Critics of “go local” movements warn that buying local deprives people in developing countries of jobs that could lift them out of poverty. But the global economy isn’t that simple.

Buying Local Doesn’t Hurt The Developing World
By Francis Moore Lappe 

There’s only one thing worse for the poor in the Global South, we’re told, than a job in a sweatshop: It’s the alternative — no job. That’s basically what New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof argued recently. If true, then “buy local” campaigns in the North that cut imports could harm the planet’s poorest people.

But before accepting this heart-rending story, let’s ground ourselves in the real global economy.

Shedding corporate-media filters, we see that the poor are not languishing in their sad villages and grimy shantytowns just waiting to be saved by corporate giants from abroad. Many poor people are themselves creating the real job growth in much of the Global South. They are the small shopkeepers, street vendors, and home-based workers whose jobs make up what’s called the “informal economy” not counted by authorities.

In Latin America, 85 percent of new jobs created during the 1990s were in this sector, not the corporate one. Informal jobs account for more than half of all jobs in Latin America and the Caribbean, and as much as 80 percent in parts of Asia and in Africa.

“The informal economy is anything corporations can’t make money on,” social entrepreneur Josh Mailman quipped to me recently. “That’s why it’s invisible.”

Many of the jobs the poor are creating are not what the wealthy minority abroad might imagine — lone individuals scrambling, say, to power a pedicab in Dhaka or sell fruit on streets of Caracas.

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