When I lived in the Barrio San Pedro in Tepoztlan Mexico in the early 1970s, a peso was a paper bill, and people used used to use pine splinters to illuminate. Today, the villagers need to have an income of hundreds, preferably thousands, of pesos every week to pay for food, electricity, transportation, communication, medicine, cooking gas, school, etc.
Today, the campesinos have hundreds and thousands of pesos going through their hands, yet they are poorer now than they were when a peso was a bill that one folded. Indeed the increasing poverty of the country people is reflected in the great increase in stress level and desperation that is fueling the ever-increasing migration to work as an illegal laborer in the northern neighbor. More than half of the men in the villages are long gone.
I dont think that after 40 years of continuingly decaying physical economy for the marginalized populations that any NGO is about to come swooping down with the solution. (Surprise me!) The solution we desperately need and are committed to realizing, is coming up from the grassroots.
The solution, when it comes, will not be popular, or easy to recognize, because, naturally, it will have defied several sacred cows, and failed to salute various politically-correct theorems and axioms.
Now we send out Warm Greetings !!! to the groups who have submitted proposals to this valuable event - and thanks to the Ashoka and Changemakers staff.
I have read all of the essays I think and there are some VERY interesting people here. We want to applaud and support these worthwhile efforts.
Please rate our AODDM entry. One key feature of the AODDM proposal is that there is NO charge to the user of the Artisan-Owned Direct Distribution Model system and NO licensing. Artcamp is giving away this valuable technology to village-based producer groups, in the spirit of solidarity with our brothers and sisters, village producers, not only from a humanistic motive, yet also because we know that the economic renaissance desperately required by our world, must necessarily be propelled by the artisans, the producers, the transformers of raw material....
The monetarists made everybody crazy with their accounting methods. The inevitable return from virtual reality to ordinary reality, information economy to physical economy will be painful, but this is going to happen.
Artisans will play a key role in the development of our respective national economies, not only our local communities. Globalism has worked in a way that makes it not profitable to be productive Since hawking to tourists is far more profitable, than making handcrafted jewelry. We have forced by the increasingly difficult circumstances in which we find ourselves, to find a way to be productive, and to make that way profitable" That is the crazy challenge the AODDM was created to respond to. Friends. Best wishes from Mexico!
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