Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [33]
We try to make “lessons, not models” a basic theme of our work. Yet some people attack Food First for offering idealized “models” of alternatives. From these reactions we have learned that our readers—especially North Americans—are not accustomed to thinking in terms of lessons from abroad. Thus, when we praise some feature of another society, we are sometimes accused of suggesting wholesale adoption of their entire system. Wherever possible we seek to break out of this bind by speaking from actual experience and pointing out both the positive and negative lessons to be learned from other societies.
All this explains why I went to Africa in the summer of 1978 with my colleague Adele Negro. I wanted to see what it was like to be in countries where the land is not owned by a small elite and where the government is not merely the brutal defender of the power of this elite minority. We visited two neighboring African countries whose governments claim to be progressive—Tanzania and Mozambique. At the time, Tanzania was in its eighteenth year of independence from British colonial rule, Mozambique its fourth from Portuguese colonial rule.
In neither country did I see the degradation of the majority of people that I had witnessed in northwestern Mexico, the Philippines, or Guatemala. While most Mozambicans and Tanzanians are poor, I did not see decadent wealth flaunted in the face of miserable poverty. I did not see widespread starvation in the midst of abundance.
In Mozambique we visited a cooperative farm. Begun by 33 families in 1976, it included 300 families by the time of our visit. We talked all afternoon to one of its founders. In spite of setbacks of every imaginable kind—flooding, late arrival of seeds, transportation breakdowns, and theft—the cooperative was thriving. The cooperative could not have been organized without the support of the government, which provided the initial loans. Although it was one of a handful of successful cooperatives at that time, it was the kind of organization for development that the government hoped would flourish.
As I talked with the cooperative’s founder, I could not help but flash back in my own mind to the banana plantation in the Philippines. In the Mozambican cooperative, every member had one vote. Those who worked the land decided what to grow and what to do with the profits. On the banana plantation the workers were not only powerless but lived in fear of the power of the owner, backed up by the government’s military.
It was dusk by the time my host let us leave. Even though I was exhausted and eager to begin the long drive back to the city, he wouldn’t let us go until he had taken us out into the well-tended, irrigated fields. For years he had fought against Portuguese colonialism, but he seemed prouder of these budding crops than of the victory over colonialism. For him, the struggle to build a new society was an even greater challenge. And I think he is right: societies formed and deformed over hundreds of years of colonial rule will not emerge within a few years as just societies. Patience is a necessity.
My African trip also showed me the inadequacy of the labels used to describe the two dominant theories of economic organization—capitalism and socialism. Americans are taught to associate capitalism with democracy and socialism with totalitarianism. Yet in the world today we see extremely antidemocratic economic structures in both “socialist” and “capitalist” systems. And we can see democratic elements in both systems, too. In the Philippines, a “capitalist” country, I saw few signs of democratic participation; in “socialist” Mozambique I saw the beginnings of democratic participation from the village up. Every member of the production cooperative had a vote; moreover, everyone could participate in choosing representatives for the country’s decision-making