Fwd: Small Businesses Are Backbone of Communities - long

[Peggy Adams <adams@pcei.org>]

Again, if you're not interested in local economics hit delete now.

For the rest of you here's another provacative article to chew on.  I can't
tell you all how pleased I am that such an active conversation has resulted
from 'Kevorkian Economics!'



Article by Metta Winter from: Agriculture and Life Sciences News, December
1999,
page 3, published by the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Cornell
University, Ithaca, NY 14850.

Small Businesses Are Backbone of Communities

	Big businesses that dominate a town's economy don't have the
community's interests at heart. For communities to thrive, they need
locally owned businesses, including farms.

        Rural sociologist Tom Lyson holds up his U.S. Department of
Commerce badge and says that itís his ticket to the inner sanctum of the
Census Bureau.  Lyson is the first sociologist to get into Census Bureau
data files for the purpose of showing that communities dependent on big
business interests are
less well offóeconomically and in every other wayóthan those built on small
locally owned businesses.

	When the economy of a community is dominated by one large plant or
nationally owned business, it has a dampening effect on organizational life
which, in turn, means less investment in the well-being of the community
over the long haul, explains Lyson, citing an observation that was made in
testimony before Congress at the end of World War II.

        As Lyson tells the story (that has taken him years to piece
together), Congress didnít listen to the sociologists of the day, awarded
munitions contracts to big businesses, and the military-industrial complex
was born. As long as the United States dominated the world economy,
businesses could afford to enter into a tacit social contract with labor
unions. As a result, towns in the industrial heartland, Buffalo and
Syracuse among them, thrived.

	But when the economies of Europe, Japan, and southeast Asia became
strong competitors, American corporations reacted by becoming lean and mean
"they moved out and left these communities to die" Lyson points out.

	That doesn't happen to communities that have a strong, independent,
merchant class of small businesses and family-owned farms. Small business
owners are committed to their communities; they might be fiscally
conservative but nevertheless won't let the schools or the roads go to pot.
What's more, locally owned businesses spawn a rich associational life.
Kiwanis clubs, bowling leagues, hospital auxiliaries, church youth groups,
and choral societies all contribute to better social outcomes such as less
crime, fewer out-of-wedlock births, and better health.

	"But if you're working for Kodak, you are thinking about where
you'll be transferred next. So your allegiance is to the corporation not to
the community," Lyson says.

       "I get really juiced up when I can make the big connections, when
the lightbulb goes on and I can push things a bit" says Lyson, professor of
rural sociology, who, a dozen years ago, found in the college a home for
his controversial ideas. And a place in which to act on them, too.

        Take the theory of civic community, which says that the goal of
agriculture should be more than producing low-cost food and making a
profit; rather that agriculture and food are inextricably linked to the
community and to the environment as well.

	"And if the food costs a little more, then I'll pay more for it, he
adds,"because there is value in having farms out there, value in keeping
people employed in agriculture."

        Lofty idea, a holdover perhaps from Lyson's early days as a warrior
in President Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty. But how likely is it to fly
at a time when the middle class in America is struggling financially to
keep its head above water?

        Lyson has put the theory of civic community into action as director
of Farming Alternatives: Cornell's Agriculture and Development and
Diversification Program. The program is a $250,000-a-year think tank that
promotes community agricultural development through sophisticated direct
marketing of locally grown, value-added products; what's known as the New
Agriculture.

        Examples include fresh fruit and vegetable stands at travel plazas
on the New York State Thruway, farmers' markets, community-supported
agriculture (CSAs) where individuals buy a share of a farmer's crop,
restaurants featuring New York State grown produce and wines, and
agritourism operations such as U-pick pumpkin farms featuring hay rides and
homemade pies.

        Lyson contends that in the Northeast we've paid a lot of attention
to industrial, mass production agriculture by increasing yields, increasing
milk output, making farms bigger, and making farmers into managers. But if
this is all we rely on, we'll get beaten by global-scale processors from
California, Florida, Texas, and Mexico. Lyson says that instead of putting
all its economic eggs in one basket, New York should be simultaneously
focusing on bringing production and consumption closer together.

        New York State imports an estimated 85 percent of its food and that
percentage would be closer to 95 were it not for milk.

	"New York City is at the center of the biggest consumer market in
the world, stretching from Boston to Washington, and we've hardly begun to
exploit it," Lyson says.'Why should the food eaten in Manhattan come from
California, when a lot of it could be grown next door in the Hudson Valley?"

       By developing unique, regionally identified products and cultivating
local and regional markets, the potential is unlimited. Lyson points to
cheese as an example.
	"The biggest economic multiplier is with a cheese plant," he says,
explaining that in the manufacture of cheese, every dollar rotates back six
times through the community (to the farmer, the veterinarian, the feed
seller, the milk hauler, etc.).  "So we need to think creatively about
cheese just like
we did with the wine industry. Because of the Farm Family Winery Act of
1975, there are more than 100 wineries in the state now. Why don't we do
this with cheese plants and have a wine and cheese trail?"

        In the long run, Lyson says, Farming Alternatives establishes an
agriculture that will be food for communities and the environment.

	He points out further, "The New Agriculture isnít an act of
resistance to industrialized agriculture; rather it's an opportunity for a
small, local, consumer-driven food system that disappeared a century ago to
come back and exist with it side by side."
>
>Metta Winter

Peggy Adams

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