Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

"... one of the most difficult obstacles that we’re up against right now is 
that the same corporate middlemen that have ended up manipulating farmers and 
consumers are also manipulating the media and manipulating government 
regulation as well as deregulation at international levels. .. Large 
corporations, and that includes banks and speculative investment, are 
actually controlling the information that gets out...  one of the most 
powerful movements around the world is the local food movement.  It is far 
more significant than people realize."

Helena Norberg-Hodge - CA Food Report Launch
http://globalpublicmedia.com/helena_norberg_hodge_at_ca_food_report_launch

It’s very, very important that when we think about food and farming that we 
don’t just think about what happens on the farm.  Unfortunately, because 
people have become suspicious of toxic food that are full of chemicals, and 
have an interest in organic food, they have tended only to look at getting 
organic food but not thinking about the driving mechanisms of a food system 
that actually furthers and makes it almost impossible for farmers to grow 
healthily without increasing the costs to the consumer.

Now this is very largely due to the fact that people have not been looking 
enough at the whole system, from the seed to the food on the table.  Because 
when you do look at it that way, it actually becomes very, very clear that 
the problem that we have to overcome is the power of the giant middlemen that 
buy cheap food  (artificially cheap, often through subsidy). They get 
so-called commodity—vast amounts of grain, vast amounts of dairy, whatever it 
might be, which they then transform into products to sell to the consumer and 
retail.
And these systems of middlemen have become so complex and so powerful that 
they have been able to manipulate both the farmer and the consumer.  So 
fifteen years ago or more in another book that we wrote about industrial 
agriculture called From the Ground Up:  Rethinking Industrial Agriculture, we 
wrote there about how the farmer was getting 30% less pay for corn in the 
same period consumers were paying 30% more for corn in a box of cereal.

Now where did that money go?  That is one of the most important questions of 
our time, because there lies the answer to finding a way to have very healthy 
organically-produced food at a lower price to the consumer and giving the 
growers more money.  So it’s like a magic wand because it does not mean that 
the message to the consumer should be, “You should pay more for your food.  
You should pay more for your food.”  That’s not the message that we need to 
get out right now.

The message we need to get out is we as a society have got to wake up to the 
truth of what’s happening to our food and farming, and in doing so we need to 
create a strong pressure for more localized food systems.  If we do that, we 
will be getting much fresher, healthier food for a lower price than we are 
now, and the farmers that are growing on diverse, healthy farms will be 
getting paid much more.

It’s really, when you look at it, it is so simple what needs to happen.  But 
we need to think about the fact that one of the most difficult obstacles that 
we’re up against right now is that the same corporate middlemen that have 
ended up manipulating farmers and consumers are also manipulating the media 
and manipulating government regulation as well as deregulation at 
international levels.  So we do need to look at this as a very, very central 
issue.  Large corporations, and that includes banks and speculative 
investment, are actually controlling the information that gets out.

And I just wanted to tell you that a brilliant young woman worked with a very 
brilliant analyst of food systems, Joan Gussow—how many of you have heard of 
her?  She’s been active as long as I have and has been writing some very, 
very good books on food and looking at shortening distances and such.  And 
she worked with this woman in New York who had a center for sustainability, 
and they had got some money from the school system to produce a curriculum 
that was basically answering the question, “What would it take for countries 
to feed themselves?”

And as they’ve developed this curriculum, it of course became very clear.  
We’ve got to get the corporations off our back.  It is they who are 
responsible for creating giant mountains of food, often rotting or being 
burnt or destroyed while more and more people are going hungry.  And we just 
heard from Katie that precisely in the areas where most of the food is being 
grown in California is where you have the most hunger.  This is what we hear 
about India, and it’s really happening here, too, and in India.  The Indian 
Food Corporation right now has huge mountains of food, and they’re exporting 
food from India while an estimated 380 million people are not getting enough 
to eat, are not getting an adequate diet.

Now as it comes back then to how corporations control it, and in this 
curriculum they laid out some clear steps that need to be taken and produced 
a good curriculum.  But when they went back to the school board with it, they 
suddenly heard, “Oh, no, no, no, we don’t want this.”  And the school board 
even tried to avoid paying them, despite the fact the Board had commissioned 
the work. In the end,  they were paid,  but the work was never used in the 
schools.   That’s an example of the degree of corporate influence on our 
lives ---  that even schools, universities, think tanks, R & D (research and 
development)  is now funded more and more and more to suit the needs of giant 
trading corporations rather than the needs of  people and the planet.

I have experience of people in corporations and in various levels of 
institutional alignment with corporate policy.  In these positions, most of 
the people are not aware of the whole systemic impact of the system of power. 
 It’s very easy to get away with promoting something that is destructive 
because of a partial view, and so that allows people to be very good fathers 
and neighbors and decent people and yet promote a system which is very 
destructive.

So I think it’s really important that we give people the benefit of the 
doubt.  There are clearly things that seem so evil that you can’t help but 
get angry sometimes with what’s happening.  But anger and certainly violence 
never helps to breed and to create a peaceful world, so I think that 
maintaining a peaceful and compassionate attitude but not shying away from 
the truth—I think that’s the task before us.  And I really urge all of you to 
try to do everything you can to contribute to getting a message out about 
what is actually going on in the world, and also at the same time to 
encourage that the solutions lie with organizing—and that could well include 
demonstrating—but particularly important I think is to build up the critical 
mass of people who have a grasp of what’s going on in the economy because we 
do not hear about it.

And when we do hear even about the protests against global trade it tends to 
be very fragmented.  We don’t hear in the media from the brilliant 
economists, many of them from the South, who have a very clear analysis.  We 
don’t hear from the doctors, lawyers, former chief economist of the World 
Bank, or even George Soros, who is one of the biggest financiers in the 
world.  Their  perspective is not clearly articulated in the media.

