How Cooperatives Contribute to Sustainable Consumption and Production

by UNSDN, http://unsdn.org/2018/06/22/how-cooperatives-contribute-to-sustainable-consumption-and-production/

Cooperatives are a powerful economic and social force, present in most countries of the world and in most sectors of the economy. The cooperative movement counts more than a billion members.

Achieving sustainable development means that we will have to rethink the ways in which we produce and consume goods and services. For our planet to sustain a growing population, it will be necessary to protect and use the limited natural resources our world has to offer responsibly.

How are cooperatives making change happen towards SDG12 - ensuring sustainable consumption and production patterns? Here are a few examples from the field.

Coop Italy is a system of consumer cooperatives that operates the largest supermarket chain in the country. With environmental sustainability as a core activity of the cooperative, Coop Italy has committed to further developing its line of organic and Ecolabel-certified own brand products, using its own brand fruit cultivation methods to keep chemical residue below legal limits and monitoring the sustainability and resource use of its Coop brand production suppliers. On the consumer side, the cooperative educates shoppers by integrating the ideas of the three R’s (reduction, reuse, recycling) in all of its Coop brand product packaging, including using recycled materials, minimizing packaging and setting up refill stations.

The Seikatsu Club Consumers’ Cooperative (SCCC) of Japan combines good business practices with social and ecological principles and a vision of a community- and people-centred economy. SCCC began in 1965, when a Tokyo housewife organized 200 women to buy 300 bottles of milk. Seikatsu Club has since grown its buying activities to include production, distribution, consumption, disposal, social services, the environment and politics. The cooperative’s goal is to create a new lifestyle that protects the environment and overall health of the planet. One of SCCC’s mantras is “safe food at reasonable prices”. When the Club cannot find products of adequate quality to meet its ecological or social standards, it produces them itself, as has been the case for milk and soap. The cooperative emphasizes direct contact between producers and consumers to humanize the market, particularly in food production.

Non-sustainable farming techniques and post-harvest storing methods have resulted in the loss of large amounts of crops in South Africa. The IMAI Farming Cooperative is a women’s cooperative that has partnered with non-profits and government institutions to turn surplus fresh vegetable produce into pickles. Through this initiative the cooperative in- creases the incomes of its members by adding value to their products while also reducing food waste. The members chop surplus vegetables into small pieces and store them in an acidic solution to create different types of “atchar”, a kind of pickle for local consumption. IMAI Farming Cooperative also encourages organic farming as part of its activities.to include production, distribution, consumption, disposal, social services, the environment and politics. The cooperative’s goal is to create a new lifestyle that protects the environment and overall health of the planet. One of SCCC’s mantras is “safe food at reasonable prices”. When the Club cannot find products of adequate quality to meet its ecological or social standards, it produces them itself, as has been the case for milk and soap. The cooperative emphasizes direct contact between producers and consumers to humanize the market, particularly in food production.

Tourism is a sector where unsustainable consumption and production patterns can impact the environment, including food waste, damage to natural reserves, excessive water use and carbon footprint of air travel, among others. The Midcounties Cooperative travel business is the third largest travel agent in the UK and promotes sustainable tour- ism in collaboration with the Travel Foundation charity. In the last ten years, they have funded more than £10 million for sustainable tour- ism promoting local culture and products, income generating opportunities and environmental protection in different areas around the world. Their initiatives include establishing linkages between lo- cal farmers and all-inclusive hotels in Turkey that are sourcing their produce from sustainable producers; helping Mexican women set up their own businesses and sell their honey-based beauty products to hotels and tourists; and developing an educational map to inform tourists about the threatened marine bays around Fethiye in Turkey to help reduce the environmental impacts of boat trips and coast- al tourism on important habitats for turtles and other marine life.

In Togo, the Cooperative of Young Professional Producers of Organic Pineapple (CJPPAB) produces a special type of pineapple called pain de sucre (sugar bread) destined for the Italian market. The CJPPAB has 1,018 young members, of which 367 are women. The members produce 10,000 tonnes of pineapple in a year and use only organic farming practices without any application of chemicals. Assistance and training was provided by Coopermondo, the international development cooperation association of the Confederation of Italian Cooperatives, and the project received funding from six Italian cooperative banks and Federcasse, the apex organisation for cooperative banks in Italy. The cooperation between the cooperative movements in Togo and Italy allowed them to exchange experiences and resulted in new market opportunities for the Togolese farmers.

