The mainstream media — television, print and digital — routinely cycle through the litany of crises gripping the world. One week they’ll tell us about the latest climate disaster. The war in Ukraine may be the next focus. A few days later, COVID-19’s latest variant might be trending. The topic of the day is then picked up and described in isolation, before being discarded.
These crises are, in reality, something we don’t hear. Connected. These are signs of a global economic system which is not only driving up pollution and resource use, but is also squeezing people’s finances, undermining democracy and concentrating wealth and power in unaccountable global corporations. This is causing conflict and violence to escalate.
Recent events have shown how dependent we are on the global economy. The cost of living is rising because long-distance supply chain failures are occurring around the globe.
This is especially true when it comes down to our most basic need: food. Americans pay more at the grocery store. 10 percent moreFood prices are higher than they were a year ago. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reportsMarch saw record food prices worldwide. The price of chicken in the United Kingdom is set to soon matchThe price of beef
Why? Largely because economic globalization — which, in short, involves using public monies and government regulations to favor exports over self-reliance — has ensured that we source our food from ever farther away, via ever longer, more complicated supply chains.
The whole world is affected when China shuts down as a result of COVID. Global supplies of grain, vegetable oil, and chicken feed are all at risk when Russia invades Ukraine. Food prices rise when energy prices rise because industrial agriculture is built on fossil fuel-based fertilizers, and fuel-guzzling transportation. When synthetic fertilizer production facilities shut down because the price of fracked gas is too high, chemical-dependent farmers’ yields fall.
And when fear grows, they snowball: Countries all over the globe have halted food exportsFears of food insecurity
This would not be nearly so big a problem if the entire globe hadn’t been made so dependent on global trade for basic needs. Consider the fact that global trade volume now amounts to approximately 40 times greaterIt is much more so than it was back in 1950. As governments — at the behest of global corporations — continue to subsidize and regulate in favor of global trade, people’s lives and livelihoods are at the mercy of middlemen operating transnationally.
Thanks to globalization, food produced regionally or nationally is more likely to be exported than to feed the local population: They’ll eat food imported from elsewhere. The situation is so absurd that countries now import food regularly ExportAlmost identical quantities of the same products are available. The United States imported 1.53 millions tons of beef in 2019, for example. even as it exported1.51 million tonnes 2020 Germany was the world’s top importer of butter ($851 million), and also the fourth-largest exporter of butter ($653 million). France was both an importer and exporter of butter in that year. imported exportedAbout $1 billion worth beef. These are not outliers but typical examples of “redundant” trade in the global economy.
The list of potential and actual hiccups that could occur along fragile supply chains is almost endless. Recent examples include pandemic lockdowns and a blockage of the Suez Canal. We also experienced avian flu outbreaks. Last week, the Royal Bank of Canada reported one-fifth of all global container ship fleets were stuck in congestion.
These are just a few of the warning signs that worse is yet to come. The global food system itself — based as it is on chemical-intensive industrial monocultures for export — has decimated seed and livestock diversity, and is rapidly eroding topsoil and depleting fertility in our most important food bowls. This food system is also extremely unhealthy. responsible for up to 57 percentof all greenhouse gas emission, and widespread food system collapse are very possible.
Can we assume that these and other real-world effects will finally lead to a rethinking of “comparative advantage” — a cornerstone of the modern economy? The 1817 theory — an article of faith among supporters of “free trade” and globalization — asserts that if countries specialize in what they produce best and trade for every other need, all countries will be better off.
While the theory of comparative advantage may have been possible 200 years ago in some cases, global supply lines are no good in this fragile world. During the pandemic, many countries would have been much better off if they relied more heavily on local production rather than on specialized production for global commerce.
Despite its increasing costs, both right and left-leaning politicians have ignored the growing importance of economic globalization. Their policies have enabled banks and multinational corporations to amass immense wealth: More than $800 billion was generated by them in 2000. half of the largest economies in the world were corporations. Their wealth allows them the freedom to influence the democratic process through campaign contributions and huge lobbying efforts. Transnational corporations can even be allowed to trade in accordances to sue governmentsIf you are concerned about the environment or social aspects of laws or regulations, In the way of corporate profits. Globalization has, in short, reshaped society to benefit unaccountable, globally mobile corporations.
