{"id":1227,"date":"2006-01-06T08:13:04","date_gmt":"2006-01-06T12:13:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/wordpress\/?p=1227"},"modified":"2006-01-06T08:13:04","modified_gmt":"2006-01-06T12:13:04","slug":"you-have-the-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=1227","title":{"rendered":"“You Have the Power”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Commenting to this post<\/a> about the link between the alarming rate of farmer suicides in India to globalisation policies, Kevin Carson praised Frances Moore Lappe and her book Food First<\/em> saying, “She does a great job critiquing myths like “ADM\/Monsanto\/Cargill feeds the world,” and that the Green Revolution is the only alternative to starvation.”<\/p>\n

As it happens Moore Lappe has a piece<\/a> in the current issue of The Nation<\/em> informing readers that poverty and hunger have risen even in the United States as three decades of empty, bureaucratic promises and initiatives such as Make Poverty History, “fail to challenge the very frame blinding us to solutions.”<\/p>\n

She compares the depressing statistics and human suffering produced by these statist policies to real gains achieved through what she calls a “living democracy”, whereby citisens recognise the problems that come from this top-down, bandaid approach and move “beyond protest to problem solving, risking their lives to remove the power of wealth from the political system and to infuse the power of democratic values into the economic system.”<\/p>\n

With a living democracy frame for understanding hunger, it’s possible to grasp at least some of the reasons Bangladesh is making faster progress in saving lives than is India, despite its greater hunger and deeper income poverty: Citizen action networks have spread to almost 80 percent of Bangladesh’s villages, providing basic health training, schools and capital. Through the two biggest, the largely self-financing Grameen Bank and the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, peer-backed micro-loans have gone to about 9 million poor people, mainly women, enabling many to birth their own village-level enterprises. Grameen reports that more than half of the families of its borrowers–the vast majority of the bank’s owners–have “crossed the poverty line.” Assuming BRAC’s comparable impact, these rural Bangladeshis’ self-directed enterprises have freed more than twice as many from poverty as the number employed in export garment factories. There, insecure jobs offer wages of 8 to 18 cents an hour. Yet the dominant frame doesn’t differentiate these two paths; to Sachs, both place Bangladeshis on the economic “ladder.” <\/p>\n

In India hunger is being uprooted as well, but the real story isn’t high-tech progress, so far creating only a million jobs in a country of a billion. The most meaningful breakthroughs are less flashy. In Kerala hunger is being conquered by participatory approaches that have achieved fairer access to land and education. And the People’s Campaign of Decentralized Planning has trained hundreds of thousands of Kerala’s citizens in budgeting and planning to create rural improvements. Throughout India women have built a network of cooperative dairies that in only three decades has lifted the incomes of more than 11 million households and benefited more than 100 million. <\/p>\n

Similarly, Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement has secured legal title to more than 20 million acres for a quarter of a million formerly landless families, creating self-governing communities whose enterprises and farms serve community-sustaining values. Infant mortality has fallen, and wages for members are many times higher than their former day-labor pay.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To purchase Moore Lappe’s books, including the excellent Diet for a Small Planet<\/em> and her latest Democracy’s Edge<\/em>, go here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Commenting to this post about the link between the alarming rate of farmer suicides in India to globalisation policies, Kevin Carson praised Frances Moore Lappe and her book Food First saying, “She does a great job critiquing myths like “ADM\/Monsanto\/Cargill … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdXTf-jN","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1227\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}