So there is a lot of education that we need to do.  We need to look for the 
information and we need to pass it along to build up greater awareness.  And 
right now with the elections coming up it’s worrying that for many people the 
only item is “Get Bush out.  Get Bush out at any cost.”  Whereas I would 
argue that unless we develop more awareness,  we are not going to see a 
transition to a better world, no matter if Bush is replaced in office.

If the juggernaut of globalization continues unabated, we are going to see 
massive increases in pollution at every level, including a toxic mix of 
untested chemicals that are proliferating every day because of the blind 
agenda about economic growth.  We’re going to see global warming, a mad 
increase in use of petroleum to transport products globally over longer and 
longer distances because the trade ministry over here is negotiating treaties 
that commit countries to importing and exporting more and more.  The 
environment minister might talk about global warming, maybe even try to do 
something about it. But it is madness not to address the trade agenda and the 
globalizing tendency if you want to do something about global warming.

So we need economic literacy – we need it very badly. People in the world who 
are doing anything, —either giving a few hours a week of their volunteer time 
to do anything to improve the state of the world; whether it’s helping their 
neighborhood school or the opera house or the hospital, anything. Anyone who 
has a bit of time to do something out of goodwill to improve the situation 
around them, or even anyone who maybe doesn’t have time but who gives some 
money to charitable causes – this is the community of people which is 
actually very large-scale.  I believe that if all of these people had the 
economic literacy package in mind, that it would constitute a pressure to 
make significant policy change, both at the national and community level.

At the community level there are already many exciting things happening. It’s 
incredibly inspiring for me because almost all of them are happening despite 
the fact that there is almost no funding from government, big business,  or 
even the big charities.  There was almost no help with media, so getting the 
word out was very difficult.  Despite that, everywhere you look there are 
inspiring and very positive initiatives that are bearing fruit.

Now as you come to food, which is so important to see in the broader context 
of  the economy, one of the most powerful movements around the world is the 
local food movement.  It is far more significant than people realize. New 
farmers markets have been started, community supported agriculture (CSA’s);  
and in all sorts of different ways restaurants, shops, schools, hospitals, 
etc.  are using and consciously trying to source, as they say, local food.  
It has far greater implications for our lives than we realize.

And again, the best way to realize why this is so positive is to understand 
better how the current government-supported and big-business-led, globalizing 
food system works.  We are in California right now.  We’re importing food all 
the time --  strawberries are being imported in strawberry season, Brussel 
sprouts are being shipped to California, and tomatoes from Canada, nuts from 
Italy --  while exporting nuts to Italy.  And this is part of a general trend 
that is the consequence of globalization, which means ever larger 
corporations—owning the seeds, buying up the water rights, and owning, 
particularly importantly, the media with which to advertise, and supermarket 
chains.

These concentrations of economic power operate like a Wal-mart or a new 
hypermarket that go into an area  and offer things at a lower price than the 
multitude of local existing competitors. This destroys the local  
competitors. Then the big boxes up the price.  Because they’re so large, they 
can afford to operate in that way to destroy smaller competitors.

Now that’s one direct way, but indirectly they work with government to change 
regulations, to pressure governments to deregulate international mobility of 
corporate goods and investment.  So they’re removing any environmental  and 
human protection measures that would  make it difficult for them to operate.  
That’s what trade liberalization, trade deregulation,  is all about.

How many of you feel that you’re familiar with how globalization operates?  
Yeah, so most of you.  How many of you have read, for instance, When 
Corporations Rule the World?  Oh, I hope that those of you who haven’t that 
you will look at that because that’s a very good book that outlines the sort 
of structures of this system.

But I think another aspect to this which is less well-known is that 
corporations have also worked very systematically to bring in regulation that 
will destroy smaller competitors.  So we know, for instance…we had a specific 
insider’s knowledge years ago from a friend who was a lawyer working in 
Boulder that hotel chains in America were pressuring Congress to bring in 
regulations for bed and breakfasts.  So that even if you had a big, beautiful 
house where you and your family were allowed to live, you would not be able 
to have paying guests unless you put in fireproof doors, fireproof 
mattresses, I think now also handicapped ramps—all sorts of things that were 
not necessary. Very consciously the hotels knew this would eliminate a lot of 
the competition from bed and breakfasts and smaller hotels.

Now we also heard that there was someone in Washington—this is about six 
seven years or maybe it’s more like ten years ago—who was lobbying in 
Washington to deregulate constraints around research in genetic engineering.  
And we thought that this would be coming from Monsanto or somewhere like 
that.  We were that naïve.  No!  It turned out that Monsanto let it be known 
that they did not want them to lobby to remove the regulations that 
controlled research around genetic engineering because they knew that that 
would destroy the small competitors.  And a few years later, Novartis and 
Monsanto had bought up virtually all the small companies that were 
experimenting with genetic engineering.  Now as far as I’m concerned, I don’t 
like either small companies or big companies, but you see it’s one of these 
very difficult situations where we do want regulations, but we basically need 
to look at how we must regulate the international activity of global 
corporations.

And that’s not as complicated as it looks.  It’s a process that’s beginning 
to happen.  There are now so many groups and so many people who are aware of 
this problem that there is a growing tide of public opinion and activism 
around this issue.  So please don’t think that look at the big picture like 
this is hopeless and that it’s something we can’t change, that this is 
somehow evolutionary, and you know, there’s no point even thinking about it.  
I used to sometimes think that it’s hopeless, but I have to tell you that in 
the last four or five years I feel much more encouraged than I did ten years 
ago, because of this very clear increase in the awareness.  That is the 
prerequisite for real political change, and it is happening.

