A new way of living

Eco-villages have featured prominently in two of the more influential publications on their development: The Worldwatch Institute’s State of the World Report 2008 and the United Kingdom’s The Ecologist July 2008 (see here). Ecological sustainability is necessary for human survival and small scale eco-communities can have a lot of appeal. However, the depoliticisation of any community acts to hide knowledge and cover abuse. All communities must be accountable to the society at large.

Eco-Towns

In Britain the notion of the eco-village has grown into the eco-town. These towns are minus the spiritual component. Nonetheless, the plan to build eco-towns has seen mass demonstrations outside the British Parliament. They have been called “rural ghettos of the future”. The focus here is on the disruption of an already quiet rural lifestyle by developers. Britain’s Telegraph described it as a protest of “rich peasants”.

Eco-towns and eco-communities have also drawn criticism from a number of economists and social theorists who warn against communal autarkies [closed authoritarian and totalitarian groups]. Small eco-communities are also eligible for government funding. There are already many small farmers gaining government subsidies while the rest of the world’s population are left to starve.

Reforming agriculture to solve the global food crisis

London’s Financial Times writer, Martin Wolf, sees the perceived global food crisis as an opportunity to reform agriculture into small self-sustaining holdings. Paul Collier, who wrote a reply on Wolf’s weblog, has noted that this would impact greatly on those countries that are dependent on imported food, especially Africa. For Africans the eco-village model is a catastrophe. Collier suggests the most effective way to increase food supply is by “replicating the Brazilian model of large technologically sophisticated agro-companies supplying the world market”. Collier writes:

Unfortunately, large scale commercial agriculture is unromantic. We laud the production style of the peasant: environmentally sustainable and human in scale … In Europe and Japan huge public resources have been devoted to propping up small farms. The best that can be said for these policies is we can afford them. In Africa which cannot afford them, development agencies have oriented their entire efforts on agricultural development to peasant style production. As a result Africa has less large scale commercial agriculture than it had fifty years ago.

We need to ask, is there really a food crisis? Last year the Western world dumped millions of tons of food because local producers could not compete with imported produce. It would appear then that the problem of a perceived global food shortage is not one of production but one of distribution.

To this end, Paul Collier concludes his lengthy post by saying “we need stronger, fairer globalisation, not less of it”. Further, while most would agree that we need to be more environmentally conscious with each person doing their best to improve ecology and reduce waste, we also need to make governments and businesses more accountable not withdraw from the system so they can abrogate their responsibilities. We can care for each other in whatever system we choose to live in but it seems logical that we can care for the world’s poor much better in an open society.