While the G-20 met in Mexico this week to talk about creating jobs and stabilizing currencies, the experts and their economic indicators continue to forecast a bumpy road ahead. For the world’s six million children who will die of hunger or related causes this year, it’s not just a bumpy road. It’s a dead end. In May, International Co-operative Alliance (ICA) President Pauline Green addressed the annual Cooperative Issues Forum in Washington, DC (www.ocdc.coop). She urged global leaders to “recognize the contribution co-operatives can make to addressing social and economic issues.”
Nelson Kuria, CEO of the CIC Group in Kenya, agrees, and that’s why he’s coming to the Imagine 2012 International Conference on Co-operative Economics and the International Summit of Cooperatives: ‘The Amazing Power of Cooperatives’ (www.2012intlsummit.coop) in Quebec City, Canada, October 6-11. “For fifty years, the African continent has been the guinea pig for various types of economic models that have failed dismally,” says the co-op executive. “Despite the enormous amount of aid poured onto the continent by developed countries and international agencies, and experimentation with ‘structural adjustment’ and ‘trickle down effect’ economic models, hundreds of millions of Africans continue to be ravaged by abject poverty, chronic hunger, and disease. Extreme socioeconomic inequality on the continent, perpetrated by a very small local expatriate elite, has been a recipe for social tension and political instability.”
Mr. Kuria will be in Quebec City this October in order to take an active role in propelling ‘Co-operative Economics’ into greater prominence on the world stage. “I have no doubt that the co-operative model provides a most effective institutional mechanism for responding to the development challenges of the African continent on a sustainable basis. Co-operatives can simultaneously promote wealth creation, poverty alleviation, and more equitable distribution of resources.” Many African countries have seen the success of the co-op model firsthand, which is one reason why so many of these nations will be represented at Imagine 2012 and the Co-op Summit. “The world’s poor people don’t need sympathy and pity,” Nelson Kuria emphasizes. “Rather they need the type of empowerment that true co-operatives facilitate through bringing the majority of the marginalized population into the mainstream of economic activity.”
But the challenge for world leaders—and indeed the whole neoclassical capitalist global community—will be whether they can honestly examine the foundations of their current economic system. “Until they break their connection to the short circuiting economics of profit-maximizing speculation,” explains Imagine 2012 coordinator Tom Webb, “they will remain powerless to fix the enormous problems caused by that system.”
Toward this end, Imagine 2012 will bring together co-operators like Nelson Kuria from around the world with cutting edge, award winning economists focused on creating an alternative to ‘business as usual’. Their objective: begin to frame a set of theories, assumptions and analyses that could become universally accepted as the discipline of Co-operative Economics. “This is the natural progression of an economic model that has been largely developed in situ,” says Tom Webb, who helped create the international Master of Management, Co-operatives and Credit Unions program (www.mmccu.coop). “It’s time to unplug ourselves from the old global economics and plug into the enormous potential of co-operative economics to truly build a better world.”