When you look historically at why we’re in this situation, then it becomes 
very clear that these very powerful corporations would not be so powerful if 
they had not gained, already gained a huge advantage in  earlier periods.   
So really if we look at the global economy and the globalizing tendency, 
historically, it started with colonialism when from Europe the elite sent 
their ships and their conquistadors out across the world to basically force 
the rest of the world to produce for Europe instead of producing for 
themselves.

This is a very fundamental thing that should make us more critical and more 
skeptical about trade, because the trade that we know in the modern era was 
built on the backs of slave labor in cotton, coffee, tin mining, tea, 
bananas,  and so forth. This defined the whole world.  When we looked at 
geography we were talking about, oh yeah, that’s a coffee country, that’s a 
banana republic, that’s this, and that’s that.

Before colonization, many of these countries previously produced a range of 
products for themselves.  The fact that they were quite well-suited for 
bananas was an additional advantage, but it was not something that perverted 
their production and their economic activity into huge monocultures, because 
any sane population is going to think about that fact that they would like a 
range of products for themselves.  And they were engaged in producing not 
only a range of food, but also building materials, fibers, the things that 
they needed to live on.

So here came Europe and turned them into these basically slave economies.  
Then we thought, we were told, that in the development era after these 
colonies were freed, that they had become free because now they had their own 
people in charge of their countries and we supposedly, the white Europeans 
supposedly went back home and left them to their independence.  But now, of 
course, we’ve learned that this wasn’t independence.  It was actually a 
continuation of economic slavery, this time in a much more sophisticated form 
with a growing debt and a stick of debt, boycotts, and even continued 
CIA-sponsored manipulation, especially if there were leaders who did get into 
power who wanted to go a different economic path.  That wasn’t tolerated.  
And by this time the US was one of the major bullies.

Now we’re told in the globalization era that now finally the third world is 
going to benefit.  More trade is going to make them wealthier.  But if you 
look at it historically, it’s not just more trade that’s needed.  It’s more 
local trade that’s needed.  In so many countries during the colonial era 
local trade was forbidden for a whole range of reasons.  Sometimes in islands 
people were told that it wouldn’t be safe.  That the British had to look 
after them and they weren’t safe to travel in their boats to do trade 
regionally.  I mean, there were a number of different ways that local trade 
was cut off.  So what we need is more local trade and less global trade.

At the moment, we have identical products being imported and exported.  So 
the US now exports about 900,000 tons of beef and veal annually and turns 
around and imports about 900,000 tons of beef and veal.  Britain exports 
about 100,000 tons of milk, turns around and imports about 100,000 tons of 
milk.  Now this import and export of identical products, as I said earlier, 
is an insanity in an era of global warming, dwindling oil supplies, wars over 
oil—it’s  madness!

We all need to realize that many experts, especially  most persuasively the 
petroleum geologists who go out into the field looking for oil,  are warning 
that we are going to see the price of oil go up because the excavation and 
the extraction is becoming more and more difficult and more and more 
expensive.  The supplies are more and more limited, and the extraction is 
becoming more expensive.  So they are warning of a huge increase in the price 
of oil.  I think we need to imagine what things are going to be like in 
Berkeley or San Francisco if, in a very short period, the oil prices shoot 
up, so that the imports on the outside are going to cost a lot more money.

We would be so much better off if we got on with the job of creating 
relationships between farmers and consumers, getting more local and regional 
food into the economy, helping everywhere, children and anyone who can grow a 
bit of food to do so.  We actually have found that where people do engage in 
this process, it often has incredible benefit psychologically and spiritually 
as well as economically and ecologically.  Because we’ve been so involved in 
this for so many years in so many countries, it’s just evident for us.

For instance, there’s a therapist in England who was a torture victim.  And 
these torture victims are helped to work in a garden. This person talked 
about the trauma that she went through.  She was helped by engaging in the 
process of growing food, nurturing the natural world, you know, from the seed 
to growing, watering, tending and caring. It’s being part of the natural 
cycles of life and this is engaging, really, with the essence of what 
spiritual teachings are all about,  the inextricable oneness with everything 
that lives.  So this is a solution multiplied, rebuilding local food systems 
is far, far more than it seems on the surface.  So on the one hand we need to 
recognize that this sort of fearful scenario of having a shortage of fresh 
and healthy food in the local economy if the oil prices do shoot up.  But 
even if it were not to happen, there’s this multitude of benefits that comes 
from rebuilding local food systems.

Now one thing I’d like to just reiterate, and that is that there’s a 
structural relationship between ever-larger monocultures on the land, 
ever-longer, straighter superhighways paid by our tax money, not for us to 
drive our car, but to transport goods back and forth.  That’s the primary 
reason why the roads have to be straighter and far more expensive than they 
would be if they were built for the family car.  And I’m talking about a 
factor of many, many billions that we pay with our tax moneys without being 
told that we are building those roads for the McDonalds and for the Monsantos 
in order for them to be able to transport things in larger and larger 
container lorries.  Those container lorries can’t manage small, winding 
roads, and the plans from government everywhere are to invest more and more 
billions of our taxpayers money to build more road networks.  Even in 
countries that are riddled with roads, road budgets are in America about $175 
billion; in the EU it’s about $450 billion to be spent, I think it’s over the 
next ten years or something, on expanding transport infrastructures.  And 
it’s actually articulated that it’s in order to improve market access, 
meaning corporate access to all the market.

