Food for Thought

Today I was reading a journal article by Ingrid Burkett of the International Association for Community Development. The article discusses the idea of re-localisation, and particularly the recent interest in local food:

Yes it could be said that local food systems potentially contribute to ecologically sustainable development because they can reduce the food miles of our diets...it could also be said that local food systems play an important role in building strong and vibrant local economies...however, many of the 'organic' and 'slow food' events that are occurring around the world reach out to the 'gourmet' food market with relatively little attention paid to questions regarding how poverty, access and inequality are addressed by local food production.

I think the last point that Burkett makes is an important one, as it tries to get to the heart of the real purpose of local food production.

A very simple example of 'local food' production I read recently can be found here. It tells the story of Alexandra Reau, a fourteen year-old girl from Michigan, who has converted her family's backyard into a small farm. She grows fruit and vegetables and sells them to regular customers in her neighourhood, who claim to value both the quality of her produce, and the fact that this initiative comes from a local youth. The story is testament to how much a fourteen year-old can accomplish when he or she makes efforts towards a noble goal.

Reau's farm contributes to her own development (she tells us that farming requires a lot of patience!) and in some sense to the local economy, both commendable ends in themselves. But what would change if this project were linked to a larger goal of community building? Or, more simply, was conceived of as providing a service to one's community? How would this change the concept of local food?

Burkett believes that "a renewed longing for community" is the real "starting point" and "social push" behind local food movements.

If we are to re-localise our communities, our motivations could be based on building strong relationships with our neighbours, engaging with the local cultures/s, improving our health and the health of those with whom we live, generating friendships across diversity or even just eating healthier, tastier food.

These "strong relationships" could be build on trust, love and a mutual striving for individual and collective progress, and would naturally lend themselves to an exchange of material goods and services for the wellbeing of all.

I use the term 'naturally' because of a fundamental belief that each one of us has been created to bear fruits (metaphorically, at least), to develop our various talents and capacities for the benefit of others and ourselves. And where else would this service be expressed but in the spiritual and material wellbeing of one's community, the latter implying the need for a vibrant local economy to facilitate this exchange of services.

Understanding the link between communities and service, of which local food is just one example, helps us better conceptualise one purpose of the practice known as 'community development'.

Burkett does warn against romanticising the local food movement as a move back to past 'traditional' ways. The OECD has echoed this warning in its publication Community Capacity Building: Creating a Better Future Together, in the context of community capacity building:

Community capacity building and/or economic development should not be an attempt to recreate the communities or businesses of the 1950s. The world - its people and its economy - has simply changed too much...we should guard against the assumption that the past, or an alternative vision of the future, are the only or the most appropriate visions for the futures of communities today...it is clear that the concept of community is changing. Nevertheless the geographic, indeed local element, cannot be overlooked.

Another trap to avoid falling into is believing that the greatest power an individual possesses is his or her buying power, so that the act of choosing to buy local becomes an end in itself. Human beings are not mere consumers, even though modern urban cities have been designed to promote the values of a consumer society. Brenda and Robert Vale explain this in the book Designing High Density Cities:

Most recent planning theory has ignored the vital relationships between food, energy, water and land because of access to cheap and plentiful fossil fuels. This has meant that food can be grown at a long distance from settlements and transported to them...

A capitalist society would best operate with everyone living at high densities so that the maximum number of people would need to buy everything they required, having little opportunity to provide basic services, such as growing food themselves. A high-density city is necessarily a consumer city.

Burkett describes how the concept of local food does more than change our buying habits but "challenges us to move from being consumers and passive recipients in these systems to being active participants, citizens and co-producers of the systems."

I love this idea of moving from consumers to actors, and would love to hear some more practical examples about community farms and gardens within the framework of community building. In particular, reflections on the role of the community as a "starting point". If anybody is involved in this area, please share - we're keen to learn more about it!

the city's heart

A quote I read from Jane Jacobs' iconic book The Death and Life of Great American Cities got me thinking recently:

When a city heart stagnates or disintegrates, a city as a social neighbourhood of the whole begins to suffer. People who ought to get together, by means of central activities that are failing, fail to get together. Ideas and money that ought to meet, and do so often only by chance in a place of central vitality, fail to meet. The networks of city public life develop gaps they cannot afford. Without a strong and inclusive central heart, a city tends to become a collection of interests isolated from one another. It falters at producing something greater, socially, culturally and economically, than the sum of its separated parts.

