying both itself and the natural world. Its effect on living systems is what David Korten calls the Great Unraveling. It is happening at the same time as the Great Turning, and we cannot know which way the story will end.
Let's drop the notion that we can manage our planet for our own comfort and profit'or even that we can now be its ultimate redeemers. It is a delusion. Let's accept, in its place, the radical uncertainty of our time, even the uncertainty of survival.
In primal societies, adolescents go through rites of passage, where confronting their own mortality is a gateway to maturity. In analogous ways, climate change calls us to recognize our own mortality as a species. With the gift of uncertainty, we can grow up and accept the rights and responsibility of planetary adulthood. Then we know fully that we belong, inextricably, to the web of life, and we can serve it, and let its strength flow through us.
Uncertainty, when accepted, sheds a bright light on the power of intention. Intention is what you can count on: not the outcome, but the motivation you bring, the vision you hold, the compass setting you choose to follow. Our intention and resolve can save us from getting lost in grief.
During a recent visit to Kentucky, I learned what is happening to the landscape and culture of Appalachia: how coal companies use dynamite to pulverize everything above the underground seams of coal; how bulldozers and dragline machines 20-stories high push away the 'overburden? of woodlands and top soil, filling the valleys. I saw how activists there are held steady by sheer intention. Though the nation seems oblivious to this tragedy, these men and women persist in the vision that Appalachia can, in part, be saved and that future generations may know slopes of sweet gum, sassafras, magnolia, the stirrings of bobcat and coon, and, in the hollows, the music of fiddle and fresh flowing streams. They seem to know'and, when we let down our guard, we too know'that we are living parts of the living body of Earth.
This is the gift of the Great Turning. When we open our eyes to what is happening, even when it breaks our hearts, we discover our true size; for our heart, when it breaks open, can hold the whole universe. We discover how speaking the truth of our anguish for the world brings down the walls between us, drawing us into deep solidarity. That solidarity, with our neighbors and all that lives, is all the more real for the uncertainty we face.
When we stop distracting ourselves by trying to figure the chances of success or failure, our minds and hearts are liberated into the present moment. This moment then becomes alive, charged with possibilities, as we realize how lucky we are to be alive now, to take part in this planetary adventure.
Joanna Macy wrote this article as part of Stop Global Warming Cold, the Spring 2008 issue of YES! Magazine. Joanna is a scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory and deep ecology, whose latest book is World as Lover, World as Self. She lives in Berkeley, CA. www.joannamacy.net. Photo by Brian Hamilton. www.sirbrian.com