Now, this relationship between these giant monocultures, the long, straight 
roads, the giant container lorry and the giant hypermarket—the 
Wal-mart—there’s a structural relationship between that.  When you shorten 
distances and when you help create a direct relationship between farmers and 
consumers, local shops, or farmers’ markets, you’re actually doing something 
that changes the modes of production.  Because when you shorten the distances 
for the farmer, there are going to be economic gains from diversifying.

So what you’re doing is you’re literally changing the free market system.  In 
other words, you’re changing it to a real free market where the producer is 
able to act freely to produce that which the consumers in that free 
marketplace are demanding—in other words, free from the hidden manipulations 
and the hidden hand of the corporation.  So there, you’re setting up a system 
where farmers automatically start diversifying, meaning planting many 
different things on the same plot of land.

Now, as it happens, planting a range of products on a given piece of land is 
virtually a guarantee for higher productivity.  It’s the opposite of what 
we’re told.  We’re told that these big monocultures have to do with 
efficiencies of scale, that that provides cheap food, and what’s happening is 
that people want cheap food.  That’s the lie that we’re told in the media.  
When I say lie, it’s a fabric of half-truths that constitutes one giant lie.  
What they have been saying is that we’re producing more food with fewer 
people, and that’s right.

They’ve eradicated millions of farm jobs while getting our tax monies to be 
used for investment in petroleum and the roads, and the R & D at universities 
that gets our scientists looking at “How can we create a tomato that will 
transport better?”  Not “How can we have a tomato that’s going to be more 
nutritious?”  How can we create a tomato-harvesting machine that is big and 
that can be used by a big corporation?  That’s the sort of thing that our tax 
monies have been used for, not the opposite.  How can we find technologies 
that will try to use renewable energy, that will try to facilitate organic, 
sustainable, diversified farming?  What is the infrastructure that would be 
needed for having really sustainable food production?  No, that’s not what 
our tax monies have been used for.

We are now getting to the point where more and more people are aware of the 
benefits of local food. But we need to look at  the regulations,  about the 
use of  tax monies, so that we can start building up much more pressure for 
truly organic production.  Because when the farmers are stimulated to 
diversify, the amazing win-win-win thing that happens is that when they’re 
diversifying on the farm, they simultaneously increase productivity, more 
food out of the same acre of land.  And at the same time they reduce the 
ecological footprint.  So in terms of the damage to water, soil, air and 
wildlife—that decreases and the productivity goes up.

In the same way, when you shorten the link, the farmers’ costs go down.  
Because when they diversify they start getting cycles where something that is 
waste in one production can be fertilizer for another, and especially if you 
introduce animals into the cycle, you get actually more from the land, from 
the diversified small-scale farm.  You employ more people, and then, the 
other thing that happens is that the farmer in the shorter links gets a much 
higher proportion of the money that we spend.  So you’re talking about such a 
win-win-win-win strategy that it’s almost unbelievable.

And when you go to the supermarket, many of us don’t know that we’re not 
paying for the food.  I mean, very often for every dollar we spend, the food 
actually may be 10% or less.  In fact, I think now in our report we found on 
the average it’s 9 cents out of every food dollar actually goes to the 
grower.  So what you’re talking about is you spending money when you go to 
buy food, you’re spending 90% on irradiation, packaging, refrigeration, 
transport, advertising—all these things you didn’t ask for.  And yet you’re 
being told that we have this system because you’re a greedy, selfish 
consumer, and you’re getting what you want, you know, and you want Wal-mart 
because it’s so cheap.  Again, another lie.  There are half truths there.  
People respond to the Wal-mart if they don’t have very much money, but the 
system is not there because you ask for it.  You weren’t even told about the 
opportunity for you to spend tax monies differently.

In that regard, I also just want to say that when you actually analyze what 
the dominant message is that you get through academia and the media today, it 
is basically saying that you are the one to blame for all the crises in the 
world.  You’re being told that if there’s global warming, it’s you in your 
car and your filthy, high-consumer habits, and especially as an American 
you’re now demonized worldwide as just the worst people on the planet.  Then 
when you hear about hunger on the other side of the world again, it’s your 
greedy, selfish habits, people starving over there thanks to you.  It’s no 
wonder that people don’t want to hear more about crises.

And for me it’s just so heartbreaking that even many people don’t want to 
hear about globalization because they think that it’s yet another big, huge 
issue that’s added on to all these other crises that we hear about and where 
we feel more and more powerless, and we’re being told that we’re to blame for 
them.  Now, actually understanding the analysis that we’re talking about from 
a global perspective helps not only to show a very strategic way to solve a 
whole range of social and environmental crises.  It’s a lever, it’s a central 
lever that relates to everything from forest depletion, pollution of water, 
ownership and sale of  water—again, crossing the world, bottles of water 
going back and forth, human rights abuses, even terrorism.  They relate to 
this economic system.

And it’s actually very wonderful and empowering when you realize that there 
is a way of solving a multitude of problems at once. It’s even more powerful 
when you really wake up to the fact that you have been falsely blamed for 
these crises.  When the discussion comes to poverty and global warming,it’s 
your fault, but then you are being told  you’d better shop like crazy.  Have 
you shopped enough at Christmas?  Have you shopped enough now?  How is 
consumer spending going, because that’s what’s going to keep the economy 
going.

So you’re being pushed and bullied into consuming, both directly and 
indirectly, because our governments are measuring growth according to a 
completely faulty yardstick and pushing us into this consumer behavior, and 
then when it turns out to be disgusting, environmental crises or poverty, 
it’s suddenly you who are driving the system!  You aren’t driving the system. 
But sadly, we are all being manipulated into going along with it because 
we’re also told these big corporations produce more food, more cheaply, and 
on a crowded planet, you know, we’ve got to feed people and this is the way 
to do it.  So these myths keep perpetuating the system.