The "heart" whose passing Jacobs mourns seems to be no other than that of the community - that arena in which a mélange of minds, ideas, backgrounds and talents unite to build on and reinforce one another. Where human beings shed the burden of individualism in order to contribute to the building of something that transcends merely the sum of their separate parts.

Today's discourse on the value of the 'community' is often housed within a wider discourse on community development and local economy; yet there appears to be a universal struggle to get to the heart of what the term really means. How relevant is community life in today's urban-centred working world, with its constant flux of moving house and migration, its faster trains and all-you-can-eat internet? Are the communities of today online networks, are they those fading memories of 1950's sports clubs and church groups, are they defined by common interests, or along geographical lines like neighbourhoods?

We think the time is ripe to reconsider the purposes of the community, and to trace an outline of the potential destiny of the communities of today and tomorrow. This is not the first time we have posted about the community, but this time around, we'd like to think about the role of the community in individual and social transformation. And so, our main question:

When so many forces are pulling us the other way, why make the effort to learn about the ways and methods of community building?

Some initial thoughts....

What if our true identity, as a community, is spiritual, consisting of members working together to enable each individual to embark upon a process of learning to become protagonists of their own spiritual and material development?

What if we conceive of unity as both the instrument and the goal of creating this kind of community?

What if a commitment to this 'unity' implies a collective process of inquiry, of walking together - consulting, acting and reflecting on the process of community building?

The Baha'i writings state:

Let us take the inhabitants of a city....if they establish the strongest bonds of unity among themselves, how far they will progress, even in a brief period....

Please share your thoughts!

At the Heart of Social and Economic Development

Recently I attended the Baha’i Social and Economic Development Conference in Orlando, Florida. The theme was “Baha’i Inspired Development and the Growth Process: Partners in Transforming Society”. A co-worker and I had the honor of presenting the work of the Tahirih Justice Center and share the history and learnings of the organization to two very captive audiences. The conference itself offered an opportunity to learn from many others — young and old — involved with development/service work in their communities.

Among the questions explored in the conference was the meaning and source of “development”. Of course the term “development” is not new to anyone. Nations have been striving towards “development” for centuries. And who can deny that humanity has made astounding advances in scientific and social development in the last two centuries alone? Notwithstanding these benchmarks of progress, another fact rears its unpleasantness: a majority of the people inhabiting the planet have been left far, far behind. Ironically the gap between poor and rich is widening even as “development” has morphed into a global enterprise that seductively (and rather self-righteously) markets itself as targeting “the poorest of the poor”.

“Born in the wake of the chaos of the Second World War, ‘development’ became by far the largest and most ambitious collective undertaking on which the human race has ever embarked. Its humanitarian motivation matched its enormous material and technological investment. Fifty years later, while acknowledging the impressive benefits development has brought, the enterprise must be adjudged, by its own standards, a disheartening failure. Far from narrowing the gap between the well-being of the small segment of the human family who enjoy the benefits of modernity and the condition of the vast populations mired in hopeless want, the collective effort that began with such high hopes has seen the gap widen into an abyss.” (One Common Faith, 2.4)

Why has “development” failed? The question is intimately linked to another — what is the nature of true human/societal development? Is it purely material? The experiment of the last century was an exercise in applying the notion of development defined in purely material terms. Its dogma caused us to believe that human progress rested on material accumulation alone. We therefore pursued development projects that narrowly sought the economic exploitation of the environment, promoted the violent cultural intrusion of societies, and tolerated the kind of painful structural adjustment programs which the IMF and the World Bank implemented in developing countries at the expense of health, education, local infrastructure and the overall welfare of local peoples. Unembarrassed by both the immediate and devastatingly long-term tangible human suffering caused by the injustices of these policies, our world seemingly continues to blindly follow a credo fed by an insatiable, brutish appetite for material wealth.

