An example of what we mean by 'community owned solutions' is the now infamous 'Parable of the Chilean Potato' promoted by Paul Hawken, a leading environmentalist and social activist. This is how Arie de Geus recounts the parable:

'Parable of the Chilean Potato'

There was a time when the Chilean economy was in trouble because much more was being imported than exported so the economy was crashing. The cause seemed clear: Chile could no longer produce its own food and had to rely increasingly on imports. The US decided to offer a helping hand and dispatched a team of agriculture experts to study the problem.

The team flew to Santiago and then onto to the Andes Mountains. The Andes is where the potato originated; it is still the main food eaten in Chile. Potatoes have grown for thousands of years at considerable heights in the mountains.

The US experts visited the potato fields. The fields were on steep mountainsides. They had highly irregular shapes and were very stony. Within each field, the experts discovered 10 or more varieties of potatoes growing. There were round potatoes and long potatoes, red, white and blue potatoes; and concerning to the experts – some plants which produced many potatoes and others which produced very few. This seemed terribly inefficient.

At harvest time the experts noticed that the villagers were not following a system of digging and appeared to them as almost 'lazy' in the way they collected the potatoes. Many plants in the corners of the oddly shaped fields were overlooked and left to grow wild. By then the experts had reached their conclusions. Their calculations showed, beyond doubt, that the more careful selection of seed potatoes, a switch to higher yielding varieties and more systematic weeding and cropping of the fields would increase the annual crop by at least 15%. Conveniently this equaled the shortfall in the country's food production, the team took their plane back to the US with the feeling of a job well done.

But the advice was wrong. However scientific the experts' approach may have been, they could not compete with the accumulated local experience, based on thousands of years of potato growing in the Andes.

Chilean villagers, based all their lives in the mountains, knew that a wide variety of terrible things could harm their potatoes. There may be a late night frost in spring or a caterpillar plague in summer. Mildew might destroy the plants before any potatoes have formed or winter might come too early. Over the years, each of these problems has taken place from time to time.

Whenever a new problem happens, the villagers walk up to their fields and look everywhere – in the corners, beyond the rocks and amid the weeds – for the surviving potato plants. Only the surviving plants are immune to the latest plague. At harvest time the villagers will carefully dig up the survivors and take the precious potatoes back to their homes. They and their children may have to go through a winter famine, but at least they have next year's potatoes from which a new start can be made. They are not locked into a particular set of farming practices or a particular type of potatoes; they may be inefficient at times, but they have diversity spread into their everyday practice, diversity which allows them to meet future challenges.

Arie de Geus (1997) Adapted from The Living Company, pp. 177-179

Now, after having finished this book, make sure to go back to the main page and complete activity 3.