Organic trade: food, money, and global economic democracy
Summary; Organic trade.
Summary
This was a keynote address given at the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM)’s conference, Mainstreaming Organic Trade: New Frontiers, Opportunities and Responsibilities, Bangkok, November 2003. The participants were mainly drawn from Japan, Thailand, Germany and New York State. The recent World Trade Organization COP27 conference in Cancun reminded me of papers I wrote soon after 2000.
Organic trade?
I have come here to learn about organic trade; to meet some of the people who are making this movement happen; and to share with you some of the general ideas I have about making a better world. My talk is in three parts. I begin with some reflections on what organic trade might mean. This expression appears to contain a contradiction, in that 'organic' implies 'natural', and trade entails buying and selling with money which many people think of as extremely unnatural. An attempt to reconcile opposites was built into the project from the beginning.
This will be my main theme: the need to combine 'natural economy' with the market, the rural and the urban, production and consumption, global and local, money and democracy. The subject of the second part is food’s centrality in any serious attempt to redress the political economy of our unequal world. Third, I will look at some options for building local economic democracy, focusing on community exchange circuits using currency issued by the people themselves. Finally, I ask if these have potential relevance for international trade.
Humanity is trapped between our past as cultivators of the land and an urban machine revolution that is just two centuries old. The current system of making money with money—called 'capitalism', especially when we want to disparage it—is itself feudalism in drag, for the owners still extract surpluses from unfree workers. For 5,000 years, Eurasia was dominated by agrarian civilizations whose elites ruled rural masses from urban enclaves and country mansions. All the main variants of such civilizations—Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, Rome, Islam, medieval Europe, Russia, China, Ottoman—conceived of money and markets as potentially disruptive of a system based on property in land and the military force needed to keep it. Around 1800, less than 3% of the world’s population lived in cities and the rest worked the land. All the energy came from plants and animals, or from human beings fed by plants and animals. Society’s foundation was food production, and its engine was agriculture. Water-borne trade was essential to agrarian civilization and this spawned powerful maritime city-states. The military landlords abominated trade and sought to extinguish its social power whenever it became a threat.
For a millennium BCE, property in land (“aristocracy”) slugged it out with property in money (“democracy”). When the Macedonian cavalry overran Athens and Rome defeated Carthage, the western world became safe for the landed aristocracy until the Renaissance and Reformation. Aristotle was Alexander the Great’s tutor; he invented the word 'economy' to express the intellectual ascendancy of the military agrarian complex. He located economic order in 'household management' (oikonomia), by which he meant the drive to self-sufficiency of Great Houses in the countryside, with their slaves, livestock, granaries, vineyards, olive groves and extensive views. He identified trade with profit-making, an individualistic anti-social attitude which rulers should keep at the margins of society proper, never allowing it to undermine the “natural order”.
For 1500 years, Aristotle was the favorite philosopher of landed power and the church. His followers, medieval scholastics such as Thomas Aquinas, elaborated a theory of 'natural economy' whereby, according to God's plan, the bulk of people labored in agriculture to put food on the table. Even in early nineteenth century Britain, Jane Austen could use the word 'economist' to refer to the lady of the house’s control of the servants.
To keep landed property safe from contamination by trade, money and markets were left to be run by despised ethnic minorities, like the Jews in medieval Europe or the Chinese in colonial Asia; these were excluded from land ownership and political influence. Yet monarchical courts found themselves indebted to the merchants and bankers who paid for their wars and luxuries. According to a German proverb, "City air makes you free" and in time Europe's urban economy—commerce, the middle class, civil society, the mercantile system, bourgeoisie or early capitalism—began to assert itself against the political power of landed property.
They launched democratic revolutions; found in ‘political economy’ intellectual justification for giving the capital and the market priority over rent and agriculture; and they played what looked like the winning card, the industrial revolution. But machine production centralized the economy in rapidly growing cities whose workers’ combinations and criminal gangs now posed another kind of political threat. The capitalists therefore jumped into bed with their traditional enemies, the landed aristocracy. Between them they gave us the social form we all live by today—national capitalism, uniting the old regime's main instrument of rule with big money's control of commerce and finance.
This historical compromise needed an ideology, and it found one in nationalism. ‘Nature’, ‘native’ and ‘nation’ are all from the same Latin root for ‘birth’. With the French revolution spawning popular insurrections and British machine industry destroying traditional crafts everywhere, there was widespread support for keeping change in check, by returning in spirit to an idealized version of the rural way of life. A hybrid entity, the nation-state provided a vehicle for this social and cultural reaction. Urban intellectuals located the nation's soul in the timeless customs of a peasantry living close to nature; and they harnessed that soul to the demand for a state capable of expressing the cultural unity of a people living together in their own territory.[1]
If the pace of modern change is too great or seems to come from outside, retreat into national insularity stops the world for a while, allowing for the possibility of rejoining it on better terms later. In the twentieth century, thanks to two world wars and an anti-colonial revolution, global society became a system of nation-states. But transnational forces of various kinds, not least the rising tide of money flows, eroded national self-sufficiency. As a result, the world is now split into three camps: those who would shore up the nation-state to resist globalization; advocates of regional federations like the European Union; and the globalizers, from transnational corporations and the World Bank to the World Social Forum.
