Slow Movement News
Turkish fast food: Real food fast
The definition of ‘fast food’ according to the Wikipedia is food cooked in build and in advance, kept warm or re-heated to order....
Slow Food in collaboration with the region of Liguria, has just finished celebr4ating the event Slow Fish 2007. It was a great success with 42,000 visitors, a much higher number than expected. ...
National Sea Change Task Force urges more flood studies
ABC Wed Jul 11 07 The Mayor of Maroochy Shire on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, Joe Natoli, says it could be another 12 months before the CSIRO is able to undertake a flood modelling study in the Sunshine Coast region because the research body is under-funded. ...
Treechangers change country culture
An influx of treechangers into a rural community can keep population levels steady but it can change the needs and expectations within the community. ...
Slow Movement - Strengthening local economy
The current policy context of globalisation and international trade does nothing to support local employment and economic growth. In fact, in many instances it leads to multinationals controlling the fate of millions of people – from local communities to whole nations.
What is needed is a ‘new’ economy – a green economy, which focuses on local production for local use. Where production cannot meet local needs a source is found from the next level
Keeping the money local out ie from as close as possible to the need. Only when necessary would we source goods and services from outside our local area or state or country. In this way, we can have better economic self-reliance at local level and at national level.
To achieve this, our focus needs to be at the local community level not the global level. There are two sayings that are relevant here: “Think global, Act local”; and “Start In My Backyard – SIMBY”. Although we may need to keep the big picture of the global context, we focus on individual action in the local community to foster economic, social and cultural growth. We act with the bigger picture of the community in mind as well. This leads to sustainable community economic development.
The aim of community economic development (CED) is to support businesses to accumulate wealth and to make the local way of life more creative, inclusive, and sustainable. Community economic development involves people working to create economically sustainable communities. Local people build organizations and partnerships that interconnect businesses and other aspects of sustainable communities such as skills and education, housing, health, social connectivity and the environment.
Robley George has written Socioeconomic Democracy: An Advanced Socioeconomic System. Socioeconomic Democracy is a theoretical model socioeconomic system wherein there exist both some form of Universally Guaranteed Personal Income and some form of Maximum Allowable Personal Wealth limit, with both the lower bound on personal material poverty and the upper bound on personal material wealth set and adjusted democratically by all participants of society.