Rethinking economic interdependence in hard times of the Ayyakannu Syndrome'

Chennai: Empty pots, mock funerals, farm workers with human skulls slung around their necks and debt-tied land owners with dead mice held between their teeth and trying to do a ‘Bagheeratha’s penance’ for the Rain Gods and Reserve Bank of India to show mercy: Such are the stuff of regular video footages from Jantar Mantar in Delhi for over three weeks now, where Tamil Nadu farmers headed by a rustic, unconventional farmers leader P .Ayyakannu, president of the ‘National South Indian Rivers Inter-Linking Farmers Association’, have been sitting in protest, hoping the Centre will take notice.

The pathos of the current agrarian crisis and the severe drought, partly a result of climate change factors, could not have been more grimly set out as done by Ayyakannu. It has. Unwittingly, set the context for unveiling a very different book on the need for an integral approach to Economics.

The ‘Paths of Human Economy’, owes its intellectual foundations to the concept of the ‘Human Economy’, as articulated by Louis-Joseph Lebret and Francois Perroux, two eminent French thinkers, the first a Social Scientist and Philosopher and the second an Economist, who earnestly sought to put Economics “to the service of man”, and whose thoughts influenced Latin American countries profoundly.

The authors — Lourthusamy Arokiasamy, a sociologist and a social activist involved with the ‘Coalition of Land Rights in Tamil Nadu’, which is fighting against land-grab and other structural issues like caste discrimination, Yves Berthelot, former deputy secretary-general of UNCTAD, Andres Lalanne, Rector of the University Institute ‘CLAEH’ (Latin American Center of Human Economy), and Lily Razafimbelo, research scholar and teacher and member of the ‘Group for Citizens and Citizen organisations of the Network for Transparency and Social Accountability’ in Madagascar - of this joint work that began as a debate in June 2012, unfold nuances of “developing the Whole Man and All Men.”  

With a succinct preface by no less a person than Mr Kofi Annan, former Secretary General of the United Nations, it brings together a weave of experiences of well known NGOs’ and network groups in different countries of Asia, Latin America Africa and Europe, who have worked with various communities to show how civil society groups along with grassroots democracy made a difference in the lives of marginalised and displaced peoples, as a result of military action, dictatorships or ethnic cleansing.

By describing the various ‘Paths of Human Economy’, the book brings back into focus issues concerning the ‘human side’ of development, wherein economic growth cannot be reduced to one model-centric quantitative approach, but look at bettering people’s lives holistically, taking in its stride concerns of social justice, particularly of diverse linguistic, cultural, ethnic and indigenous (tribal) groups who all have a stake in the finite natural resources available on planet earth, and issues of empowerment through education, health and a sense of equality and dignity of all persons.  

“Everyone has something to bring and knowledge to share. All these examples (in the book), illustrate the African saying that reminds us that, ‘however long the path to be taken, the journey always begins with the first step,” as Kofi Annan says in his preface.

Development is not strictly an economic notion. This message rings through the entire text as it moves from one social experiment to another by NGOs’ in collective empowerment of the people. Whether it is the story of ‘Fundapaz’, an ‘Economics and Humanism Movement’ inspired by the ‘Conference of Latin-American Bishops’ in Medellin in 1968 to support and guide defenseless populations evolve a model of sustainable development, or of ‘AREDS’ (Association of Rural Education And Development Service) launched by an Economcis and Sociology professor, Samy and his wife Ms Christina Samy, in a Dalits-majority village of Renganathapuram in Tiruchy district in late 1970s’, the Uruguayan organisation, ‘CLAEH’, or for that matter the more recent initiatives of ‘NAFSO (National Fisheries Solidarity Movement), an orgaisation of fisher folk in Sri Lanka, which has taken up a bold experiment of ‘rebuilding peace and democracy through development’ by engaging the women of both the Tamil families in the North and the Sinhala-dominated Southern Sri Lanka in the post-Rajapaksa era after the end of a 26-year long armed conflict in the Island-Republic, the stories are truly inspiring and spark new hope in the common bonds of humanity.

The context in which each of these NGOs’ were born under simple, effective leadership styles of individuals caring for human dignity, the methods they adopted in tune with the local conditions and cultural backdrops, the de-emphasizing of religious and other barriers to collective human action, focusing on alternate income generating models and least aggressive consumption patterns in the larger ecological interests, and the reasons for relative success of their models in their respective geographical domains, have all been well documented in this book.

They are each, in effect, practical ways of knowing, thinking and acting in specific locales, and which yet draw from the universal fund of human wisdom that are replicable elsewhere. There are also informative boxes on role of the youth, different successful models of community development, responding to different social and political crisis, besides natural calamities in different parts of the world post-1990s’, from Bosnia, East Timor to Haiti.

The authors also hint that ‘liberation theology’, once the hallmark of NGOism, may no longer pass muster as the vast diversity of the human situation calls for more creative, location-specific solutions.

In the days of globalisation of markets, products and services, where a relentless logic is bound to work due to the immense influence of their knowledge/information systems, institutions and money-power, and their increasingly totalitarian political ramifications, the collection of people’s initiatives in this work comes as a timely pause. “We are inviting you to a debate for ideas to progress; an invitation to debate which the (Economics Nobel laureate) Amartya Sen reminds us is one of the oldest and most universal modalities of democratic life,” sum up the authors of this book, which itself has been a collective endeavour of the ‘International Network for a Human Economy’.