Biography: My Story
	Writings
	Selected Topics
	Calendar of Upcoming Events
	Past Appearances
	Contact Frances Moore Lappé
	Press Kit
	Current Ventures
	Past Events

“The World We Want & the Words We Use”

By Frances Moore Lappé

(Prepared for gathering to create the Commission on the Future of Food, Florence, Italy, February 4th & 5th, 2003. Hosts: Vandana Shiva and the Region of Tuscany. Document submitted prior to meeting / for discussion)

“How forcible are right words,” Job 16:25

As we prepare for our meeting in Florence to develop strategies for furthering a “paradigm and policy shift” toward diverse, localized, sustainable food systems, I’m writing to share reflections on language.

Admittedly, I’m a bit of a language fanatic, but I worry that we unwittingly give supporters of the current world order a great advantage by terms we use to describe what we oppose and what we seek to create. I fret that we miss opportunities for developing language that can awaken people worldwide to the new paradigm emerging from the bottom up.

Below I’ll offer a few examples. I assume our discussions in Florence are to focus on considering policy not framing a message, but perhaps there maybe some time for the later.

Mental maps.

Research suggests that public attitudes and positions on global issues cannot be changed just by presenting facts. It is the mental map that people use to made sense of the world that is all powerful. FrameWorks Institute in Washington, D.C., finds that “if the facts don’t fit the frame, it is the facts that are rejected, not the frame.” It argues that the task is to communicate in new ways that will call forth new frames into which new facts can then fit. They argue that among the keys to creating these new mental maps are metaphors and stories. Many of the terms all of us use when debating and advocating are short-hands conjuring up a whole set of associations.

Globalization.

Yesterday’s New York Times headline for its story on the World Social Forum called it an “anti-globalization” gathering. Here, 100,000 of the world’s most creative and pro-active people are defined by what they are against! By continuing to define the debate as for or against globalization, I fear we lose a large number of people who would agree with us. (Please excuse the liberties I’m taking here with the “us”!)

Our communication problem is that globalization carries positive connotations for many people. To them it means the intermingling of cultures which brings a richer array of interesting cuisine, music and literature. It means closer communication through new technologies. It means interdependence.

The term “globalization” immediately focuses the mind on the question of the range of activity, the scope of activity (global, not local); whereas I believe we actually want to emphasize who is in control (who benefits, who loses) more than scope, per se.

Therefore, to most people, at least here in U.S., to be anti-globalization is to be:

• backward, irrational, unrealistically nostalgic for irretrievable, simpler time
• isolationist
• anti-market altogether, and thus pro state planning

For us globalization is short-hand for increasing corporate dominance (displacing governments) and a concomitant reduction of essential aspects of life to market exchange values -- both bringing deepening inequality and environmental decimation. We need to recognize that these negatives we see are largely invisible to most people; at least this is true, here in the U.S.

In the spirit of brainstorming to trigger ideas, what if:

• we were to drop the word “globalization” and used instead “corporatism” and “globalizing corporatism” for what we oppose?
• we were to use “living democracy” and “economic democracy” for what we advocate and are actually building today? The wonderful thing about the term “living democracy” is that it emerged independently on different continents. We started using it in the U.S. as our defining mission at the Center for Living Democracy and Vandana Shiva’s Foundation and organizing network Navdanya independently chose these words to capture their vision when translated into English.

Trade & the market.

Here is another big challenge. Defenders of the dominant corporatist order say they are implementing “free trade.” Our challenge is to make clear that what exists now and what they are pursuing through the WTO and agreements like NAFTA is not “free trade.” We should not try to convince people that free trade is bad. Anything (at least here in U.S.) that has “free” attached to it is unquestionably good!

“ Free trade” suggests exchanges based on producers competing in the global market based on independent, voluntary choices to specialize in certain commodities, on real costs and non-coerced demand. We can make clearer that, as we all recognize, most trade is not “free” in that:

• Roughly one-third transpires between different pieces of the same global corporations. It is therefore not part of exchange of goods and services based on market-determined pricing.
• Prices for many commodities are determined by speculative betting by a handful of people.
• Prices of some agricultural commodities reflect massive government subsidies (almost $1 billion a day) by the industrial countries. Prices reflect coercive influence of international lenders leading countries to specialize in the very same limited number of export crops (leading to price-depressing gluts, as we see with coffee today).
• World trade not without rules; in fact it is governed by many complex rules and regulations. For the most part they deny people’s representatives the right to create a context for trading that is beneficial to citizens and the environment. So they deny people’s freedom to act for their own well being.
• No trade should be called “free” that excludes the majority of the world’s people who cannot participate because they are too poor.

Free trade is a myth. As the head of Archer Daniels Midland said in the mid-nineties, it exists only in “the speeches of politicians.” We can stop using “free trade” to describe what exists and make clear we oppose today’s corporate-controlled, unfair trade. We can advocate instead fair and democratic trade.

Choice.

Even relatively thoughtful opinion makers on globalizing corporatism, such a Joseph Stiglitz, author of Globalization and Its Discontents, and Tina Rosenberg of the New York Times write that even with all its downsides at least “globalization” gives poor people more options. They both use examples of desperate people in rural communities with no income source gratefully taking that job in the new multinational corporate assembly plant for a pittance.