The speed by which people replace their old devices with new ones has created huge amounts of electrical and electronic equipment waste (e-waste). E-waste is the fastest growing waste stream, and it is hazardous, complex and costly to treat. Heaps of e-waste end up in landfills or are exported to and dumped in develop- ing countries. In Bolivia, formal mechanisms for waste management are limited, so most people store their old electronic equipment or leave it to be picked up by informal collectors. A group of solid waste pickers in La Paz (the Association of Recycling Collectors and Sorters of La Paz, ARALPAZ) formed a cooperative in 2006 to overcome the waste collection challenges. Their 40 members earn a better income through recycling in total about 194 tonnes of solid waste on a daily basis, including plastic, cardboard, metals, used clothing, glass and occasionally e-waste. The collectors do not focus on e-waste alone, because this requires more specialization and involves higher costs to collect and dissassemble. They sell the e-waste at an informal market and looking into supply it to recycling companies. The collective massing of other recyclable material has enabled individual waste pickers to accumulate sufficiently large volumes to sell directly to businesses and negotiate better prices.

In Switzerland, the major retail cooperative Coop has developed its own line of fair trade organic clothing called Coop Naturaline. In 2013, they adopted the Guideline on Textiles and Leather, which regulates the minimum social, ecological and toxicological requirements in both the cultivation of raw textile materials and their further processing and improves transparency in the supply chain. They advocate for reducing the use of chemicals, recycling old textiles and promoting the use of fairly traded organic cotton.

In India, the Chetna Organic cooperative has organized 15,279 cotton farmers into 978 farmer self-help groups which are clustered into 13 district cooperatives. An international supply chain coalition was created (ChetCo) linking the organic cotton cooperative farmers with 16 ethical textile brands, such as Loomstate in the US, to promote sustainable clothing production from seed to cloth. Chetna Organic trains farmers in applying eco-friendly production practices, such as the production of bio-inputs like organic com- posting and bio pesticides such as chili-garlic solution. The cooperative also promotes collective ownership of machinery that improves productivity, like tractors, tillers, seed cleaners and graders. Inefficient water use is an important challenge in Indian cotton production. Different measures are taken by the cooperative to protect natural resources, manage watersheds and harvest water for supplemental irrigation. The variety of seeds is also under threat with the dominance of GMO seeds in cotton production. Chetna Organic wants to protect local varieties from extinction and is working to preserve seed sovereignty. The establishment of seed banks is one of their strategies to collect and maintain local seeds.

Source: COPAC

Walking the City with Jane: An Illustrated Celebration of Jane Jacobs and Her Legacy of Livable Cities

by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings:

https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/06/13/walking-the-city-with-jane-jacobs/

thebubble.com

“Every walk is a sort of crusade,” Henry David Thoreau proclaimed in his manifesto for the spiritual rewards of sauntering. But it was a crusade easy to carry out in the woods of Walden, in an era before cars and highways and metropolises. A century later, it took manyfold more courage to defend walking and its broader democratic, humanistic, and spiritual implications against the forces of urbanization, capitalism, and merciless development. The task fell on another humanist of a high order — Jane Jacobs (May 4, 1916–April 25, 2006).

Jacobs saw urban communities as vibrant ecosystems and fought fiercely against power-hungry developers like Robert Moses, who tried to turn them into commodities for economic growth. Governed by her conviction that “people ought to pay more attention to their instincts” — a countercultural idea in a mechanical age, amid the mid-century boom of blind consumerism and industrialism — she revolutionized our ideas about what makes a livable, human-centric city. Her legacy inspired the wonderful Jane’s Walk — an annual festival of free, citizen-led peripatetic conversations in cities around the world, in which people get to hear and share the stories of their neighborhoods and communities.

Joining the loveliest picture-book biographies of cultural heroes is Walking in the City with Jane: A Story of Jane Jacobs (public library) by the prolific Canadian children’s book author Susan Hughes and French-Canadian illustrator Valérie Boivin.