Another thing I’d like to mention, another aspect to all this which relates 
to food, but it also has a much broader implication.  I learned a lot of 
thisthrough  looking at the broader system from experiences in Ladakh or 
Little Tibet, where I had this bird’s eye view of a culture that hadn’t been 
affected by colonialism, development or the global economy, having been 
sealed off for a number of reasons.  And it was suddenly thrown open.  And I 
came in as part of a film team; I was a linguist.  And I learned…first of 
all, I was only planning to be there for 6 weeks, but I became so fascinated 
by these people who were the most self-assured, relaxed and happy people I 
had ever met anywhere.  So I ended up staying when the filming was done 
because I fell in love with the people, and I learned to speak the language 
fluently, and most of what I’m saying today I would not be saying if I hadn’t 
had that opportunity to speak the language and to see, as it were, from the 
inside the impact of this outside economy.

And one of the things that I saw very, very clearly was these delightfully 
happy and self-assured and confident people, within a relatively short 
period, their children developed an inferiority complex and started thinking 
that they were nobody, that they were ugly, that they were inferior, and I 
could see why.  You know, I would have ended up feeling inferior and stupid 
and backward if I’d only had the information that they had, and especially 
young, vulnerable children.

So what happened was that these children were being given an impression that 
in the modern, urban consumer culture, people had unbelievable amounts of 
wealth.  They got that impression from tourists coming in and spending in one 
day what a whole family might have spent in a year.  So it gave this 
completely false impression, because they didn’t learn that the tourist whose 
money was worth a lot in Ladakh or Little Tibet was worth a fraction of that 
amount back home.  So they got a completely distorted impression of our 
wealth.  They also got the impression that we basically don’t work because we 
don’t do physical work, and this impression of this incredible wealth and 
power affected the young children.

And at the same time, advertising and media images started giving them the 
impression that the modern world consisted of certain ways of behaving, 
dressing, speaking, appearing, and they literally started trying to emulate 
this supposedly superior culture.  It was very clear that the message they 
were getting was:  If you want to be loved and seen and heard, if you want 
community, if you want to belong, you’ve got to have the right label running 
shoes and jeans and eat the imported foods, and be somebody other than who 
you are.  They should identify with this one-dimensional urban consumer 
culture.  So I saw how that led to unhappiness, to self-rejection, to young 
people using a dangerous skin-lightening cream that is called “Fair and 
Lovely.”

So then I started looking at this more and thinking more about it.  My 
husband and I actually did a study around the world, and we found from 
Mongolia to Chile, to literally every part of the world, Africa, the same 
pattern.  Very depressing.  And we found that everywhere the tendency was, as 
a general pattern, dangerous skin-lightening cream, hair-lightening 
chemicals, blue contact lenses that were sold with the advert, “Have the 
color of eyes you wish you had been born with.”  In Asia, women operating on 
their eyes to make them look more European, etc., etc.  Very clear expression 
of self-rejection to emulate an artificial, one-dimensional consumer culture.

But it took me a few years before I realized that exactly the same thing was 
going on in the Western world.  And I had a particularly shocking experience 
that I often relate.  When I came back to Sweden where most women are blonde 
blue-eyed, and the beautiful daughter of a friend of mine was exactly like 
the image of the stereotypical ideal—blonde, blue-eyed, fair-skinned, 
everything, the right shape of eyes—but she was convinced that she wasn’t 
thin enough.  So she was bulimic, and disastrously so, so that she was 
actually having to go into the hospital regularly because she wasn’t passing 
food through, and it was a nightmare for her family and for her.  And my 
friend, her mother, was being told that she was to blame.  She had been too 
concerned with her weight, and this is what had destroyed her daughter’s 
life.  Now nowhere was there any mention of the fact that where you do not 
have the advertising and the consumer culture intruding, you do not have 
these illnesses.  It was absolutely not mentioned by the doctors, the 
therapists.  I give you that as a very important example of many, many other 
ways that you and your families are undermined in terms of your self-respect 
and your sense of power and, especially, being made to be guilty for not only 
the destruction of the planet and poor people on the other side of the world, 
but your own daughter’s mental and psychological crisis also just pointing 
back to us as individuals.

And then we’re told we’re going to change this by recycling our aluminum 
tins, and being sure that we separate some of our rubbish, and everything 
will be all right.  Well, we are now at the stage where we need to look more 
broadly and more deeply, and what’s really, really exciting is that when you 
do that, you suddenly can change the I to a we.  There are very meaningful 
and exciting things that can be done at the community level with a group of 
like-minded people, and I really hope you’ll contact our office for our 
“Roots of Change” materials.  Becky here, if you’re interested, can tell you 
more about it.  We have a set of readings that come from around the world 
that deal with these issues, and what we recommend is that groups of people 
do it together with the idea of also taking some action if they can, and we 
think we should look at education as activism.  And I’m talking particularly 
about education for adults, to start action in the relatively near future.

Because we’re at this point right now where even the economists and The 
Financial Times that are the bibles of the free-trading corporate heads, and 
so on, have said that the anti-globalization activists are winning.  They are 
saying we are winning in the streets, we are winning the arguments, and 
before long these policies will be turned around.  And they are saying that 
this globalizing model is not the only way that the world economy can go.  So 
it’s up for grabs, and it’s up for more of us to be more informed, and 
ideally we need to send an economic literacy packet to Kerry and all the 
Kerry campaigners so that there’s pressure on him to really start taking a 
different position.

