Agriculture, Food Security and Inclusive Growth - SID Netherlands ...

fact, in the US at least, conservatives, liberals and progressives agree that
corporations have too much power over public decisions. Yet, without a vision
of real democracy most people feel powerless to act. So, my question has to do
with what it would mean for the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food to even
more explicitly frame the challenge in these terms.
After travelling the world and meeting empowered people finding their
voices for real, engaged democracy, one rainy night in Seattle, my daughter Anna
and I shared a realization: People often disparage themselves as being ‘mere’
drops in the bucket, as if that were nothing. But wait, we said, being a drop in
a bucket is magnificent if one can see the bucket, for a bucket can fill up really
fast. The real problem is that most of us feel like drops in the Sahara desert,
evaporating before hitting the sand.
So my question for discussion is: What is the ‘bucket’ that gives meaning
to our ‘drops’ What would it mean consciously to be creating a language and
stories highlighting not only the political but economic and cultural dimensions
of democracy Of democracy that is the next historical stage in a transition to
societies positively aligned with our own nature – with rules eliciting the best and
keeping the worst in check -- and aligned, as well, with wider nature
In other words, the frame of human rights, including the right to food, is
critical. But one virtue of the overarching frame of democracy is that it connects
directly to the universal value of dignity. An international survey in the 1950s,
covering 75 countries, asked citizens to identify the value that they held most
dear. Dignity ranked very high. Dignity is perhaps the most democratic of values
because it depends on feeling respected, included, and heard. Dignity is bound
up with knowing that we have voice: the essence of democracy. The language
of human rights is essential, but without the wider frame, it may not fully
communicate what is most important to human beings: to be a true participant,
to be able to hold oneself and others accountable.
I so appreciated your inclusion of cooperatives, for they are an
embodiment of democracy in economic life—an aspect, at the level of the
enterprise, of democratic economies. To further a vision of a truly democratic
culture we can underscore that cooperatives are not simply “nice,” while
marginal within the concentrated global economy. Actually, there are likely as
members of cooperatives in the world today as there are people who own shares
in publicly traded companies. More jobs are created by cooperatives today than
by multinational corporations. For example, how many jobs have been created by
women-led dairy cooperatives in India, compared to the high-tech industry there
Indian dairy cooperatives have created at least three to four times more jobs.
Cooperatives embody the dispersion of power, transparency in human relations
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