I first thought that 'organic' was Greek for the Latin 'natural'—certainly the French equivalent biologique is just that. On closer inspection, however, it turns out not to be a synonym for 'natural', although it shares the cultural baggage associated with the 'nation'. The idea of an 'organ' is more interesting than just the birth of life or genetics. It is an instrument, a way of getting something done.[2] Its prime connotation is 'work', as in 'energy'. From there it is a part that does a particular job to keep the whole body going. And this is the prime referent of 'organic'—affecting the organs of the body. But because of the rise of organic agriculture, it now also means “free from synthetic fertilizers, pesticides or hormone injections” and excludes “genetically modified organisms” (GMOs). The word's etymology reflects its metaphoric extensions—simple, healthy, close to nature; having the properties of living organisms; interconnected; constituting an integral part of a whole, fundamental. 'Organic' belongs to the same family as ‘organize’—to put together in an orderly, functional, structured whole.
One thing for sure, money and markets as presently constituted do not lend order to the world in this organic sense. Indeed, many feel that the world is running out of control, that we are exposed to ungovernable risks.[3] It is reasonable that such feelings should find expression in a concern about our food. But we should not forget that organic agriculture fills a niche in human culture what the %nation-state once did and still does—a desire, conscious or not, to anchor a runaway world in the timeless values of a simpler life.
The big question is where to channel the political effort to bring such a condition about. We have seen that the economy was once located in the house and then in the city, before national monopolies became normal for a time. Humanity is now caught between the declining ability of nation-states to control their economies and a world market for which institutions capable of administering social justice in the interests of all participants simply do not exist. No wonder that, faced with their own economic vulnerability and escalating inequality everywhere, many people turn inwards to the possibility of restoring a measure of local control over their lives.
Agriculture is a contradictory basis for such a move in that, ever since its invention 10,000 years ago, it has been founded on substituting human labor for what animals and plants did by themselves before. Agriculture is best thought of as a system of food production in which the growth of plants and animals gradually came within the control of human beings. Human work is progressively substituted for natural processes of reproduction. By settling down in one place, human communities were obliged to protect animals and plants from threats to their well-being. The resulting pattern of irrigation, pest-scaring, breeding and weeding involved an intensification of labor inputs with diminishing returns. That is, people had to work harder for proportionately less reward. This logic of development through intensification of labor led to society becoming polarized between the powerful beneficiaries of this system and those who did most of the work, thereby reducing the bulk of the population to a life of coercion and servitude.
The machine revolution introduced the possibility of releasing us all from the drudgery of village life, even if its immediate consequence was to make matters even worse for many workers. At the same time, it put money men in charge of that increased productivity at the expense of the rest of us. Resort to mechanical converters of inanimate energy did, however, reverse the direction of the agricultural regime. Now human beings can produce much more for less work; more abundant means have been generated with less back-breaking toil.
It is unsurprising that peasants worldwide have voted with their feet to join the life of greater freedom afforded by machine production in cities. At first, mechanization was almost exclusively an urban phenomenon and slow to penetrate agriculture. Only since the Second World War have machines reorganized agriculture in some parts of the world. The pursuit of human freedom and the idea that society is set on a course of material improvement are reinforced by the substitution of inanimate energy sources for human labor.
The last half-century has seen radical improvement in the global food supply, largely by adding machines to long-established human intervention in natural processes. Machines today run on oil, but this was not good enough for the petro-chemical industry. The Green Revolution was launched by Rockefeller-funded research into ways of making Third World agriculture dependent on oil as fertilizer. Now the biochemical corporations are patenting GMOs to tie farmers to their brand of pesticide and seeds. The ecological threat of a hi-tech agriculture driven by financial considerations, with risks and abuses that are well-advertised. Aggressive privatization by the leading corporations removes a key plank of the cultural commons, our right to borrow the means of growing food from each other. That many still go hungry, despite the increased supply of food, is the result of the unequal distribution, not the machine revolution in agriculture as such. Somehow the benefits of mechanization must be diffused without the abuses.
An appeal to nature was already incorporated into nationalism in reaction to the speed of modern change. The current wave of resistance to GMOs has echoes of this rejection of machine civilization. Nevertheless, organic agriculture can legitimately aim to reduce the excesses and risks of hi-tech production. As the existence of this federation shows, it may also support a grassroots democratic politics that is 'organic' in trying to integrate humanity’s common livelihood at different levels of society from the local to the global, thereby extending the goal of self-sufficiency above and below the nation-state.
Notes
[1] Martin Thom, Republicans, Nations and Tribes (1995).
[2] Most of my definitions are taken from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, third edition, 1996, Houghton Mifflin, New York. It is the most recent English dictionary (1970). The world uses American English, of course, not the Victorian version mummified in the Oxford English Dictionary (1880s).
[3] Edmund Leach, A Runaway World?