Democratic Economies: To preserve and conserve
VOLUME 27, NUMBER 2, JUNE 2005
Lucia was clear and passionate as she described how the economics of progress had washed away her family's livelihood in the foothills of the highlands, and swept her up in this urban slum in Guatemala City.
"We were always poor," she said, "but not without means, and never depending on others, except our family and community with whom we shared. Now we have nothing, our families spread out over the country and our communities gone."
Lucia explained that even when she was young, the land around her was still largely communal. People grew most of what they needed in parcels that were traditionally part of their household, and sold or traded the surplus to secure other goods that they needed. They were all part of a local economy that sustained them. Household income was supplemented by seasonal labour on larger farms in the area, or on the coastal plantations, and this income circulated many times within the community.
The dislocation of her family and most others in the community began with promises about land reform, and the promotion of crops for export. The first step was the privatization and titling of communal lands, enforced by government under pressure from donor nations as a condition of renegotiating the service on debt. Communal lands were parceled out, with title given to the male head of individual families. Most people assumed that titled ownership was a good thing in a world that was increasingly oriented toward property and money. Soon they were enticed to use their property as collateral to secure credit to buy seeds and other agricultural inputs to cultivate new crops that they could sell to exporters marketing commodity crops in the north. The first such export "alternatives" were ajonjolí (sesame) and small chili peppers, and others followed.
So now the families had property - although it was usually only a portion of the same land they had access to before - but also debt. Because banks often refused to offer credit to poor peasants, the export companies provided seeds and chemical inputs as a credit advance on the later purchase of the crops. Since most farmers were competing in the cultivation of the same few "alternatives", sale prices fell while the cost of inputs increased. Costs soon exceeded income and farmers went deeper in debt, and lands were sold off or foreclosed. The land was bought up and concentrated into larger and larger industrial farms. Soon not even the most resilient small family farms were able to compete. The local economy had been destroyed in less than a generation; young people migrated to the cities seeking work, and ultimately were followed by families that had lost everything.
Lucia's story is not unique. It is only one story of how diverse family farming and local economies are being supplanted by industrialized agriculture, monocultures and external international markets, bringing with them the erosion of the local and the communal by corporate industrial production and increasingly massive economies of scale. It is a tale with myriad variations, in Latin America, and around the world.
All of this is seen as natural and inevitable, and for the greater good, at the same time as it destroys lives, scars landscapes, and undermines entire social ecologies. The majority of displaced people are people like Lucia and her family, uprooted by externally-imposed "progress." But there is no natural reason that rural transformation cannot be sought and attained to the benefit of small farmers and traditional communities, or that the process of urbanization has to leave so many millions adrift without dignity or opportunity. The lives of the poor can be improved substantially when they are directly involved as economic agents, and when economic policy takes into account the whole of people's lives - health, education, livelihoods, and social and physical infrastructure, including public services such as roads, water and electricity.
There is an entire universe of complex actions and dynamics upon which society, including the "economics" of society, fundamentally rely. That is why Inter Pares promotes the concept of the "democratic economy", which emphasizes inclusive economies geared to the lives of all citizens, and controlled by people in their own interests. This Bulletin shares examples of people working together to regain control of their lives, their economies, and their futures.
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| Reviewed May 31, 2005 |  |
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