[Campaignforrealdemocracy] Localization is way to redefine globalization

[James Holland]

http://host.madison.com/ct/news/opinion/column/guest/article_02d13201-bb85-5717-89fc-8b3c24467098.html

Localization is way to redefine globalization

Madison residents love their farmers' markets, windmills, rural health
cooperatives, credit unions and hundreds of other green businesses,
appreciating how they simultaneously benefit the local economy, environment
and civic life. Less appreciated, however, is the essential role
localization plays in promoting global prosperity, sustainability and peace
- the central theme of this weekend's Future Cities 2009 conference taking
place in Madison.

Some skeptics, like Princeton University's Peter Singer, argue that
Americans have a duty to avoid going local and to keep purchasing raw
commodities from the global South, like plantation-grown bananas and coffee.
Yet given how little of each import dollar actually winds up in the hands of
the workers most in need - probably less than a penny - this is, at best, an
extremely inefficient antipoverty strategy. It perpetuates domination of the
poor by global corporations.

If we really want to help the poor, it's far smarter to help poor countries,
poor communities and the poorest residents living in them to achieve the
same level of local self-reliance we seek for ourselves. Mohandas Gandhi
argued that the way to defeat British power was to restore self-reliance,
especially in basics like textiles and salt. He did not suggest that India
embark on a campaign to attract nicer British factories or to expand exports
to London.

This isn't going to be easy. As Madison's long-standing sister-city
partnership with cities like Managua, Nicaragua, have underscored, serious
global antipoverty work requires ongoing, long-term partnerships between
communities, North and South, in which we help one another reorganize every
element of our economies. As we in the North create community food systems,
we might help partners in the South transform their food systems, away from
the plantations and export crops and toward the cultivation of enough
healthy fruits, vegetables, rice and beans to feed their own families. As we
strengthen and spread our own local banks, credit unions, stock markets and
mutual funds, we can help partners create these institutions as well, so
that local savings everywhere increasingly support local housing, local
education and local entrepreneurship. As we deploy new technologies to
become more energy efficient, we can share our know-how with renewable
resource innovators in the South.

For nearly a generation, the city-state of Bremen, Germany, has been
spending about $1 million per year to help its partners in the South - in
Pune, India, for example - become more energy efficient by giving away
digesters that convert local waste products and plant matter into burnable
biogas.

Every localization initiative, if we are prepared to share and spread it,
provides another piece to the puzzle of global poverty relief.

As these activities proceed, relatively wealthy partners like ourselves
should remember that we have as much to learn as to teach. Microfinance was
pioneered by the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. Some of the best mass-transit
innovations have come from Curitaba, Brazil. The wireless telecommunications
networks in Asia, which skipped the "wired" phase of industrialization, are
among the best in the world. One of the world's finest examples of a
self-reliant community is Gaviotas, a 200-person village in Colombia, which
has pioneered several solar and wind technologies, developed a particularly
effective and environmentally benign means of extracting resin from pine
trees, and set up organic farms, social services and reforestation efforts
that have drawn worldwide attention.

A world of self-reliant cities is better not only for global ecosystems but
also for the health of global democracy. Actively sharing great local
business models provides a new tool for spreading democratic practice, not
through threats or violence, but through opportunity and collaboration.
Self-reliant communities, moreover, have very little rational reason to
invade or coerce one another for oil, water or other resources.

Localization is not about ducking globalization but about redefining it.
-- 




James Holland
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