And at the same time, we, right here in our own communities can start doing 
things that are very meaningful, particularly local food.  And for local food 
we have what we call a local food toolkit, which is a poster set, slideshow 
on a CD, a book which we did before Bringing the Food Economy Home, and now 
the California Food Report.  We have a cassette of a conference that we 
organized with Wendell Berry and Vandana Shiva in London some years ago.  I 
understand there was a similar conference recently.  How many of you went to 
that conference with Wendell Berry, Vandana, Alice Waters…only a couple of 
you.  It happened right here in Berkeley, which is really thrilling.

So there is a lot that we can do right now, and I also urge you to look at 
the bigger picture and to think about it.  I just want to finish by saying 
that Clinton had as his campaign slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid.”  And I 
completely agree with him that it’s the economy, stupid.  But we have a 
completely antithetical analysis to his, and our analysis is spiritually, 
psychologically, socially, ecologically and economically a win-win-win 
strategy, so I really, really hope you’ll look at the localization part of 
the economy as a solution multiplier.  Thank you.  [Applause.]

So any comments or questions?

Questioner:  I’m contemplating getting into the solar issue, and checking the 
views on the websites it looks like everyone’s expanding, and it feels good 
as a young person, and I wanted to contribute to the local spot, so I also 
kind of want to feel comfortable with that.  The people in Berkeley are going 
to buy solar panels.  I mean, houses around here are so expensive.  Anyway, 
it’s like another, I don’t know, 5 percent on your house cost, and wanting to 
feel supportive in that way.

Helena Norberg-Hodge:  Well, Steve Gorelick who works with us, and who used 
to run the office here in Berkeley, he still works with us from his farm in 
Vermont now, and he used to have a solar company in Berkeley.  And at that 
time, this was in the early eighties, he found that it was becoming quite 
difficult, that the solar systems cost too much, and there weren’t that many 
people who wanted to do it, and so on.  I’d like to say that when you analyze 
what’s going on today in the world that what we would like to urge people to 
do is to spend part of their time to contribute to real systemic change.

So for instance with food, what we’re saying right now to you is not that 
you’re got to go out and buy local food, because some of you may not be able 
to afford it.  And there are many foods maybe that are eaten that you can get 
that are local.  But in the United States for those of you who can’t afford 
to do that, then please try to give at least a few hours a week of your time 
to thinking about and passing the word along about the reality of this 
system, what’s going on in terms of the concentration of the media, what the 
real analysis of the crisis, and what can be done.  So if you can think of 
just volunteering some of your time to improve the world.  To people who have 
more money, but often less time, we say, please give just a few dollars to 
contribute to organizations that are trying to really work on fundamental, 
systemic change, which is not more difficult to implement.

This is this tragic thing, to implement the piecemeal changes, now including 
solar panels.  If it’s done without an understanding of the hidden subsidies 
for petroleum and without some kind of movement that’s really going to bring 
renewable energy to people at an affordable price, it’s going to be very 
difficult.  So we need that educational package and pressure, as well as some 
community activity.  The community activity and the localizing part can 
include setting up a community credit union where people in the community 
contribute to either loans or grants to really start making some change and 
developing some models.

So I just want to say, don’t feel guilty if in your job you’re working at 
Wal-mart or Monsanto or…I think Monsanto…I don’t know [laughs].  I would try 
to get out of some of these businesses if you can, but don’t feel personally 
guilty.  I mean, we’re being pushed in this direction.  But do what you can 
to volunteer or contribute to real systemic change.

I have found that one of the problems that’s been happening in the 
environmental movement is that a lot of groups have felt that they want to be 
able to have a job—you know, a well-paying job—to be part of the positive 
change.  And I think that’s been part of the problem, that many of these big 
groups have ended up funded by big corporations or government, and they’ve 
been skirting around the issues, just dealing with symptoms.  And so, just 
keep that in mind.

Questioner:  Has your organization looked at all into the impact of impact of 
natural gas peaking in North America?

Norberg-Hodge:  Well, we haven’t looked into it ourselves, but many people I 
work with, economists and so on, are talking about that.  That, you know, we 
really do need to be aware that we may have a very serious energy crisis very 
soon.  And we know from our work in Ladakh, where we demonstrated small-scale 
hydro, solar—both passive solar and solar panels—and wind power, that these 
technologies cost far less money, employ more people, have less environmental 
damage.  I mean, there’s just absolutely no doubt.  And the tragedy is that 
in the discussion around the Kyoto treaty, this truth is not being 
articulated, and so the fact is we should all be lobbying for any of the 
Western money that goes into the Third World, right now should be shifted to 
small-scale renewable.  It could provide millions of people at a lower cost 
than the way our monies are being spent to push big dams and nuclear and 
fossil fuel.

So we are aware that there’s likely to be a crisis also in terms of gas, and 
so we need…yeah, we definitely need to get going.  But I feel again without a 
clear analysis, a lot of the solutions that are now being presented are 
corporate solutions—very high-tech, so-called efficient technologies that are 
far more expensive than they should be.  And you all know what happened here 
with the energy crisis, anyway.  I mean, they’re trading in nonexistent 
energy.  And when we’re dealing with an economy in which the trade that’s 
going on is mainly speculative, and it’s speculating on the value of 
currency, and this is the spin-off from this trade for the sake of trade, 
completely out-of-touch economy that’s pushing us almost over the cliff.

Yes?

Questioner:  I’m wondering if you have any recommendations, either 
information content or ways of communicating to people who are feeling so 
depressed right now and who are living, say, in suburbia and working hard for 
a public health institution, sitting in traffic for an hour each way, getting 
home exhausted, upset about where they’re buying food, wanting to get ??? And 
on the one hand very receptive, but on the other so…

Norberg-Hodge:  Depressed.  Yes, very good question.  I think in our 
institute, certainly many people have said that they found giving the 
materials of the Ancient Futures book and video about Ladakh was a way of 
opening people’s eyes to these issues.  People our sort of age said it was 
the one book I could give to my parents, you know, that wasn’t seen as so 
threatening.  And we’ve always had many parents send their children to us, 
because we have a program in Ladakh where people work on the farm with a 
family, and then we have workshops and so on.

