What next?

New Internationalist, June, 2007

At the turn of the new millennium a group of activists and scholars came together at the Dag Hammarskjold Centre in Sweden. They began by asking: what is a likely scenario for the next 30 years--and what are the alternatives?

To deal with the complexity and unpredictability of the task, the artifice of a fictional account was adopted. It was developed in discussions--face-to-face, by email and conference calls--in a four-year process that took them from Mexico City (Mexico) to Dehra Dun (India), Porto Alegre (Brazil), Miami (US), Ottawa (Canada) and Uppsala (Sweden).

They concluded that if the world continues along the current 'trendline' then a bleak future, increasingly dominated by technological and corporate power, is an unnervingly reasonable prospect.

How might things unfold differently? What are the possibilities for social change and creative organizing that could really make a difference? Three alternative 'takes' were developed, avoiding recourse to miracle solutions.

What follows is an edited extract, giving a flavour of one of them.

The Report was written by Pat Mooney for the ETC Group and the What Next Project, and is published by the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation.

Resilience in the High Andes

2010 -- Rosario, Bolivia

Marta watched him coming, almost from the bottom of the mountain. With his broad white cap protecting his pink skin, and his ridiculous safari jacket with its countless pockets, he stood head and shoulders above the peasants around him. His walk was laboured. He wasn't used to the altitude and was uncomfortable on the rocky terrain. Another reporter, the woman wondered--eyeing the camera slung across his chest--or maybe an anthropologist?

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

'Good day,' the man said in awkward Aymara, 'I'm looking for Ignacio Flores. Maybe he's your husband? I'm a photographer and ... sort of ... an agronomist.'

Marta, cross-legged on the stony earth in front of her home, inspecting potatoes spread out on her ample skirts, couldn't help warming to the man. As bad as his Aymara was, it was at least the equal of most of the provincial bureaucrats. He fiddled instinctively with his camera, but decided to leave it in its case.

'I am his wife,' she replied.

The man, who said he was a Dutch photo-journalist by the name of Jaap Vissar, set himself gingerly on the proffered stoop and attempted to engage in conversation. His wife was Bolivian, he said. They were in La Paz visiting her family when he had noticed the bright purple quinoa variety (see box) in the market and brought it to his wife's sister for dinner. The seeds were spectacular. Never had he tasted a better variety. His relatives served it up in salads and soups and mixed it with potatoes.

'I asked around,' he said to Marta, 'and people told me this variety only comes from here. The people down there said to talk to you folks about how your husband found it.'

'Found?' she replied, offended by the notion that her community might somehow have tripped over it. 'First, it's not a single, uniform variety: it's a breeding line we are constantly adapting. Second, it's far from a discovery. Third, I'm in charge of the breeding around here--whether it's kids or quinoa.'

She told Vissar about the seed fairs, from Cuzco to La Paz; the quinoa exchanges, so far away she only knew that she would have to leave her beloved mountains and even cross oceans.

Her own role was as convener of the women's quinoa assessment committee. It had taken them years of intricate breeding to put together the genetic combination. She knew that the purple quinoa had genes not just from the Andes but from as far away as Ethiopia and Tibet. The result was a hardy, succulent and protein-rich variety that women used for bringing down their milk after childbirth and as a weaning food later on. Just as important, it flourished under the increasingly adverse soil and climate conditions of the High Plain--the Altiplano.

Vissar was incredulous. 'Are you part of a church project?' he asked.

'You mean, is there some kind of NGO involved?' She explained how her family, as members of the regional municipality and part of the farmers' trade union, was linked to the entire Aymara nation, connected through Via Campesina (see box on p.24) to other farmer-researchers around the world. These were not, she emphasized, NGOs.

She answered his persistent questions. Yes, most of the quinoa breeders were women, but that was not true of all crops. No, they did not go through government-sponsored research trials because these were hostage to the transnational companies that only wanted quinoa for the upscale breakfast-cereal market in Germany or Japan--the companies generally dictated regulations to governments. Yes, that meant the farmers did sidestep phytosanitary controls, not because they wanted to but because the risks of disease were fewer than the likelihood of contamination by genetically modified organisms that came with the global corporate marketplace. (Ten years ago some of these organisms had shown up on the Altiplano and it had taken her committee the better part of a decade to eradicate the contamination.) Yes, that did mean Wal-Mart would probably never buy from them. But no, their goal was not to sell to Wal-Mart but to feed their families, barter with their neighbours and trade with the towns around them.