The story begins with young Jane organizing her first citizen protest — when the teacher introduces the class to a toothbrush and demands that the kids promise to use it daily for the rest of their lives, Jane sees the demand as tyrannical and refuses to make the promise, rallying her classmates to do the same. Irate, the teacher sends her home.

Uncompelled by school, Jane finds herself learning best in the real world, exploring the curiosities all around her.

After high school, she moves to New York City and falls in love with its blooming, buzzing chaos of humanity.

She takes the subway to random stops, explores the neighborhoods around them, and marvels at the details of the city, finding patterns and connections between things like the letters on manhole covers and the complex grid of electricity, gas, and water undergirding the city.

Out of this arises the awareness that a city, like a niche in nature, is an ecosystem. The synergy of its various human and nonhuman components — neighborhoods, parks, stores, streets, sidewalks — is what makes it thrive.

It was a radical notion at a time when urban planners were labeling certain neighborhoods “slums” and mercilessly tearing down homes to replace them with grey, soulless high-rise office buildings.

After Jane marries the architect Bob Jacobs, she continues working as a journalist and championing humane cities in articles criticizing the dehumanizing forces of commerce-minded urban planning, all the while raising her three children.

One day, she receives the shocking news that Robert Moses has labeled her very own neighborhood a “slum” and is pushing a plan to bulldoze parts of it to expedite downtown traffic. A four-lane highway would slice through the local park.

After Jacobs leads a protest at the meeting where Moses is presenting his plan, he reports to city officials that nobody objects to the development — “NOBODY, NOBODY, NOBODY but a bunch of… a bunch of MOTHERS!” (One is reminded of Roosevelt’s timeless admonition that of all ruthless politicians, citizens should most mistrust “the man who appeals to them to support him on the ground that he is hostile to other citizens of the republic, that he will secure for those who elect him… profit at the expense of other citizens of the republic.”)

But Jacobs refuses to back down and persuades the city government to temporarily close the park to traffic. She comes up with the inspired idea of a “ribbon-tying ceremony” — a counterpoint to the ribbon-cutting ceremonies that mark openings, this celebration of the closure to traffic is led by her three-year-old daughter, Burgin, and a friend. The girls tie the ribbon on the iconic arch of Washington Square Park as neighbors rejoice in the triumph of Jacobs’s vision of a city made not for cars but for humans and bicycles and dogs and songbirds.

Moved by this unprecedented upswell of citizen resistance, the city eventually rejects Moses’s plan to sunder the park with a highway. Jacobs continues to protest Moses’s various plans prioritizing the city as a product over the city as a haven for people. She organizes protests that successfully prevent a colossal expressway aimed at the spine of Manhattan. Eventually, she is arrested, only to be celebrated as a local hero.

In an embodiment of Thoreau’s assertion that “under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison,” her arrest itself becomes a turning point as outraged “nobodies” use their civic might to deter city officials from moving forward with Moses’s plan.

The story ends with Jacobs’s move from New York to Toronto, where she continues fighting against the dehumanizing forces of development, modeling the civic courage by which communities stand up for themselves, and inspiring generations to walk wakefully through their cities — “to listen, linger, and think about what they saw.”

Complement the altogether delightful Walking in the City with Jane with cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz on how to walk the city with new eyes, then revisit other wonderful picture-book biographies of great artists, writers, scientists, and revolutionaries: Ada Lovelace, Louise Bourgeois, Frida Kahlo, E.E. Cummings, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Louis Braille, Pablo Neruda, Albert Einstein, John Lewis, Paul Erdős, Nellie Bly, and Muddy Waters.