So I think that can maybe help.  We also have in our study pack some 
materials that try to deal with that.  But I think more than anything, first 
of all, they need to be aware that their analysis of the crises and the 
reason for them is incomplete.  The degree of manipulation, and the degree in 
which the real truth is being marginalized is just enormous now.  About ten 
years ago, the whole world was told, we’re going to solve the Third World 
poverty problem and overpopulation through the Grameen Bank and giving small 
loans to women.  And everyone bought in to that.  And people should have been 
suspicious when the World Bank promoted it and Clinton promoted it, but they 
somehow didn’t catch on, and I was demonized for warning against it.

But now more and more people are waking up.  But for me it’s very, very sad 
that there have been a lot of pseudo-solutions pushed on people.  I mean, the 
big problem is that big corporations got more and more involved in the 
environmental movement, basically, and it wasn’t that there was ill will, 
it’s just that it was very difficult.  If you were the head of a corporation, 
the one thing you’re not going to look at is your own shadow.  So as they 
came up with solutions, they were not looking at the real problem.
And fundamental to the problem is the way we measure economic growth.  I 
didn’t say that earlier.  I just wanted to remind you, this used to be 
discussed in the sixties and seventies.  The way we measure growth means that 
if you all go home and have been robbed blind when you get home, fantastic 
for the economy, for growth.  If on the way you have a bad car accident so 
you almost die, even better.  And then everything from that to buying bottled 
water because the water is so polluted and because it’s now being privatized 
so there won’t be any commons of fresh water, clean air, land, everything 
being privatized—all of that is good for the economy.

So I think most people when they think about the crises today are not aware 
of that, and they’re not aware that we have a huge opportunity to change 
things now because the lever, the sort of center of the system that has taken 
thing so out of control, had to do with international trade treaties.  So 
even groups that were looking at the need to redefine growth were not talking 
about the trade treaties.  So these, these two areas, how we measure growth 
and the trade treaties are an incredible opportunity right now, which is 
completely historic.  We’ve never had a discussion in previous periods when 
we had an environmental movement.  There wasn’t an awareness about the trade 
as treaties being so central to corporations gaining power over our minds and 
our governments and our democracy.  Now people are alert to that, and that’s 
a very, very hopeful sign, that they have woken up to that.

So I hope that your mother will think about getting together with like-minded 
people to have fun as well.  It’s really important, you know, to sing 
together, singing and dancing.  Every culture used to do that, until the 
consumer culture comes in and makes us all feel that we’re not good enough, 
you know, to sing and dance.  Cooking together, gardening together, walking 
together.  Do your own vision quest, you know, where you’re out into nature 
with a group of friends, don’t need to spend thousands of dollars, and just 
be in nature and help your children feel the joy and the connection that 
comes from being in the natural world.  It’s things like that can help people 
feel how much of the living world is still alive and healthy and joyous.  Did 
you see the full moon the other night in that clear sky, you know.  So 
there’s so much to be joyous about, and there’s such a knowledge I think for 
those who do connect to nature, that this natural world is more powerful than 
that 500 men who are trying to push a life-deadening system on us.  This is 
not just speaking to cheer ourselves up.  This is the truth.  We know that 
that’s more powerful.

Questioner:  Do you find ??? the 500 men or other people who work in those 
corporations…do they show any kind of interest, or have you noticed a kind of 
a shift?

Norberg-Hodge:  Very definitely.  I mean, if someone hasn’t done it, I guess 
one thing we should do is to document the number of these men in power 
positions who have changed their thinking.  I mean, right now I’m thinking of 
Stephen Byers, who was high up in the British government, who came out in the 
press saying, I was wrong.  I thought that globalization and increased trade 
was good for the Third World.  I was wrong.  The former chief economist in 
the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz, who’s now critiquing it.  He does not have a 
localization, decentralization solution, and I think those of us who do have 
a deep connection to nature.

And very few of these men have a deep connection to nature, which is why 
women are also likely to lead the way, I think.  And why, you know, we need 
to have that leading, from the grassroots, from those who have a connection 
to nature, have a connection to community, because most of those men are so 
off in their head, out of their bodies, away from the earth, that they can’t 
even see or feel the earth under their feet.  So we have to start leading for 
them.  But they are recognizing that their model is not working, which is a 
huge step forward.  And many of them are brave enough to say so.

Questioner:  I was wondering, you were talking earlier about ??? is right 
now, people who ??? not having time and  not having money, and having one or 
the other, looking at the reality of the incredible growth of the packaged 
food industry and how much we’re eating out now.  And what I’m wondering is 
in your analysis of California’s food economy, did you take any of that into 
account.  How do you see that coping with increasingly less family time, 
increasingly less cooking time, increasingly less time to nourish ourselves.  
How does that interrelate with our transition to a sustainable food system?

Norberg-Hodge:  What I see everywhere is the macrotrends and microtrends.  
And I don’t know if you’ve seen the analyses which are also appearing in 
every other industrialized country of something like 30% beginning to turn 
away from the consumer culture, beginning to downsize, beginning to just take 
more time for their lives, even though it means a sacrifice in career or 
salary.  There is a very considerable number that’s doing that, sometimes 
also because their jobs disappeared under their noses, or whatever.  But 
there’s a very large number of people who are feeling that they just can’t 
continue in the rat race.  And then there’s also an amazing growing interest 
in cooking.  I mean, cookbooks are one of the more successful publishing 
endeavors, and there’s also a growing interest in eating more local, wild, if 
you like, wild-produced, grown foods.  And, so there’s a microtrend even 
towards…at many, many different levels, it is happening.  But I agree with a 
macrotrend and for many, many people it is a real problem.

