Give a Man a Fish…

by Tom Roberts, February 2017

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

The well-known adage reflects a sentiment that has arisen throughout history from many sources; mainly that it is better in the long run to teach someone how to support themselves than it is to continually give them a handout. Yet today much of our energy is spent in an effort to “give people fishes” instead of teaching them the art of fishing. This is because our addiction to short term thinking once again determines how most of our collective energy and social capital gets spent. This is not to say there is no need for band-aids, for short term handouts to those in need, because certainly there is much need for that. But when that is done to the exclusion of all manner of self-sufficiency training and organizing, then we are condemning ourselves to a never-ending downward spiral of helplessness and dependence.

The business of giving a man a fish has grown into an industry as the nation’s economic inequalities increase. There are interests within the poverty industry which are threatened by anything that would minimize the need for handouts—not by the diminishing of the supply side, but by a diminishing of the demand side, diminishing of the numbers of those in need of handouts. Serving the need for charity presents an opportunity for accumulation of power and control that is managed through the control of handouts and alms. This may seem to be a harsh assessment, but it is important that we not ignore the pro-poverty interests of those institutions that have grown up to serve the needs of the poor, even as they would deny those interests exist.

Historically, before the creation and management of the handouts industry, came the control of food pricing. By the early 1900s America’s national cheap food policy became a three-pronged trident: a way of controlling producers, a way of gaining allegiance of [voting] consumers, and a weapon of domestic and foreign policy for dealing with less developed economies at home and worldwide. Thus one can for some purposes consider the Big Ag/USDA cheap food policy and the poverty/welfare industry as two tools for the same insidious purpose of controlling local and worldwide populations by controlling the access to food. Of course those two are not the only players in the game; the Big Pharma and Ag Chem industries, the Real Estate Industry, the Banking and Finance Industry, the Insurance industry, Big Seed conglomerates, and the various merged conglomerations of the above also have their own skin in the game.

At farmers’ markets today there are programs which give free food to folks for merely showing up at market, and other programs that give folks free food as a reward for buying other food at the market. These programs require an overhead of time, energy, and money investments on the part of the market’s producers and their local organizations in order to function. Both are programs that are “giving away fish” instead of teaching shoppers anything at all—except how to go about getting free fish. And, not remarkably, only a small percentage of those eligible actually ever actually participate. Clearly, what we catch is dependent on the bait we use.

Such programs are insidious in two different ways. Both of these aspects operate to the detriment of farmers’ markets and their members.

One way is that they drain energy and resources from small scale food producers and their farmers’ markets by requiring them to meet complicated and expensive requirements in order to participate. This quite effectively diverts organization thinking, energy, and funds away from work on inventing and developing sorely needed changes to the mainstream culture. When it comes to selecting and sourcing food based on factors that are both healthful and good for the local economies, the general public has become woefully under-educated. For sectors of the industrialized Big Food food economy that are threatened by the nationwide rise of myriads of small scale locally controlled decentralized production and marketing outlets of healthful foods, the growth of farmers’ markets and the opportunities they provide for small scale food producers must be quite worrisome, since this growth drains away some portion of the profit potential that reliance on the commodity agriculture model has for so long provided them. Hence anything that puts a reins on the expansion of such micro markets can only be to their benefit.

The second difficulty is that they work to further train the public that food can be cheap or free—that it has with little or no cost and hence is of little or no value. When I first started attending farmers’ markets in the early 1980’s, I saw several farmers in various markets using the “cheap food strategy” to attract the shoppers’ dollars as a strategy to gain market share for themselves. Today, this is less apparent in farmers’ markets, but it still sometimes occurs, and is usually the sign of short-sighted desperation on the part of the seller. We must all train ourselves not to fall for the self-defeating practice of acting on the basis of desperation. We need to present to the public the practice of food production as an honorable and worthy occupation that produces value well worth paying for. This does not include self-defeating ploy of luring shoppers with the promise of cheap or free food, as this works against our better interests as producers.

So how do we ‘teach folks to fish’? Farmers’ markets are an important—although not the only—tool in our new economics tool kit. Set up right on Main Street, farmers’ market are demonstrating that folks can start their own businesses, become remarkably independent producers of foodstuffs, and as well become suppliers of these products to the local populace.

Today we have two very different kinds of farmers’ markets; those which are organized by the market vendors and those which are organized for the market vendors. Although there exists a spectrum of hybrids of these two organizational types, and there is not infrequent movement between them, the effect either type has on its vendors is significant. Market vendors are independent business people. As such, they have plenty to do to run their own businesses. Yet sometimes they arrange themselves to better their own lot by creating a mutual marketing association called a farmers’ market. Since the vendors are the ‘meat’ of the market, it makes sense for them to be in charge of the market. They are the folks on the front lines of sales transactions and apres market discussions with shoppers. They are a public demonstration of what can happen when people ‘learn to fish’. Likewise, self-organized markets demonstrate that this ‘knowing how to’ can be brought to a higher social and economic level than just that of the individual producer.

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