Beyond “Free” or “Fair” Trade: Mexican Farmers Go Local - We Usually Think of the Demand for Local, Organic Foods as Coming From the North. But in Southern Mexico, the Growing Localist Movement is a Strategy for Survival

                                 Image via Wikipediaby Mike Wold, Yes! magazine: http://www.yesmagazine.org

Tío Joel rode his small donkey down the dirt road to his greenhouse to show us his solution to keeping small farmers on their land in southern Mexico.

At about seventy years old, he could handle a machete or lift a 20-kilo sack of compost as easily as any of us, though the brace he wore around his waist was a sign of problems to come.

Trade policy in the United States usually gets cast into two opposing camps - "free" trade and "fair" trade, a dichotomy that assumes local production in the Global South must be sold elsewhere.

Taking a break from chopping green manure for compost for his popular tomatoes, he explained why a campesino like him could benefit from using organic methods: “In the harvest this year a lot of tomatoes were being harvested and the price went way down to five pesos per kilo, but we sell ours for seven. I go from house to house and sell it small-scale, but we sell out our tomatoes because they’re well-known … on Sunday we ran out of tomatoes, we sell so many.”

Trade policy in the United States usually gets cast into two opposing camps - "free" trade and "fair" trade, a dichotomy that assumes local production in the Global South must be sold elsewhere. Indeed, we usually think of the demand for local, organic foods as coming from North America or Europe.

But within countries like Mexico, there's another way to approach the issue, looking at global import and export versus local production and consumption. In the United States, it has emerged as the "localist" movement, which to many seems an unaffordable luxury compared to the accessibility of cheap imported food.

But in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, raising and eating your own food and producing for the local market has become a strategy for cultural and economic survival in a hostile trade environment.

To read further, go to: http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/beyond-free-or-fair-trade-mexican-farmers-go-local?utm_source=wkly20120127&utm_medium=yesemail&utm_campaign=titleWold

Local Economies for a Global Future: Yes, We Need to Relocalize - But That Doesn’t Mean We're Headed for Provincialism. Anticipating Our Near-Heavy, Far-Light Future

                                Image via Wikipediaby Jason F. McLennan, Yes! magazine: http://www.yesmagazine.org

This article is about a simple, singular idea, yet the significance of the idea to modern society is profound and far-reaching.

Here it is: In the near future anything heavy will become intensely local while at the same time the limits to things that are ‘light’, ideas, philosophies, information will travel even further than today - literally and figuratively. This is a new paradigm for humanity and it has huge implications for the complete reordering of society.

Environmentalists, economists, and sociologists agree: we are in an incredible state of flux, and this is simply the beginning. The planet is undergoing massive change and critical resources are diminishing, conditions to which the human race must respond. Population growth, resource scarcity and climate change will propel us, whether we like it or not, toward a new energy, food and resource paradigm.

The world’s economies, based on cheap plentiful energy and the exploitation of people and the environment are starting to crumble. We are beginning an era in which the cozy assumptions of the last half-century are turned upside down, a time when the institutions and technologies that run our civilization are re-engineered.

To understand how radical this new paradigm will be, let’s explore similar re-orderings in the past.

To read further, go to: http://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/local-economies-for-a-global-future?utm_source=wkly20120120&utm_medium=yesemail&utm_campaign=titleMcLennan