Here is an excerpt from the Introduction to Thinking Big, Building Small: Low-tech Solutions for Food, Water, and Energy.
The developing world’s problems form a familiar list: poverty and child mortality, malnutrition and disease, the lack or expense of education, deforestation and problems with fuel supply, soil degradation and desertification, an often crippling dependence on chemical fertilizer, a shortage of clean drinking water. Poverty is increasing: World Bank figures state that in 2008 there were 1.4 billion people living below the poverty line of $1.25 per person per day, 430 million more than previously estimated.
Although there are thousands of NGOs working in the developing world, their efforts haven’t always had the success they deserve. There are debates about how aid can be designed and delivered more effectively, but every year there are more hungry people.
This book tells the story of the Full Belly Project, a small NGO based in North Carolina which invents, promotes, and distributes low-tech food-growing and food-processing equipment. The inventor is a Canadian engineer and social entrepreneur named Jock Brandis. (Yes, I’m his sister, which gives me lots of advantages in writing this account.)
The FBP’s work is directed mainly to the developing world, but the “two worlds” image of the planet, while still accurate in some ways, is becoming blurred. In an era of global trade, global climate change, global problems with food and energy and water, connections and even similarities are increasing. As though to emphasize this, in early 2009 the Full Belly Project was contacted by an NGO in North Carolina – FBP’s own back yard – which was working with people who had lost their jobs when the textile industry moved to developing countries. (To see where the jobs went, check the labels on your clothes.) This factor and others are bringing third-world conditions to parts of the United States; according to Bill McKibben, climate change will contribute to the process.
So technology of the kind developed for Africa is now being used by small farmers in North Carolina. “Reverse technology,” Jock Brandis calls it. The Full Belly story is not just about over there. “Africa is the continent where Homo sapiens was born, and with its worn-out soils, fitful rain, and rising population, it could very well offer a glimpse of our species’ future.” Even now, McKibben writes, “more and more Americans no longer live in the rich world; instead, they struggle to get by.” Helping the “poor” world is becoming a way to help the whole planet.
The story of the Full Belly Project – a tale full of weird and quirky stuff, of heart-lifting successes and unaccountable failures, of difficult miracles – therefore has widespread ramifications.
Footnotes:
1 Bill McKibben, Eaarth (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2010). 76. Quoted from “An Even Poorer World”, New York Times, September 2, 2008.
2 Eaarth, passim.
3 Joel K. Bourne, Jr., “The End of Plenty.” In The National Geographic, June 2009, Vol. 215, No. 6, p. 38.
4 Deep Economy: the wealth of community and the durable future (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2007) 103. The reference is to James Lardner, “What’s the Problem?” in James Lardner and David A. Smith, Inequality Matters, (New York: 2005), p. 15.
© Marianne Brandis, 2011.
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