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Local food, global benefit: Helena Norberg-Hodge critiques the practice of transporting food across the world and back again.

Article Excerpt
It is very inspiring to see the changes that have been happening in Australia since I first started coming here, about seven years ago. I was giving talks about local food systems, and starting farmers markets, and there was very little happening in Australia at that time. So it's a great source of hope and optimism for us to reflect on the real progress that has happened in these last seven years.

I am finding that today that there is a tendency for most people to feel very overwhelmed and rather depressed by world events. I, on the other hand, was much more worried ten years ago than I am now. I had been thrown into unusual circumstances by going to a remote part of Tibet called Ladak that had not been affected by either colonialism or by the modern development colonialism. And so I had an unusual opportunity to see what cultures and economies look like when people are free and independent to develop according to their own needs and their own values. I have also had the opportunity to witness--now over three decades--the changes wrought by the global economy.

So ten years ago I was coming back to the West every year, warning about the violence and the poverty and the environmental destruction wrought by the global economy. At that time I was often told I was too dramatic--it wasn't that bad; and anyway business and government were all getting involved in sustainability, so why was I so worried. I was trying to say that what was actually being implemented was a very superficial version of sustainable development. In fact I had witnessed that as governments and big business agencies used more and more of the language of community, cultural diversity, sustainability, conservation and concern about the environment, they were actually implementing policies that were larger-scale and more destructive.

I had a very clear experience of this in that my book Ancient Future was subsidised by the Swedish and Danish governments. There were full-colour pictures and they promoted it with me giving talks all over Scandinavia. They were also funding the initiatives that we had started in Ladak which, among others things, included renewable energy as an alternative to fossil fuel. We were demonstrating that by using solar and water and wind, you could actually raise the standard of living very significantly without the same social and ecological costs that fossil fuels, nuclear power and large dams--large centralised energy developments--create. These were also funded by Scandinavian aid agencies. This was in the 1970s and 80s. And I then witnessed how those agencies stopped funding that type of work;...

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