What we can learn from the third world
Town & Country Planning,
February 2001
Gonoshasthaya Kendra is a former field hospital from the Bangladeshi
war of independence, deep in the countryside. Not the kind of thing you
stumble upon wandering around a modern city.
It has also been converted into a major experimental centre for community
economics, as a network of micro-credit systems, workshops for the very
poor - plus a school and an ayurvedic hospital.
I know this partly because, in December, it was also the venue for one
of the most important international conferences on public health ever
held, the People's Health Assembly, attracting more than 1,500 delegates
from 92 different countries.
But I also know it because my New Economics Foundation colleague Sarah
Burns, who has been working so hard recently to successfully launch Time
Banks UK, was among the 1,500 and among the speakers.
She shared platforms with some of the leading figures in grassroots health,
and I know she had an extraordinary time, sandwiched between hospital
administrators from south London and barefoot medics from the African
bush - not to mention a smattering of be-suited officials from the WHO,
mouthing statistics.
This was also a salutary lesson for me, because I had forgotten for a
moment the number of times I have written articles entitled 'What we can
learn from the third world'. There I was writing funding applications
so that we could take the social currencies idea to the burgeoning cities
of the developing world, when all the time they had their own perfectly
good tradition of the same idea.
Like, for example, the social banking programmes of the Indian state of
Kerala, a series of franchises that post ordinary people's skills and
time so that they can be exchanged without cash.
Or the Pakistani 'time bank' systems used to help needy groups who have
fallen outside the powerful social capital of mainstream society, like
those in a low caste or with mental health problems.
Or, of course, the social banks in Cuba, which mobilise huge sections
of the population to tackle malaria-infested regions.
The point is that, while we've been busy in the rich North developing
all these new kinds of money, time banks and barter currencies - there
is an equally effective tradition around the world which is also emerging.
It includes the highly successful but controversial printed bonds used
in the southern states of Argentina and the complex tlaloc currency (named
after the local rain god) in Mexico City.
One of the most exciting is the Thai bia currency (featured in the latest
New Internationalist magazine), launched with the help of Dutch, Canadian
and Japanese agencies. And the bia is an object lesson in how local currencies
can allow communities to keep money circulating locally by substituting
for expensive imports,
Once the system was up and running in a handful of villages in the Kud
Chum district last year, villagers began to realise how much of their
hard currency was going out of the area to buy their children's sweets
- not to mention what it was doing to their teeth.
The result: they began producing their own locally-produced children's
snacks, sold partly in the national baht currency and partly in bia. That
formed the basis for a market selling locally made shampoo, detergent
and other household necessities.
The downside of the story is that the Bank of Thailand has recently announced
that the bia is illegal, and local police have spread the rumour - effective
whether it's true or not - that possessing bia notes could make anyone
liable for arrest as a threat to national security.
As local aid worker Jeff Powell puts it, the bia "just might result
in a reallocation of wealth, tilting the playing field ever so slightly
towards communities and away from corporations. And maybe, just maybe,
there are some people, there are some people in Thailand and elsewhere
who don't like the idea of village people doing just that."
All the more reason for spreading the idea of parallel currencies until
they become unstoppable. Corporations are issuing them, after all, and
so are cities. We may have to take back the right to create our own money
first in the North before the Southern authorities dare relax enough to
allow it.
But if it makes the unwieldy global financial system just a bit safer
for us all, then even the Bank of Thailand might find itself benefiting
from it.