Illustrations courtesy of Kids Can Press

INTERVIEW: Cooperation Jackson's Kali Akuno - 'We're trying to build vehicles of social transformation'

by Robert Raymond, Shareable: https://www.shareable.net/blog/kali-akuno-qa

We are witnessing the rise of a solidarity economy movement, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, including organizations like Cooperation Worcester in Massachusetts, Cooperation Humboldt and Cooperation Richmond in California, and Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi, among others. One of the leaders of this movement is Kali Akuno, co-founder and co-director of Cooperation Jackson, who recently wrote a book titled "Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi." Akuno was born in Los Angeles, California, and grew up in a working-class community where he watched the devastation brought by deindustrialization and the gang wars that hit L.A. in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. His family was deeply involved in various social movements, particularly the Afrikan People's Party. Akuno was raised in a world marked by violent poverty, as well as radical activism. Akuno moved around in California and eventually wound up in Jackson, Mississippi. We spoke with Akuno about his work with Cooperation Jackson, the broader solidarity economy in general, and what particular challenges working-class African American communities are experiencing in the deep south.

Robert Raymond, Shareable: So how did you end up in Jackson, Mississippi, as director of Cooperation Jackson, having been born and raised in California?

Kali Akuno, co-founder of Cooperation Jackson: So, I have a kind of varied background, particularly leading up to Cooperation Jackson. it really started in the early 2000s when I was the director of the School of Social Justice and Community Development in Oakland, California. During the second year of that project, I just woke up one night with a terrible nightmare. The nightmare was about, what were we really doing to prepare the kids we had recruited, in terms of a job, in terms of opportunity? Just kind of recognizing that given the shift of the economy that much of what we were preparing for was going to be rapidly becoming obsolete and that this was a population that was going to become increasingly more and more disposable.

I just woke up feeling like I kind of set these kids and their parents up with false hopes and false expectations. I just couldn't live with that. So I started on a journey trying to figure out what could be done. What could working-class people — particularly black working-class people — what could we do to put more direct control and power in our own hands, toward shaping the economy, creating the economy that would serve us and serve our needs. That led me back to a road of really looking at and analyzing worker cooperatives and other types of solidarity economy institutions.

So then from that, I was a member of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and the New Afrikan People's Organization, and it was in the course of mid-2000s where we developed what became known as the Jackson-Kush Plan [a vision, starting in 2007, put together by a number of different organizations, including the Jackson's People Assembly, to create jobs with rights, dignity, and justice that generate wealth and distribute it equitably based on the principles of cooperation, sharing, solidarity, and democracy].

One of my major contributions to that plan was really incorporating the Solidarity Economy framework within it and contributing what I had studied from a deep, deep dive into a study of the Mondragon and Emilia Romangna cooperatives — as well as some of the work that was being done by that Zapatistas. So, I just really brought that to the fore and tried to incorporate that within the Jackson-Kush Plan, which eventually wound up becoming a core component of debate and study within that organization. As we launched a major phase of that plan's execution in 2013 with the with the election of Chokwe Lamumba to Mayor of Jackson, one of the main things that we were trying to move and shift as a result of pursuing that office was changing some of the municipal policies to make it so that it would be easier for a grassroots communities, working-class communities, to actually develop cooperatives to make a contribution towards the local economy, but also to put more direct control in worker hands. Unfortunately, Chokwe died shortly after, too soon before we could really execute what we all had in mind in terms of those policies. But the plan to move forward and to try to execute that vision, that moved forward and that became Cooperation Jackson. So that's kind of how I got involved, and that's part of the core genesis of how Cooperation Jackson got started.

So how would you describe Cooperation Jackson today?

Cooperation Jackson is an emerging network of cooperatives supporting solidarity economy institutions that are working to transform Jackson, its economy, and the social relationships. It's starting with the establishment of more equity in the community but overall it's trying to end some of the old school, longstanding differentials in the power that exists in the economy here locally. But to also be a model of the transformation of a more ecologically and regenerative way of doing production and putting the means of production directly in the hands of members of the community. So that's just a short bit of what we're trying to do, what we're aiming to do, and what we're on the on the road to do.

What do we need to know about Jackson, Mississippi, to understand why this project is so important?

Some key things I think to understand about Jackson, Mississippi. Number one: it's the capital of the state of Mississippi, it's a city roughly about 200,000 people. It's over 80 percent black. If you follow the federal regulations, it's overwhelmingly poor with more than twenty percent officially below the federal poverty line. We would argue that the real unemployment rate is between forty and fifty percent.

