In answering this week's learning challenge from our guest facilitator (and fellow Aussie/Permie) Leigh Blackall, I'd like to consider the organic Coffee industry in Nepal as a model for focusing my thinking on his third question:
Is the individualism implicit in networks too problematic for people with cultural, family or political backgrounds that value collective identities?
Whoa! Organic coffee, open governance and networks - where is this nexus of seemingly divergent ideas coming from?
Well, if you're a fellow member/networker in Peer to Peer University's (P2PU) 'Open Governance' course, you've probably see Leigh's blog and video of Stephen Downes, shot in New Zealand in 2006. If you haven't, then it is worth hot-linking yourself over to check them out.
As for that other type of Java (real Coffee), perhaps some background information about me will help fill in the blanks.
In looking to build skills for a simpler, more sustainable lifestyle, in 2008 I made a solo journey to Begnas Lake, to study a short course with the Nepal Permaculture Group. Graduating with a Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) at the end of the most intensive, grueling and enjoyable (up to then) study programme in my entire life, I wanted to consolidate my learning with some practical work. I was blessed to find wonderful mentor in Surya Prasad Adikhari, so my beloved Maha and I ventured there together, spending four wonderful months of learning-by-doing, as volunteer permaculture interns.
A pioneer in the region, Surya-ji's farm is an abundant food forest, whose under-story comprises over two thousand coffee bushes and the pulping centre he established, now services the crop from over 300 growers - for whom the seedlings from his nursery have provided one of the sources of their growing livelihood. But what is at the core of that livelihood? A strong, cooperative, governance framework.
Every year, growers, pulping centres, exporters come together to under the facilitation of the Government of Nepal’s National Tea and Coffee Development Board (NTCDB), to agree on prices for the year ahead. Prices for raw beans (grower), prices for dried beans (pulper) and the export price per kilogram for cleaned or roasted beans (exporter). Is this about control - to an extent - but one to which the industry sees a broader benefit, where all sectors in the production chain, are clear about the future market price of the commodities they produce and enjoy a level playing field.
Directive? Yes, but with good representation and what members of all three non-Government sectors described to me as an amicable and positive working relationship, there seems to my joyful eyes to be not only a blurring of the "coordination versus autonomy", but also the "distributive versus connective" elements which Stephen Downes seems to want to put at loggerheads.
There is great scope for individualism, from families with twenty bushes who may bring just one fifth of one kilogram at time for pulping, to more dedicated farmers who have a thousand or more bushes and struggle along to the pulping centre with 25-40 kilograms in the bag hanging off the tump-line round their foreheads.
Conversely, Nepal's communal approach also extends beyond just this single cash crop, as the area is undergoing a community-based, organic certification process. On the basis that if one member fails a certification audit, the certification for all is compromised, this system further entrenches the reliance of network members on each other.
By contrast, when I think of the latent desire I harbour to set up a similar system for the production and marketing of Olives in Pakistan, I know that there is a long way to go before we could get past people's sense of self-interest to operate such a cooperative model.
Is it cultural background which drives the collective identity of the organic Coffee industry in Nepal? Is individualism too problematic? I suspect the either/or (almost exclusionary) approach that Stephen Downes puts forward to defining what I see as a network, may be countermanded by this positive, practical and functioning model.
What do you think?
PS:
If you're into armchair travel, feel free to browse photos from our stay on Surya-ji's farm. They're in the Photos tab of my facebook page, entitled Memories of Nepal (1, 2, 3, 4) and Abundance.
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