Paul Cohen:

In an environment where the cost of living is increasing year-by-year, if we're able to increase our capability to produce some self-reliance – so if we are becoming 5 percent self-reliant in the first year – we've gone from 0 to 5 percent. If the cost of living goes up 4 percent, or 4.5 percent, we're still a half percent better, relative to what's happening in the market around us. That's a huge impact on somebody's life in this particular area.

Usually self-reliance comes with self-esteem in some way. It's linked to, "Yes, this is something I want to build. I see my family. I want to create more resources for them. So I'm going to invest in things like trees, and food, and gardening, and those sort of qualitative practices."

People might do a little bit just because of survival, but that level of survival is not building self-reliance. They are different. One is a desperate situation of just, "I want to eat tonight." And the other is, "I am designing more self-reliance for myself."

People living in poverty in this area have, I think, a tremendous capability for surviving with next-to-nothing, but people were not practicing their own self-reliance because they haven't had access to land. Keeping people in that poverty level has been the historical context for at least the last 100 years or so.

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