Making a difference

THE image of our blue planet floating luminously in dark space is a modern icon. This image is put to use for diverse purposes. An international credit card company uses a brilliant picture of the blue planet to sell its promise of "the world in your hands". Environmental groups posit the shimmering image of our only home to invite more people to join "the race to save the planet".

There may not be any obvious contradiction between these two different uses of icon earth. Yet behind both uses are distinct and divergent worldviews. The first sees the earth essentially as a market place - with the power of buying and selling as a primary function of life. The second treats the earth as a precious, sacred gift, to be nurtured and lived with harmoniously. From the latter point of view, the buying and selling functions of life are secondary or even incidental.

Of course these divergent outlooks do not exist in neat compartments. They overlap in the lives of millions of individuals. Yet the dispute between these worldviews is real enough. Indeed, the very future of the blue jewel in our solar system depends on how this dispute is settled. Thus the growing importance of the question: can the market economy be moulded to work on more humane, sustainable, and just terms?

To put it more succinctly, "Market: Master or Servant?" This was the title of an intensive course recently organised by the Schumacher College, in Devon, United Kingdom. Last fortnight's column outlined part one of this three week course, led by David Jenkins the former Bishop of Durham and author of the recent book Market Whys and Human Wherefores.

Jenkins' basic submission is that the market is an essential and ancient mechanism of human society. However, the current deification of the market poses serious threats to the well-being of not only human society but the planet itself. This consequence has emerged largely from the assumption that our collective interest is ensured by everyone pursuing their own self-interest.

A story about the popularity of salmon fish in the German market helps to illustrate the problem. The story is told by Wolfgang Sachs, environmental activist and author, who led part three of the discussions on markets at the Schumacher College. The growing demand for salmon in Germany benefits people who run fish farms in Norway, Sweden and Scotland. These farms in turn create a demand for fish-meal which benefits suppliers on the Pacific coast of South America.

Yet all these layers of seemingly complementary self-interest do not benefit everyone. Instead, many people involved in the process find themselves at the losing end because the intensive "production" of fish-meal is rapidly depleting fish reserves in that part of the Pacific. This in turn undermines the economy of local fishermen, who live off the sea. "The salmon, a light healthy post-modern diet, ends up on tables in Germany," says Sachs "and the dirt, stench, polluted waters and dwindling fish reserves are left in South America. The benefits go to the top of the chain in the North and the costs settle at the bottom in the South."

Sachs takes pains to emphasis that there is now a "Global North" and a "Global South" spread across the world. The global north includes those who derive benefits from the prevalent model of the market-driven globalisation and the global south are those who are left to pay the price of that prosperity. This is inevitable when 20 per cent of the world's people are consuming 80 per cent of the earth's resources.

This has particularly tragic implications for that one-third of the world's population which still depends directly on nature for its survival. The prevalent model of free trade and market driven globalisation holds no promise for these billions of people. So where do we go from here?

Martin Khor, leading activist of the Third World Network, suggests that we start by recognising that the present form of globalisation is neither inevitable nor involuntary. Even the digital revolution and other technological factors are not the primary movers of globalisation. Instead, the process is being driven by policies and strategies set by powerful economic interests.

The market itself is not an enemy, asserts Khor, who led the second part of the course on Markets at Schumacher College. We have to combine a humane kind of market mechanism with non-market functions, says Kohr. "TAMA, or There Are Many Alternatives, will mean different things in different cultural contexts."

Thus, the explication of TAMA is not just a matter of listing alternative modes of material exchange - through cooperatives or local currencies or equity-oriented credit structures and so on. It is far more important to challenge the basic premises underlying the existing model of market economy.

For example, the prevalent system rests on a theory of behaviour which treats selfishness as more universal than goodness. This theory does not reflect reality but the theory produces its own reality. So for 200 years the world has been moulded by a tradition of economic activity, established by Adam Smith, which overlooks all factors and activities of life where money is not involved. This is today lamented as "market fundamentalism".

Intellectual activists like Sachs and Khor are essentially arguing that political and social action will have to create greater space for reciprocity as an alternative to brutal competition. This will mean giving greater value to what Sachs calls "the care economy, the gift economy and the informal economy."

This cannot happen unless it is more widely recognised that the dogma of limitless growth is an outdated 20th Century aspiration. In the last 50 years, a period of unparalleled economic and population growth, one-third of all arable land in the world has been severely degraded and the fresh water on the planet has shrunk by one-fourth. The global fish reserves have also declined by one-fourth. "The utopia now is to learn to live elegantly within limits" urges Sachs. The ideal economy of the 21st Century will provide maximum well-being with minimum consumption. Optimum resource use and ecological sensitivity must now be the new standard of excellence for engineers and managers. Across the world, innovators are working on the concept of industrial clusters that will follow ecological food webs.

The transition to this kind of new economy will require a combination of "reinvention, prudence and restraint," says Sachs. None of these qualities show up on supply and demand curves or other conventional economic charts. Yet all these qualities are inherent in most societies and have always played a role in pre- modern market transactions which were embedded in cultural and social relations.

The benchmark of this process of trasformation was perhaps provided by the 19th-century American writer Henry David Thoreau, whose ideas and actions on civil disobedience later inspired Mahatma Gandhi. A man is rich, Thoreau wrote, directly in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let go.

RAJNI BAKSHI

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