Yesterday at DGI in Saint Vincent we talked about how the ideas of the industrial NGO’s complex differs from the ideas of Survival Kit Collection.
Survival Kit Collection is trying to create a network of independent, autonomous zones that support one another. The main thing NGOs do is create dependency on themselves. They bring food, then apply for more funding to bring more food, then build an enormous bureaucracy around funding money and distributing resorces. Even if the people involved are well-intentioned, they become part of a class that survives only because someone depends on them.
Spirulina was discovered in the 1970s, and a special UN organization was set up that promised to feed everyone in Africa.
Spirulina’s modern recognition grew in the 1970s when the United Nations (UN) and its agencies, like the Food and Agriculture.Organization (FAO), evaluated its potential as a superfood to fight malnutrition, leading to support for large-scale cultivation and the idea of it being a “best food of the future,” supported by groups like UNESCO for sustainable development in places like Lake Chad.
When I learned about this later, I kept wondering: why on earth didn’t they actually feed everyone? The reason is exactly this: they created countless NGOs in Switzerland where five or six people were paid 57,000 dollars a month to “support” one small spirulina project in India where women were growing it. With that money, they could have created 500 such farms.
For this to work, the social design must be different. There should be a network of fully autonomous and independent producers who, once they receive instructions and an initial culture, can develop on their own. They also need their own motivation to do this.
Today, almost all motivation to produce spirulina is purely market-driven and largely controlled by big Western corporations. Small producers have neither their own markets nor their own support networks, apart from the same non-profit organizations which, unfortunately, often tend to sustain themselves rather than those they claim to support, since the very people they help are also end up being their source of income.
What can we do differently? This is the central question that, for example, the people who created the Bauhaus and those who built Proletkult were trying to answer.
