A Tale of Localization in Two Cities by Debra Efroymson
After spending 30 years in Asia (mostly Bangladesh), I have recently begun spending most of my time in the small city of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Going from a megacity of roughly 22 million people to a city of merely 90,000, relocating from the tropics to the desert, the differences are obviously staggering. But what I want to focus on today is the way that localization plays out in each of the two locales.
At one level, the hip, progressive city of Santa Fe would seem more likely to be interested in localization than the megacity of Dhaka, with its rapid growth, constant construction, incessant traffic and unbearable noise. In Santa Fe, localization is celebrated through a year-round weekly farmers market, twice-weekly year-round artisan fairs, many other special events, and a proliferation of small, locally owned businesses. One busy street is lined with secondhand shops, some of which donate their proceeds to charity. Native art and culture abound. New Mexico even has its own cuisine. New Mexicans are notoriously friendly, giving the city a small-town feel.
But Santa Fe, different as it is from the rest of the United States, is still part of the same country. Most people make most of their trips by car. There is urban sprawl. Fast food joints and big box stores abound. As elsewhere in this country, it is possible to go from birth to death without making a single purchase from a small, independent business.
Dhaka, on the surface, is everything Santa Fe is not: noisy, polluted, and congested. Parts of the city have succumbed to the fascination with suburbia, offering endless blocks of housing almost unrelieved by local shops. But is there anywhere in Dhaka where vendors do not move through the city carrying merchandise on their heads or pedaling it on bicycle carts, shouting as they go, offering live chickens, fresh vegetables, or handmade brooms? Surely every corner of the city has its neighborhood tea stall set up on the sidewalk, as well as men and boys carrying thermoses of tea and containers of biscuits for sale to passersby. Vendors of live fish line the sidewalks at certain hours; fruit sellers offer many imported fruits, true, but also the local seasonal fruits. Traditional markets are still common, offering all kinds of minimally processed, often unpackaged foods such as rice, lentils, and heaps of potatoes, onions, garlic and ginger.
It would require far more effort in Dhaka than in Santa Fe to skip all that is local in favor of all that is transnational. There are, alas, trends in that direction. Even in the Bangladeshi countryside, it is considered more fashionable to offer people soft drinks in plastic bottles than a fresh limeade. (More shockingly to me, local companies make packaged mango juice and even coconut water-a travesty in a country where coconuts and mangoes are available fresh from the tree.) There are a few fast-food franchises in Bangladesh, though thankfully they are rare and we are still free of Walmart, Target, Walgreens, Tesco Lotus and the like. The so-called super shops (grocery stores) offer a plethora of ultra processed foods, though nothing like what is found in the typical American supermarket, and people still buy most of their essentials from small shops and vendors.
One of the two NGOs I co-founded established sixteen farmers markets in and near Dhaka. During the winter months which I spent in Dhaka, I regularly visited one. There are currently four or five farmers who travel from the countryside to sell their vegetables, fruit, milk and eggs. It is only open on Fridays; I walk there after doing a partial circuit around the nearby “lake” (an old canal system that is mostly built over). There is an even smaller though daily market closer to my home, at another place I regularly exercise; the food is grown right on the grounds, transported only 100–200 meters before being sold. In both cases the customers seem mostly keen on getting fresh milk and finding bargains; few seem interested in the greater freshness of the food. Many of the customers are downright belligerent, shouting at the farmers in disagreement over prices or measurements, demanding whether the farmers picked up their products at a wholesale market rather than growing them themselves, and generally treating the farmers like 3 rdclass citizens.
In contrast, when I stumbled by accident on the Santa Fe farmers market, the atmosphere was one of jovial conviviality. Customers chatted with vendors. They asked questions. They showed an interest as they squeezed past each other to buy salad greens, turnips, white Daikon radishes, sprouts, tiny carrots, dried beans, multi-colored posole, pecans, fresh bread, and bakery treats. All organic, all local. The customers seemed to understand that it was worth paying more to contribute to local farmers and to the local economy, rather than try to get the cheapest possible groceries at Walmart, regardless of the external costs to the community. Of course, for the most part the customers were also financially well-off.
In the United States, walkable and cyclable communities tend to charge higher rents, as they are so popular and rare. Making a neighborhood or city more livable, alas, can mean pricing the poor out of the market. Government subsidies for corn-which is in virtually all ultra-processed foods-makes corporate foods cheaper than farmers’ produce. Similarly with government subsidies for big box stores, giving them an unfair and disastrous advantage over local businesses. Economic policy disregards the negative effects on people’s health, the environment, communities and local economies, instead ceding to the lobbying influence of global corporations. As a result of these shortsighted economic policies, localization can be a niche market for the concerned and progressive elites in wealthy countries, whereas in much of the Majority World (or Global South), localization is an under-appreciated though vital aspect of daily life.
Happy though I am to be in a place where many people appreciate the local (though alas many others cannot afford to be part of that more vital economy), I wish that localization were not only treasured throughout the world, but also simply the standard. Whether we live in a booming Asian city or a small town in North America, we should not want our communities dominated by big box stores and fast-food chains. Perhaps North Americans could learn from the Majority World about how to integrate localization in all aspects of the economy and our societies; in turn, perhaps my Bangladeshi neighbors could learn from people in Santa Fe how to be more respectful and appreciative of those safeguarding our seeds, soil, and traditions.
- Debra Efroymson is co-founder and Executive Director of the Institute of Wellbeing, Bangladesh and is currently undergoing severe culture shock in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Originally published at https://www.localfutures.org on April 23, 2024.
