Gardening and Globalization

Using Local Agriculture to Strengthen Communities

Four months later on Jan. 18, I was on my first trip back to Chicago. Two prominent page one headlines in the Wall Street Journal on the seat next to me caught my eye. "For Egypt's Terrorists, Fertile Ground Lay In Widespread Poverty; Now the State is Attacking Root Problems to Stem Resurgence of Extremists". "Enron's Board Fired Arthur Andersen as Auditor Amid Storm of Recriminations Between the Companies". These two articles may seem unrelated, but they are just a new version of the same old story. Concentrating wealth and power with few controls (Enron) inevitably leads to social stress and economic breakdown (Egypt).

In recent years Enron was the ultimate example of economic globalization, and concentration of wealth and power. In a few years it had become the seventh largest US corporation largely through unfettered global trading in a wide range of goods and services. Both multinational corporations like Enron and public institutions like The World Trade Organization promote globalization as a way for developing countries to reduce poverty and create a safer world. Countries like Egypt are presented as the big winners in the new global economy. However, there is increasing evidence that the opposite is the case.

The rising tide of the global economy will create many economic winners, but it will not lift all boats…[It will] spawn conflicts at home and abroad, ensuring an even wider gap between regional winners and losers than exists today… [Globalization's] evolution will be rocky, marked by chronic financial volatility and a widening economic divide. Regions, countries, and groups feeling left behind will face deepening economic stagnation, political instability, and cultural alienation. They will foster political, ethnic, ideological, and religious extremism, along with the violence that often accompanies it."
- US Central Intelligence Agency, GLOBAL TRENDS 2015, 2000.

A Widening Gap
As the World Bank noted in a 1999 report, "[g]lobalization appears to increase poverty and inequality". All the evidence from the past 40 years, when global free trade and financial liberalization have been growing faster and faster, is that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. During this time the income gap between the 20% of the world's people living in the richest countries and the 20% living in the poorest countries quadrupled, from 20 to 1 to 80 to 1.

Economic globalization has made large corporations and individuals associated with them fabulously wealthy. Today, the list of the largest 100 economies in the world contains more companies than countries. But the wealth generated by global business does not reach down to those most in need. Rather, the rules of free trade guided by the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, lock the wealth at the top of the economic pyramid. Governments and communities lose the ability to redistribute wealth and protect important industries (like agriculture and forestry), workers and the environment.

What does all this have to do with Abe Lincoln's observation about the importance of land-based livelihood? As we enter the 21st century almost half of the world's population still works the land, growing food for their families and selling it to their communities. In Mexico, Kenya, Turkey, India and China family farmers use sustainable practices perfected over generations. Small scale, diversified farming systems that use local fertilizers, pest controls, and proven seed varieties passed between generations feed billions of people.

One of the most devastating affects of policies pushing free trade and rapid export development is the shift of local economies away from farming that feeds people in surrounding communities toward large scale, industrial farming practices aimed at exporting food to wealthy countries. This new model is guided by Del Monte, Dole and McDonalds. I've met with a Guatemalan yucca and bean farmer who lost his land to a US company that air freights snow peas to Washington DC. I visited a Costa Rican citrus, papaya and pepper farmer who now watches burgers-to-be graze where his orchards once were.

As the International Forum on Globalization reported in a special 2001 Bulletin, "[a]n export-oriented system of agriculture favors high priced, high margin luxury export items - flowers, potted plants, beef, cotton, exotic vegetables - to be sent to the already overfed countries. As for the people who used to live on the lands, growing their own foods for their communities and for local markets, they are rapidly being driven off their lands... Self-sustaining communities disappear, still intact cultures are decimated. This is as true in the United States as in the Third World."

Local Farms for Local Communities
I started Gardener's Supply 20 years ago partly to help Americans make "a comfortable living from a small piece of land". Many of our early customers were market gardeners who bought frost protectors, weed barriers, hand tools, propagation supplies and greenhouses from us. I felt the challenges facing the profession of small-scale, local farming, as well as the critical role it plays in the health of people, communities and the environment, made this livelihood among the most important to defend. Fifteen years ago we started a nonprofit organization called the Intervale Foundation which is committed to finding ways to promote local, sustainable farming.

Today, the Intervale Foundation is a leading proponent of community agriculture. We are inventing ways to grow, process and distribute food to achieve our goal of providing 10% of Burlington, Vermont's fresh food, flowers, poultry, eggs and more from local farms (when we started it was less than .1%). We created the country's first farming incubator where young farmers are sponsored to develop business plans, share farm equipment and get marketing advice. We started the largest composting project in Vermont using yard waste, municipal leaves, food waste, agricultural waste and manure to make 10,000 tons of compost annually to help revitalize the land. The Foundation now supports a dozen organic farms that are functioning as a vital community asset providing fresh food, land stewardship and increased community health and security. Dozens more farmers and apprentices have worked on Intervale farms, taking their experience with them to help establish and strengthen other farms across the country.

Gardener's Supply supports local farming and land conservation because it is a healthy and good thing to do for our community. Beyond that, this work also is a response to the globalization of agriculture where industrial farming practices and export-driven production are forcing small, self-sufficient farmers off their land in unprecedented numbers. The crisis in American agriculture relates to the gutting of rural communities by corporate agriculture. The USDA reports in the second half of the 20th century we lost two-thirds of our family farms while the amount of land farmed, often by absentee ownership, has remained about the same. The crisis for agriculture in developing countries is more severe as productive livelihood evaporates and hunger grows, creating unmanageable social stress and economic collapse.

A Model to Build On
Our work in the Intervale offers a model for strengthening community-based, sustainable agriculture in America. Increasingly, the Intervale Foundation is sharing its expertise with towns, nonprofit organizations and economic development groups across the country. Now, I want to employ this expertise in developing countries where the loss of self-sufficient local farming presents the greatest risk to the world community. During the next few years I will spend half my time in western Costa Rica building a new organization to help revitalize agricultural practices and stem the loss of family farms on the Guanacaste peninsula. I will work with the Peifer Center for Agro-ecology and Community Farming in Paraiso (Paradise) Costa Rica, an existing training and demonstration center. I will seek to transfer the lessons learned at Gardener's Supply and the Intervale Foundation over the past 20 years to a region fast losing its family farms, hoping to offer another small counter balance to the globalization of our food system.

I invite interested gardeners to learn more and get involved. One of my challenges in Costa Rica is to help rebuild the pool of seed varieties to grow tomatoes, peppers, corn, lettuce, beans, squash, peas, melons, herbs and other crops more successfully for market and family gardens. If you are a gardener in the warmest US growing zones (zones 9 and 10) with high water challenges (either too much or too little) and difficult pest and disease problems, please let me know which varieties of the above crops work well for you. We don't have this kind of know how in Vermont!

PS. If you'd like to learn more about the Peifer Center and the work we are doing there, e-mail me at: info@gardeners.com

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