For ManyThis is a bad idea for obvious reasons. This is why governments have been unable to act on climate change. Profit-driven media are becoming more polarizing, incendiary because of it. Global giants are driving local businesses to bankruptcy and causing communities to be disintegrated and merged into larger, more resource-intensive megacities. It is why billionaires continue to get richer and richer, even as the majority of the world’s people must run ever harder and faster just to stay in place. As resources are less available, conflicts within and between countries will increase.
These seemingly disparate issues are interconnected by their common roots in the globalizing economy system. Perhaps counterintuitively, this is a reason to be hopeful: If we focus on the root cause, it will be easier to take steps to address all of them simultaneously.
And although we haven’t heard much about it in the media, initiatives across the world are proving the multiple benefits of shifting away from dependence on global corporations toward place-based, community businesses. These projects can be seen on every continent and constitute a movement toward what can best be described as “localization.”
Ordinary people are responding the fear of food insecurity by increasing localized production and other basic needs. The COVID pandemic began in Melbourne, Australia. Small farmers were able to produce food from Mexico City to Melbourne. ramp up productionIt took only weeks to meet a doubled demand. This shows that local businesses and farms are not only more resilient to global crises, but also more responsive to the needs in their communities. We have heard from a number of sources that these farmers didn’t raise their prices, even though they ended up working harder and employing more people.
Similarly, people are organizing into informal community networks to help each other deal with the havoc of COVID lockdowns and — increasingly — climate shocks. These informal groups have been proven to be far more effective than centralized bureaucracies in many cases. They also galvanize community solidarity and lift people’s spirits in ways that simply cannot be achieved by large-scale organizations.
Because they’re happening under the radar, no figures will do justice to the proliferation of such informal groups. It is striking that, in the U.K. more than 4,000Only 2020 saw the creation of mutual aid groups.
The community mutual aid networks are just one aspect of a larger movement for localization. Although they are often overlooked in mainstream media, concerns about climate change, corporate rule, and mental health are generating a multitude of localizing responses.
Every continent is witnessing a rise in the popularity of local food movements. While the number of farmers’ markets in the U.S. has quadrupled over the last 20 yearsThe largest social movements worldwide are those that fight for local food sovereignty. representing more than 200 million small farmers.
Local food systems — which are based on small-scale, biodiverse production — not only dramatically cut greenhouse gas emissions but actually regenerate the land. Studies by the Rodale InstituteThese techniques could be used on all cultivated and uncultivated land to rebuild soils and sequester more than 100 percent of CO2 emissions. This doesn’t mean a reduction in production: Small farms produce up to five times moreThere is more food per acre in monocultures than in industrial agriculture.
What’s more, reorganizing our economies around local interdependence instead of global dependence would significantly increase community prosperity. A U.K. study in 2021 shows that local food outlets can create new jobs. three times as many jobsThe same amount of food is sold at supermarket chains.
Localization is more than just a good thing for the food system. A case study on independent versus chain bookstores found that money spent locally left three times as much money in the local economy as money spent at a chain store — resulting in three times the job impacts, three times the income effects, and three times the tax proceeds to local government. Another studyIt was found that every square foot of retail space occupied locally by a business generates 70% more local economic impact than a store chain.
Regional government support for local, craft-based economics in certain parts of rural India has been maintained. increased earnings by more than 60 percentfor hundreds of thousands of people while slowing the harmful trend towards hyper-urbanization.
Stronger local economies are important for their economic and employment benefits, as well as for the close contact with nature and community they offer. A Norwegian study showed that simple acts of community gardening can be beneficial. more than twice as effectiveTreatment of depression with chemical antidepressants. Participants in such programs have overcome devastating mental illnesses and have described their experiences movingly (“as the garden began to bloom, we began to bloom”).
We can identify systemic solutions by understanding the root causes of global crises. What’s more, we can also see that these solutions are already being pioneered by ordinary people all across the globe, acting with little if any government support but on goodwill and common sense.
This June, under the banner of “World Localization Day,” numerous projects and networks working toward economic localization are coming together to make their global movement known. The campaign demonstrates that localization is not about isolationism — in fact, cross-cultural collaboration is an integral part of the movement. World Localization Day is also an attempt at breaking the corporate stranglehold of information. While the mainstream media excels in highlighting the disparate symptoms and causes of systemic breakdown it fails to connect them or identify the multitude of real-life, systemic alternatives.
The next time the daily news makes you painfully aware of the many crises we face, remind yourself that we don’t have to fight each problem on its own. Instead, we can expose their root causes and work together in order to reduce our dependence on the global system and re-establish local interdependence. We can join forces to solve multiple crises at the same time.