The problem is not material wealth per se — rather it is the motivating impulse that drives the processes involved in the aim to improve the conditions of life. Consumer culture has operated under the conviction that those with means must become slaves to their senses and continuously satisfy their material wants and desires. With spending perceived as the pulse of healthy social and economic development “[s]elfishness becomes a prized commercial resource…Under appropriate euphemisms, greed, lust, indolence, pride—even violence—acquire not merely broad acceptance but social and economic value.” (One Common Faith, 2.3)

Part of the problem lies in a deep rooted perception of human nature as incorrigibly selfish. People, we are told, are fundamentally self-interested actors. By design the social and economic structures we have built under the various development regimes are meant to harness those impulses to fuel human progress on the path to “modernization”. Or so we’d like to believe — reality tells a different story, one that is hard to ignore: the disintegration of the family, mounting violence and crime, disappearance of community life, the degradation of the environment etc.

What if we painted a different picture of development? What would it look like? What if development was more than just a measure of income and material wealth? What if development also can start with interpersonal relationships, between two neighbors? What if we viewed true development as unlocking the potential of the individual and building their own capacity to identify problems and take social action within their own community? Does development really begin with material resources and capital? Or does it begin with collaboration and commitment to a broader vision born of a community of people who aspire for something better for themselves and future generations?

Slowly, we are learning that at the heart of how we understand development is a fundamentally different way of looking at human nature — each of us are intelligent beings with the capacity to overcome our baser qualities, with the capacity to do good, to serve, to give sacrificially for the benefit of the whole…the choice has always been ours. We have the agency, what has been missing for far too long is the will.

If we viewed human beings as having capacity to improve their own conditions would necessarily change the way the world “does development”. And here’s how: Currently, most development projects and programs are, by design, top-down in approach. It somehow presumes that pouring resources into a country will naturally lead to development—the project has only to be engineered and orchestrated in right way by the learned “experts”. It presumes that any failure to reach the intended results is due to missteps in the process of execution. If we are to throw out the underlying framework of the development model that is currently imposed on the peoples of the world, something else will have to take its place.

In order to move away from a model that too often regards the “poor” as “charity” or as “untapped human resources” that simply need training by the “experts” to be productive members of society, we need to embrace the idea that every individual is the agent or protagonist of their own learning and development, as human beings with capacity and the ability to build upon it. This idea firmly affirms that whole communities of people can develop the capacity to identify their needs and work together to address the challenges of their community, thereby becoming truly empowered, as they have taken ownership of their learning and growth in a manner most suitable to their environment and current development. We would perhaps start to look at “poverty” as not lack of material wealth, but as a life wasted due to lack of opportunities to achieve their highest potential to contribute to the welfare of the wider community.

So that leaves each of us — protagonists of change, agents of social transformation — at the heart of the matter.

Social and Economic Development can begin, and in reality, does begin with each of us. We all have the capacity to contribute to the betterment of our neighborhoods, the quality of our relationships with young people, the ability to serve each other. Through these grassroots initiatives, be they formal or informal, taking part in service or “social action” and working diligently towards these ends will release the potentialities of the human spirit in ways we have yet to fully realize.

What about the Community?

Economic Assumptions and the Role of Hyper Public Goods

In a world that presupposes that individuals are like atoms, orbiting within their own sphere of self, the community is, arguably, irrelevant to economics. In this conception of the world (commonplace, though far from ideal), economics would merely become an exercise in maximizing profit and individual gain at the expense of…everything else (think Darwin’s survival of the fittest.) Such is the show playing out before us on the world stage today, as we watch the gap between the rich and poor forever widen, the environment increasingly degrade, and an excess materialism continue to cast its dark cloud over moral and spiritual values.

And yet, in these times of financial uncertainty and moral questioning, more and more people are standing up and shouting out in defense of a more meaningful rewrite of reality. A world in which the individual is part of an organic, interconnected whole. A world where economic systems cannot be divorced from the lives of the real people using them.

