Social Entrepreneurs: Doing Sustainable Development - Ashoka

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Jadwiga Lopata
utable information, co-ordination among environmental NGOs, and organization
of affected communities, ToxicsLink has positioned itself in the center of
this box. ToxicsLink starts with ensuring that data is reliable and irrefutable
with professional monitoring and analysis. From this base, the various constituencies
are engaged. It shares this information with the most at-risk communities,
so that they can organize and develop preferences about how best
to address the problem. It feeds this knowledge into a network, initiated by
ToxicsLink, of over 350 NGOs so the public interest community can select the
most leveraged opportunities for protection and deploy its efforts most efficiently
and effectively. Finally it uses this data as the basis for its advocacy
efforts with the government and businesses.
Still early on, ToxicsLink is beginning to get traction. An integrated community-based
waste management system using the ToxicsLink model has been
replicated across 8 of India's most populous cities. Ravi and ToxicsLink have
also been instrumental in the development of landmark policies including a
1998 law regulating medical waste and a 2000 statute governing all waste
management activities. "The most at-risk communities are beginning to
understand how to protect themselves while making a living," says Ravi. "It
is still taking its first steps, but the system is turning and the playing field is
becoming more fair."
Resurrecting the family farm
Fly half way around the world, to Kracow, Poland. Rent a car
and drive 80 kilometers into the countryside. Around you
are family farms, the kind of farms that hark back to Grant
Wood paintings, not the colossal agribusiness and collective
operations that have spread from the Central Valley of
California to the rice fields of Indonesia thanks to the Green
Revolution.
Livestock mill about, farmhouses face the country road
proudly, stout-looking farmers tend to their crops. It is a
lifestyle that is slowly disappearing throughout the world, as the process of
feeding the world has become more mechanized, pesticide-reliant, and capital-intensive.
Bucking this trend, these family farms in southern Poland are
thriving.
At the center of this backlash is growing demand for organic produce and
dairy goods, a former software engineer and current Ashoka Fellow named
Jadwiga Lopata, and a simple but ingenious new set of farm products. Like
many disaffected urbanites, Jadwiga was drawn to rural Poland by the lure of
a simpler and healthier lifestyle made possible by the small-to-medium scale
family farm. Unfortunately, the viability of the Polish family farm was, as it
still is in most of the world, threatened by roll-ups into larger farms that deliver
economies of scale at some cost to society: pesticides polluting air and
water, monoculture replacing a more diverse variety of crops, and the underlying
unit of the family farm getting squeezed from all sides.
Despite growing demand for organic products, many family farmers cannot
afford the transition costs of "going organic"-the cost of certification itself and
3 years of reduced earnings, the usual waiting period before products can be
marketed as such for premium prices. Furthermore, some farmers cannot