What and by which measurements are we measuring?
What are we measuring? What are we not measuring? Is the productivity paradigm healthy? Is it progress to level up?
Robert Paarlberg states that in Stage One countries “without increased access to markets, improved technologies, health services, and schooling, productivity will remain low” (Paarlberg, 2011).
To start with the last piece of that concept, lower productivity levels may allow other valuable factors contributing to the health of the community, which may be at risk when productivity is high.
In my work with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) installing a potable water system in Mexico’s high Sierra for a tiny, off-the-grid village called Bermudez (which was not yet on the map), community cohesion and lifestyle were valued equally to productivity; the villagers had time to drink coffee with neighbors, to ride up to the plateau across streams and through the woods to trade goods, to listen or dance with friends to ballads played on the porch. People laughed and sung and danced and moved their bodies in nature a lot. Are we measuring happiness? Physical activity? Positive social interaction? Immersion in nature?
[I’d like to note here that the Quakers wait until the community asks for their help and takes full responsibility for deciding the course of action.]
The productivity paradigm is at odds with the health of the community. Access to markets, better roads and transportation, is a two-way street— excuse the pun. It would most likely lead to foreign investment and market integration, which is shown to correlate to unhealthy food consumption (Stuckler, McKee, Ebrahim, Basu, 2012). In Bermudez, there were no soft drinks and no packaged food.
Improved technologies are costly to buy and to service creating dependency on external markets, most likely some foreign. This dependency pressures remote communities to move away from trade within the community and neighboring communities, and to create cash flow to pay for technological goods and services by increasing productivity, specifically of commodities in demand from external consumers. Is this paradigm healthy for the community?
Finally, what is valuable schooling for each community? In Helena Norberg Hodge’s work detailed in her book Ancient Futures (2009), for centuries children in Ladakh learned from their families and elders how to live sustainably in the harsh climate of northeastern India. When taken from their homes and land to go to “school”, they studied foreign subjects and concepts that had little to do with their lives. Additionally, they were exposed to foreign marketing that extolled Aryan physical qualities and western values and lifestyles and devalued local ones, and were separated from their families and the meaningful work and healthy food they had in their communities, tearing the fabric of their ancient and successful community system. Is that progress?
As I have no right to insist that remote communities are better if unexposed to foreign meddling, neither do others have the right to assume that productivity, “access to markets”, and “schooling” is better for health of these the communities. Self-determination may be the better answer.
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And we need to reconsider our arrogance towards people who labor hard on their "inefficient" farms. They are moving their bodies, creating community, talking to each other, outdoors, in nature while highly capitalized farms rely on expensive machinery, reduce human movement to the degree where farmers who were once lithe and fit are now combating obesity and depression. No doubt, the small farm life and growing carrots in rocky soil is taxing. I do it. But all the small farmers I know in Vermont who’ve been in the business for at least half a lifetime—and I know and have interviewed plenty—wouldn't give up their life if offered a million bucks and a starter castle. Well, maybe some.
References
Paarlberg, Robert. (2011). Governing Dietary Transition: Linking Agriculture, Nutrition and Health.
Stuckler, David; McKee, Martin; Ebrahim, Shah; Basu, Sanjay. (2012). Manufacturing Epidemics: The Role of Global Producers in Increased Consumption of Unhealthy Commodities Including Processed Food, Alcohol, and Tobacco.
Hodge, Helena Norberg. (2009). Ancient Futures: Lessons from Ladakh for a Globalizing World. Sierra Club Books.