One of these people is Professor Stephen A. Marglin. His current research, including that published in his book The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community, brings the notion of the community back into the spotlight as fundamental to understanding how economic systems ought to function. He questions the foundations of mainstream economic thought and asserts that they distort our understanding of humanity’s true nature and the purpose of human relationships in a way that renders the ‘community’ irrelevant:

Economics substitutes a mantra of market freedom based on assumptions of dubious merit, whether considered as facts about people or ethical norms.In adopting a particularly extreme form of individualism, in abstracting knowledge from context, in limiting the community to the nation and in positing boundless consumption as the goal of life, economics offers us no way of thinking about human relationships that are the heart and soul of community other than as instrumental to the individual pursuit of happiness.

So perhaps before we think about human relationships, we ought to rethink: who are the ‘individuals’ forming them, if not isolated ‘atoms’? One could compare individuals to the cells of the human body, which are interconnected yet diverse in their functions. The cells within a human body both depend on and fortify one another. They must work together accordingly to form more complex vital organs. Much like humanity itself, the body relies on this diversity to meet its various needs, as well as a certain harmony and coordination. The interconnectedness of the system is even more apparent when something is amiss. If one part of the body is suffering, the rest of the body must work harder, and may also suffer as a result.

So we could evince this from current global trends in climate change, the world economy, natural disasters and health pandemics. But on a more profound level, this analogy of the human body implies a deeper thread between individuals, who share more than just a planet, but also a common purpose and responsibility to fulfill the destiny that a shared Creator has set for humanity. A somewhat daunting task. But then, if we think about the human body, it is not just the sum of individual cells that makes it work, but rather the unity among them.

If the above-mentioned assumptions beneath mainstream economics render it incompatible with a more profound exposition of human nature and human relationships, the relevance of economics to an investigation of reality disappears. Marglin argues precisely that, pointing out that mainstream economics is getting the focus wrong. Particularly, he addresses the use of market models in economics, which economists oftentimes use as a tool to propagate assumptions associated with self-interested individuals devoid of community. He doesn’t purport that markets are inherently bad, but claims that mainstream economists use market-modeling as an end in itself. Furthermore, he claims that economists are driven to persuade the world that market-based models thoroughly describe reality as it is and create models to justify their inherent value rather than trying to understand how markets work and the insights they provide into reality:

The problem with the idea that economics is purely, or even primarily, a descriptive undertaking is that the apparatus of economics has been shaped by an agenda focused on showing that markets are good for people rather than on discovering how markets actually work.

Rather than helping the world to function and advance, the economy is simply reinforcing a definition of the self-interested individual that contributes to the break-down of human relationships and consequently the increase of injustice – both economic and social – in the world.

A shift in focus, towards understanding how markets work, may just reveal profound insights about the dynamics of community life and the human relationships that define it. And it may very well change our assumptions about how the economic system ought to function in the world.

Marglin suggests that one of the ingredients of an ideal community would be love. Faithful to an integrated, holistic vision of the economy, he calls love a “hyper public good” that “increases by being used and indeed may shrink to nothing if left unused for any length of time.” He then goes on: “The sensible thing to do is to create institutions to draw out and develop the stock of love.”

A great start – though one can’t help but feel it’s just the tip of the iceberg. What is this love that bonds individuals of a community together and how is it linked to a greater shared destiny for humanity? What implications would this have on forming a new paradigm for economic thought?

If we really are intent on keeping the economic system integrated in the world, we could ask: once all the cells of the body are functioning healthily, what does the human body do? The body’s functioning is not an end in itself but rather a means for that individual to engage with the world, to participate in a two-fold process of individual and societal transformation. What would the purpose of this new community be? How would a new economic system work naturally to help advance this purpose?

We would argue that a ‘healthy body’ version of the community is still in the making, though there are certainly many models in existence today that would be worth studying. That being said, an interesting next step could be to closely study communities that are built on values such as love, and to identify other ‘hyper public goods’, such as trust, unity, or a desire for justice. As these individuals are empowered to promote the interests and well-being of all, connected by bonds of love, fortified by a collective undertaking to work together for the well-being and advancement of humanity, we could perhaps start to set the new foundations to a just, fruitful economic system. That could be a start.