Helena Norberg-Hodge - 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.