NOTE: This story also ran on the Vernon Economic Development Association web site at http://www.veda-wi.org.
By Gregg Hoffmann
Making a fast buck is important to some people, but that doesn’t help build sustainable food systems or communities, according to Woody Tasch, chairman of the Investors’ Circle and founder of the International Slow Food Movement.
Tasch is the author of “Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: investing as if food, farms and fertility mattered.” He appeared at the Kickapoo Country Fair on Saturday and had two appearances in Madison planned for Sunday and Monday.
“Money that is too fast is money that has become so detached from people, place and the activities that it is financing that no experts understand it fully,” Tasch writes in his book. “Money that is too fast makes it impossible to say whether the world economy is going through a correction in the credit markets, triggered by the subpriome mortgage crisis, or whether we are teetering on the edge of something much deeper and more challenging…”
Tasch wants to slow money down by investing in sustainable things, especially local food systems. “We have to stop throwing our money up smokestacks in China,” Tasch told the Kickapoo audience. “We have to stop defining success as growing a company and then selling it to a multi-national company.
“That system is not about relationships. It’s about profits, often short term. It does not help a community build. We have to leave money in the system for future generations. We can’t just take profits from one place and keep putting it elsewhere.”
Tasch said momentum is building for a slow money system in pockets around the world. He said the Kickapoo Valley is one of those pockets and that Organic Valley, a co-op owned by farmers and other small investors, is a model for how a sustainable food system can be built.
“People are becoming more concerned about health and their food,” Tasch said. “We need to make entrepreneurs more like farmers than farmers more like entrepreneurs.”
Tasch is involved in a movement to create a Slow Money Alliance, which has a web site at http://www.slowmoneyalliance.org. The group‘s first large organizational gathering will be in Santa Fe on Sept. 10-11.
Among 12 principles of the Alliance are: bring money back down to earth, put money back into local economies and carbon back into the soil, invest as if food, farms and fertility mattered, invest as if carrying capacity, diversity and non-violence mattered, as if aquifers, childhood nutrition and food deserts and obesity side-by-side with hunger all mattered..
Tasch would like to see 5% or more of investment dollars go into local food systems. “Right now, 99.9% goes into the system that created the Walmarts of the world,” he said.
While admitting the movement is still small, Tasch said the growth of CSA’s (Community Supported Agriculture), micro-investments and coops such as Organic Valley demonstrate that people on the grassroots are interested in alternative food systems and investing in their communities.
“A total of 100,000 people in the U.S. are in CSA’s. In Copenhagen alone, 55,000 are in one,” Tasch said. “The pendulum has been way over here for a long time, but it’s starting to swing this way.”
