By Hannes Lorenzen, Brussels
These days we are being urged not to save money but to consume more in order to save our crisis-ridden economy. Some states even pay us to take our old car off the road and buy a new one. We are supposed to help the banks back into business and save ourselves more recession and unemployment.
The Wall Street Journal recently stated that also the Chinese and Indians are a problem, because they save far too much. Their more than 2 billion consumers together privately spend less than 80 million Germans do. According to the Journal, that must change, otherwise our European economy will not get going again.
We cannot carry on like this. With more of the same we will not solve the global economic crisis, let alone climate change, or the conflicts simmering everywhere over oil, water or food. Mind the displacement reflex: We can’t do much on our own.
We know better than that. The financial and economic crisis is immense. Our societies are shaken more than we are yet aware of. We can grasp rapid climate change can and dwindling biodiversity in multiple pictures and figures– but they do not move us. We live as if we had another world in the back of the car, as Jane Fonda once said. We need two more worlds if the Chinese and Indians consumed like we do.
We know that this wasteful lifestyle and the runaway collective indebtedness of our society is an intolerable burden for all future generations and an outrageous injustice against the billions of people who live in poverty and hunger. We know that we are a bad example to those who are slowly working their way out of their colonial past and economic dependence upon us: China, India, Brazil, South Africa.
All appeals to developing countries to go easy on greenhouse gases, avoid meat consumption and the use of private cars are pure cynicism as long as we ourselves believe that more consumption and more public dept could save our economy and our future. In fact, the basic needs of sufficient and healthy food, enough clean water, clothes and shelter are denied to many billion people on earth, because our economy and our lifestyle draws the minimum needs away from them.
If we asked ourselves what we really need – doing a kind of green feng shui for the economy? Feng shui means ‘concentrating on the essential; not burdening oneself with bad habits; letting stubborn energies flow.’ Finding out what is enough means replacing the growth dogma with the sufficiency principle: creating more common goods like education that empowers people to have access to their basic needs, like food, health – while wasting as little of our natural resources as possible. We must make endangered and limited natural resources and the unfair share between individuals, families, villages, towns and countries more visible for everyone. We must translate sufficiency into tangible language, images and especially into a new lifestyle.
At present, Europe and the United States, with 19% of the world’s population, consume 60% of the available energy resources and 45% of the available food. Around 30% of the food sold in Europe ends up in the rubbish bin on its way from field to plate. We are wasting other people’s lives.
In fact the potential for saving and strategic buying is enormous. The new study by the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, the Environment and Energy entitled ‘Sustainable Germany’ has indicated three directions: consume less, give priority to products with a longer life and reuse things as much as possible, instead of reproducing them. Furthermore, all the climate experts first of all urge a drastic reduction in consumption, and consumer and environmental organisations have produced checklists to help us tackle stubborn habits in our everyday life.
Today we take food sufficiency as an example: Together with civil society organisations our Green-EFA group in the European Parliament organises on 29.April a global videoconference on Food sufficiency, which links 5 regional conferences in the Philippines, West Africa, Brazil, the US and Europe to work on strategies to achieve food sufficiency. We wish to confront the outdated wasteful model of industrialised and export-oriented European agriculture with locally based highly productive, employment creating and environmentally friendly farming and consuming patterns. These are currently being destroyed around the world by unfair trade and false subsidies. We will ask: What is a fair deal based on food sufficiency for all?
In its so-called health check of the Common Agriculture Policy of the EU, the European Commission has recently named the main challenges for global food security in the coming decades: Maintaining biodiversity, sustainable water and energy management and active climate protection. None of these goals must be achieved in order to receive EU subsidies, and export-oriented factory farming is still not questioned at all.
Take an example from Malaysia: Gan and his wife Kazumi farm 5 hectares near the capital, Kuala Lumpur. On this land they grow 70 different kinds of local vegetables, fruit and herbs, – preserving biodiversity. This small patch of earth provides work for 10 people. They sell their organic food directly in the village, but also in the city via organic boxes. Their customers take care of distributing the food among themselves. They offer a broad programme of education for schools and nurseries on farm.
They are each responsible for 0.2 tonnes of greenhouse gases a year. An average European accounts for 11 tonnes, and an American emits some 20 tonnes into the atmosphere each year. According to climate experts, an annual figure of 2 tonnes per capita is acceptable if we want to slow down climate change.
There is no reason to glorify the life of Gan and Kazumi or to smile at them condescendingly. There is reason to learn. They live a decent life, have sufficient food, they do not depend on subsidies, they preserve biodiversity, they employ a lot of people, do not contribute to climate change and practice an excellent water management. Have a look at our global food sufficiency conference. It is streamed at http://www.greens-efa.org/cms/default/rubrik/16/16174.programme@en.htm
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One Response
I liked your article about the Sufficiency Principal.
We are going to put your article under our resources at the Global Sufficiency Network.
We welcome your thoughts and input in our community.
Thanks,
Cyndi