So basically, that’s why we also urge people—I didn’t say this before—but we 
urge people to think in terms of the action that they take, to look at it 
both in terms of resistance and renewal.  The renewal we’re talking about is 
that reweaving of a sense of a connection to the natural world, to community. 
 But the resistance is more hard-nosed, sometimes more intellectual—the 
analysis of the global economy, getting the political message out there, 
which needs to happen very rapidly, while the renewal can only be a renewal 
with a slowing down.

So we all know that we need to be schizophrenic, consciously schizophrenic, 
to do what needs to be done today.  And it’s just too long there have been 
people who were just activists fighting against, against, against, and then 
on the other hand there were people who said, we know all the problems.  We 
don’t want to hear about them.  We’re only interested in solutions, and we 
are becoming spiritual, and we are working on ourselves.  And the message 
was, you know, if we want peace, we have to start with ourselves.  And I was 
always saying, no, no, ourselves.  We are not actually separate, static 
entities.  There’s an inexplicable relationship between what happens out 
there and what happens inside us, so let’s work on both levels.

So I think that, you know, the most important thing we can do is to be 
clearer about the strategic leverage points, and I expect that in the 
not-too-distant future there will be a shift in policy that will lead to a 
decorporatization, which is synonymous with a more place-based economics, 
which is synonymous also with a slowing down.  It means more jobs and more 
time, less environmental impact.  There is a path forward that is such a 
win-win solution, not just at the level of food systems, but at the level of 
all economic activity, and localizing/decentralizing is synonymous with more 
time for each and every one of us to have time to enjoy our lives, to cook, 
and to enjoy our children and enjoy the natural world.  But that macro-change 
will have to happen at the policy level, and then meanwhile we can learn how 
to make important choices in our lives.

I’d love to see, you know, things like people more consciously cooking for 
each other.  You know, like maybe choosing…instead of going out, having ways 
of cooking with each other as a group or for each other, and doing that quite 
frequently.  I remember once in one of our study groups, people, where they 
had done this thing where they had cooked for each other.  It helped to 
reduce the number of times a week that you cooked, but you had delicious, you 
know, homemade meals, and they were delivering to each other and sometimes 
eating together.  That’s something you…yes.

Questioner:  I live in a co-op here where we basically ??? for food and our 
??? income.  We had a debate recently over fair trade bananas.  Rather than 
saying it’s some issue of who can be more ???, I think it did raise some 
important questions in that what about the regions of the world ??? because 
of ecological ??? degradation of the land, or present structural issues that 
are dependent on cash crops?  Maybe it’s not conceivable to do the switch to 
local economy immediately, and can it be helpful to have networks like the 
fruit trees, banana networks that aren’t buying local but still upholding 
some sort of tradition.

Norberg-Hodge:  Well, I think that this is a good question.  It’s a very 
important one because a lot of people are being…again, it’s been one of these 
pseudo-solutions that’s been pushed on the environmental movement.  And the 
problem is that a lot of the fair trade projects are actually development 
projects where groups are going in and helping people to export fair trade 
coffee or bananas or chocolate or something instead of using aid money like 
Oxfam and big church organizations to help them make the transition to 
diversifying and producing for their own needs as a priority.

You see, if we care about equity and justice and the environment, this is the 
way we have to go.  It’s not really a question of personal, subjective 
interpretation.  If you’re actually on the ground, it becomes so clear.  You 
know, if you want everyone to have a decent diet and to eat, to pervert the 
economy into this export-led thing where you’re totally vulnerable, gluts in 
the market, constant speculation on value of currency, so you’re creating 
such vulnerability.  So if they are dependent on unfair trade, as a charity, 
as a development option, the only thing that makes sense is to try to go in 
and, yes, switch to fair trade.  You know, that’s one step.  But, if it’s not 
accompanied by help to switch to more localized production, diverse 
production for local needs, it’s really irresponsible.

So of course it’s not going to happen overnight, and localizing, you see, is 
not going to happen overnight here either.  So there are a lot of false 
arguments that are used, like if we localize, then we won’t buy their produce 
and they’ll be hungry.  We’re not going to localize overnight.  Every step of 
the way that we plant seeds that mean that we have to wait for the harvest, 
and seeds can be planted over there.  So we’re talking about an 
internationalist view and an international movement to support both sides of 
the world, both sides of the corporate divide to work together to make this 
transition.  So don’t be fooled by some of these arguments that say, oh you 
know, they’re going to go hungry if they’re not exporting their food to us.

I think that actually the ideas about literacy, female literacy, and the 
lowered birth rate and so on, a lot of them, again, are a very shallow 
analysis.  You see, here in California we’re talking about eco-literacy.  
We’re trying to get children to have an ecological literacy where they learn 
to tune in to different varieties of plants and the complexities of the 
natural world.  We’ve come to realize that that’s very important.  When we 
talk about literacy in the Third World, it’s actually…usually it’s about 
learning a standard, monocultural curriculum for life as an urban consumer.  
And it’s in these cases where we’re talking about women in the Third World.  
It’s actually a tool that goes hand in hand with little micro-loans that 
takes them away from the ecological literacy into learning how to read 
Wordsworth.  I mean, if you’ve seen our film from Ladakh, you’ll see that 
learning to see history through white, Western eyes, usually not a word about 
their own history.  And, so the literacy, generally speaking, is neither a 
real history about what’s going on in the world, because they have even less 
access to that information than we do.