And then we exist in the larger context. This is the largest city in Mississippi, but it exists as a progressive bubble in a very red and ultra-reactionary state. … I think to understand Jackson and what's been going on here, and some of the success that we've had, is that we've been living with the politics that everyone else is now also experiencing with the Trump regime — the kind of virulent racism, the outright misogyny, you know the viciousness, we've been living with that for quite some time. That has been the norm and order of the day here in Mississippi for well over 50 years. Not much has really changed in that regard into the politics.

It produces a certain level of clarity that you have in the community's minds about what their interests are, and who's opposed to those interests, that I think has made some of the different aspects of the work that we've been trying to do somewhat simple. That clarity enables our work to really move in a way that may be a bit harder in other communities. That's a critical thing to understand. That doesn't mean that there’s still not a great deal of organizing work that has to happen, but for us, trying to convince people that there are problems is the easy part — that you don't really have to sell to anybody. The challenging part is what is your solution and is it viable? That is where there's a lot of organizing work that has to be done to convince people that doing economics in a different way is a viable alternative that can challenge the stranglehold of the powers that be. So, first and foremost, we're putting forward as solid a vision as we can to get people to see a different future as possible, and then to work our way towards building the models and the institutions that we need — to actually live, breathe, practice, and embody the vision that we want to see.

What is the connection between cooperatives and economic democracy in Jackson? And what other new economics interventions are you exploring?

A core element that cooperatives speak to are questions of self-reliance and self-sufficiency, particularly regarding historically oppressed, exploited, and marginalized communities. In order to change that situation it has to start from within, and with the resources and the talents that you yourself possess. We've got to be very clear that there are no external saviors coming to save the day. And that our liberation is in our own hands ultimately. So just starting with the clear foundation which I think Mississippi brings to bear every day, that the search for solidarity really starts within, within your own community and folks who are sharing similar experiences. So that kind of foundation runs through the black community particularly here given the circumstances I just described.

Another key thing that I will say is that the solidarity economy is not something that we have to invent or parachute or convince people of. Given the vast majority of people's economic situation, if there wasn't some level of solidarity that people were practicing — particularly with their families and their extended loved ones — many people just wouldn't make it through the day or the month. You know, paying bills, eating, providing child care support to each other. There's a great deal of solidarity that already exists as an informal solidarity economy, and what we're just trying to do in many respects is to build on that foundation and move it from an informal set of practices and relationships to a more formal set of practices and relationships, and create a dynamic wherein, you know, people can exchange, trade, and barter, and still share with each other across familial relationships or just basic communal relationships. And trying to scale that up so that we can do time-banking, perhaps throughout the city in the next couple of years. We're also working on an alternative currency. You know, so this organic composition already exists in that community and our challenge is how to connect it much more explicitly to the formal piece.

It really sounds like Jackson is up against a lot, with the far right in political power and having been entrenched in a kind of structural racism for decades — centuries. Do you think that things like alternative currencies, or even cooperatives alone, can transform the economy of a place like Jackson?

So, that is where the politics have to come in very clearly, and where we try to interject them very clearly. It's to say that we're not just trying to build cooperatives for cooperatives' sake. We're trying to build vehicles, very explicitly and very intentionally, of social transformation. What we're trying to do is fundamentally change the relations of production in our community. If people can create their own livelihood, I won't say business, because it's more than just business — but if we can create and control own livelihoods, it eliminates the long legacy of exploitation, of abuse, that people — particularly black people — have suffered in this community.

We believe that you have to have very explicit and intentional politics that goes along with the development of cooperative businesses and enterprises, so people are very clear on why they are trying to build a certain level of equity and what we hope that will lead to. You know, if we change the social relationships, we change the balance of power in this society and remove people from being in positions of dependency — particularly economic dependency — and move them to places of being able to exercise real strength because, say, they control their own resources and they're not afraid of somebody kicking them out of their house, or they’re not afraid of somebody firing them from a job. That control gives you far more power to say what you want, and to do what you want, and to exercise your own will when you control those fundamental basics.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

Hear more from Kali Akuno in Upstream's latest episode — part two of their worker coop series. Listen to the episode here.

Header image of Kali Akuno courtesy of Cooperation Jackson.