Gardening and Globalization

Using Local Agriculture to Strengthen Communities

February 2002

By Will Raap
Founder and Chairman
Gardener's Supply

I landed at Chicago's O'Hare Airport at 8:50am September 11, 2001. A few minutes later the Airport was shut down. On the way to my meeting in Chicago, on the 80th floor of the second-tallest downtown building, my shuttle van was radioed to terminate service for the day. I arrived on the 80th floor just before the entire building was evacuated. It took me three days to get back to Vermont by train. 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. In my travels, I've met with a Guatemalan yucca and bean farmer who lost his land to a U.S. company that air freights snowpeas to Washington, D.C., and 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 When we started Gardener's Supply more than 25 years ago, one of our goals was 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. Twenty years ago, we started a nonprofit organization called the Intervale Center which is an incredible success story about local, sustainable farming. The Intervale Center is inventing ways to grow, process and distribute food to achieve the goal of providing 10 percent of Burlington, Vermont's, fresh food, flowers, poultry, eggs and more from local farms. In 1988, that figure was less than 1 percent; 10 years later, it was already passing 6 percent. The Intervale Center established the country's first farming incubator where young farmers are sponsored to develop business plans, share farm equipment and get marketing advice. It also operates the largest community composting project in Vermont using yard waste, municipal leaves, food waste, agricultural waste and manure to make tons of compost annually to help revitalize the land. Gardener's Supply is a strong advocate for local farming and land conservation because it is healthy for our community. Beyond that, the work of the Intervale Center is also a response to the globalization of agriculture where industrial farming practices and export-driven production are forcing small, self-sufficient farmers off their land. 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. The Intervale Center is sharing its expertise with towns, nonprofit organizations and economic development groups across the country. I am also sharing this expertise in Central and South America, where the loss of self-sufficient local farming presents a great risk to the world community. I encourage you to grow as much of your own food as you can, and support whatever local agriculture initiatives are happening in your area. The benefits of local agriculture are many, and increasingly, those benefits are global as well as local. Will Raap is Founder and Chairman of Gardener's Supply Company. Read more of his Founder's Corner essays.