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A Truly Sophisticated Economy Would Pursue More Than One Goal

A Personal Perspective by Beth Sawin
(Originally appeared in Timeline #64 July/August 2002)

I have a young friend who, I think, will never eat another banana without knowing a great deal about its history.

On a trip to Belize, Hannah and other home-schooled teenagers saw monkeys, the rainforest, and Mayan villages. But the memory that seems to stand out the most vividly is of a banana plantation.

The workers at this plantation do not wear protective clothing. When the planes spraying pesticides fly over, the workers take shelter under the nearest banana leaf. "They say the chemicals make their chests hurt," Hannah tells me.

Hannah reports that mothers bathe their babies in the tubs that the bananas are washed in, sponging off the babies with the residue of whatever chemicals make their fathers' chests hurt.

At the store where I shop, organic bananas cost seventy-nine cents per pound. Non-organic bananas are forty cents per pound. Otherwise, the fruits look identical-bright-yellow, cheerful, innocent.

But somewhere between Central America and the U.S. almost the whole story of these bananas has been stripped away. Did the person who picked them earn a fair wage? What chemicals were used? How were they used? All that complexity is reduced to a sticker that says "organic" or "conventional" and a price tag.

If Hannah stood in the produce section and told her story, how many people in my town would bring home their first bunch of organic bananas?

None of us can act on information we do not have. The organic label doesn't guarantee that the pickers were paid enough to feed their children. The conventional label doesn't mean that pesticides were used irresponsibly. And thirty-nine cents per pound doesn't mean anything except thirty-nine cents per pound.

Once I imagine Hannah standing witness in the banana aisle, my imagination takes off. I begin to populate the whole store with providers of missing information.

Beside the cheese case, I place my friends Marsha and Gail, partners in a small cheese-making business. They could explain what you couldn't taste in their cheese. How local farmers are now benefiting from the fair price the cheese makers are paying for milk. How the high pasture where the cows graze turns a brilliant shade of green in early spring. How the milk for this cheese never traveled in a gas-guzzling tractor-trailer truck because the cheese room is next door to the milking parlor.

Their cheese is more expensive than others, but if you could see the farmers, the high pasture, and the lessened greenhouse emissions as a part of their product, you'd begin to understand that they are offering a bargain.

This missing information is so vital because a system that makes decisions based on a single variable can only fulfill a single goal. You wouldn't expect a healthy garden if you only optimized the phosphorous content of your soil. You wouldn't expect a healthy family if you made all choices based on the needs of only one of your two children.

And yet the reigning assumption in our world is that an economy that takes only price into account can still somehow deliver other goals. Under this assumption, if children are in poverty, we must have a "child-poverty crisis." If ecosystems are struggling, we must have an "environmental crisis." But these are not distinct problems. They are symptoms of a single deep crisis-the crisis of an economy operating with insufficient information and a fundamental inability to pursue any goal beyond price.

Whether we are trying to help the polar bears, an estuary, or an impoverished nation, we find ourselves pushing against the full force of an economic system that is designed to seek ways to reduce some price somewhere no matter what the consequences for people and nature. This isn't evil or malevolence. It is just a powerful, informationally-bereft system following its only decision rule single-mindedly.

Instead of exhausting ourselves pushing against such a system, perhaps it is time to redesign it.

Already we have ideas and technologies that we could experiment with. If Fed-Ex can track the exact location of any package anywhere in the world, why can't we know the history of a bunch of bananas? We can handle countless reviews of books and movies without clogging up the entertainment industry, so why can't we have reviews of the social and environmental impacts of wedges of cheese, bottles of wine, and bouquets of flowers? Why can't we estimate the true costs of products and make sure that cost shows up in the final price? Why can't we find ways to reward the efforts of careful stewards and responsible manufacturers?

People will call me na_ve for suggesting such ideas. People will say that it is impossible to consciously design a more intelligent economy.

In response I simply say that we won't know it is impossible until we try. And I ask you to count up all the people who have ever wanted to do the right thing and found it impossible. Impossible because the right thing for land or people doesn't have a sufficient return on investment to satisfy shareholders, because a responsibly produced product cannot be sold for a low enough price to be competitive, or because a consumer can't tell which product was made with the future in mind.

Like water held back by a dam, this frustration represents power, and once we see how the battles we are fighting are the product of the obsolete assumptions of our economic system, we will find that power. That is when we will see the veterans of battles to save the whales working alongside the defenders of children, the developers of solar cells, the organizers of migrant laborers, and the business leader of the highest ideals.

The world has never known a coalition like that, but it is high time to find out what it could accomplish.

Beth Sawin is a mother, biologist, and systems analyst who lives in Hartland, Vermont and works at Sustainability Institute <www.sustainer.org>. Contact her at bethsawin@vermontel.net to receive a monthly column on systems and sustainability.

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