Here is a typical quote from The Economist capturing this view that globalization increases choice: “Under a market system, economic interaction is voluntary. This is the market's greatest virtue, greater by far than its superior productivity. So there is no reason to fear that globalisation itself threatens traditional non-western cultures, such as Islam, except in so far as individual freedom threatens them. McDonald's does not march people into its outlets at the point of a gun. Nike does not require people to wear its trainers on pain of imprisonment. If people buy those things, it is because they choose to, not because globalisation is forcing them to. (9.27.01)

We can get better at challenging the notion of choice. Obviously, the reason that poor person in the example above is taking the job is that their choices have shrunk not expanded. Their choice to stay on their land, creating healthy communities, has been taken away: In Mexico, an example close at hand, small farmers have seen their income fall by 40 percent because of U. S. heavily subsidized corn imports.

Self-reliance or health & democracy?

Words often used to capture what we’re creating are self-reliance, food security, food sovereignty, and sustainable trade. While they are positive in many ways, they still describe, for the most part, means not ends, and can therefore fall short of capturing our vision.

In other words, one could, for example, have “food security” or “food sovereignty” through a totalitarian system based on rationing. “Sustainable trade” sounds like trade that could do on forever, but our goal is not to make trade endure per se.

Again in the spirit of provoking discussion, let me suggest a couple of approaches.

• It seems one end goal we are seeking is “health” – defined as that which supports life – for people and all species and natural systems. Moving toward maximum possible local food provisioning based on democratically organized economies (embodying transparency and accountability) is a means toward such health.
• Since I believe that true democracy -- living democracy in which people have a real voice and opportunity to dialogue and reflect – by definition leads to health (no one consciously chooses to be hungry, spoil their ecological nest, or get sick from what they eat), I feel living democracy is also an end goal, not simply a means.
• Thus, language that might better communicate our vision would include these words: e.g. “a democratic and healthy food system” or “democratic and healthy trading systems.”

Another thought related to living democracy: When I looked for elements among the papers contributed to our Florence meeting, so far I see that often present, expressed or not, is the theme of “empowerment.” “Empowerment” is one of those much-used words that can sound clichéd. But it is the heart and soul of living democracy. What is changing the world at this moment is a shift going on all over the planet in core assumptions by and about “ordinary” people – a growing appreciation of their/our innate wisdom and capacity to participate in shaping the larger world. That is the revolution. How do we make this more evident? What is the language of empowerment that sounds less clichéd? For it is this capacity of citizens that makes everything else we are working for possible; without it, we would have to turn over out fate to global corporatism!

Not a culmination, an aberration.

Another point is about the wider framing, not just about single terms.

The religion of the market has so taken over the world (although a backlash may be afoot, evidenced perhaps by Lula’s election in Brazil), that increasingly it is assumed that what we have now is actually “the end of history.” This mental map that people increasingly carry in their heads is that, of course, economics is only about isolated individuals making self-interested choices in an impartial market system.

We easily lose sight of the fact that such a notion of economic life emerged in a blink of historical time. Throughout most of human evolution, economics was deeply embedded in cultural values -- in the values of sustaining family life and community life through cultural norms and ritual. These norms included mutuality and recognition of our dependence on, and gratitude for, the gifts of the natural world.

We can get better at communicating that what we are experiencing today is a dangerous aberration not a culmination. It has burst forth – mostly during the last half of the last century. That’s no time at all! The speed of consolidation of control over productive assets and wealth is breathtaking. The striking expansion of trade reflects that centralization. We can clarify that the globalizing food system we’re experiencing today is untested, risky, and already revealing its dangers in widespread hunger and food-linked disease.

We can portray the promoters of this system as they really are -- the renegades and the extremists pushing something on faith (The head of our Federal Communication Commission has said that indeed the market is his “religion.”) that has never been tried and obviously can never sustain itself (because of the energy costs alone, if nothing else!). Proponents of this radical remaking of societies and the Earth are not conservatives at all. Just the opposite. Those pursuing democratic alternatives, ensuring more voice for more people, are the conservatives: We want to conserve our communities, our dignity, our earth.

Metaphors suggesting our vision.

In my recent works I’ve been using the metaphoric language of “re-imbedding economic life in community values.” It is vague, yes, but it conjures up the idea that citizens can create rules and norms within which economic exchanges take place. This framing is positive. Rules and regulations are typically put in the negative frame of restraint of freedom of choice. Rather, “re-embedding” suggests that we together – as pro-active co-creators of the communities, societies and world we want – of course must set parameters defining what is healthy for all of us to do. This has been what human society has been about through our entire evolution.

Another approach is saying that we are for “democracy embracing economic life” rather than seeing democracy and economic life seen as distinct realms, operating by utterly different principles (the former being about society and the later being only about the individual).

Finally, in my recent work, Hope’s Edge, written with my daughter Anna Lappé, we contrast two approaches for problem solving. One, the prevailing Western approach, we call “solving by dissection,” and the other we call “solving for pattern,” a lovely term we gratefully borrow from the American poet/farmer Wendell Berry.

One of the features of the approach of the broad movement with which we identify is that it sees the whole interacting pattern of forces in the food system (from fossil fuel use to saturated fat levels in our diets, from healthy soil and genetic diversity to speculative commodity markets and prices for producers) and, seeing the whole, our goal is change make interventions that are most likely to reverberate throughout the entire system in healthy ways. The current debate, for example, about whether the Global North’s lowering tariffs and other barriers to exports from the Global South makes sense is contentious when taken as a single intervention (solving by dissection). If woven into a consciousness of an entire pattern, including the South’s forced export-crop dependency, then discussion can progress.

Closing wish.

I offer these reflections not knowing whether the brief time we’ll have in Florence will allow engagement on language per se. Whether or not such discussion makes sense there, I hope that we will continue to attend to the vital task of choosing words and images that will best allow our critique and our vision to be heard. This requires a lot of interchange to learn how language is received in different settings and cultures. Thank you allowing me to share my thinking.