Literacy and structural adjustment: sustaining local communities in global economies.

Lesley Farrell Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences University of Technology, Sydney Lesley.Farrell@uts.edu.au A paper presented to the 2008 AARE conference QUT Brisbane, November 30-December 4, 2008 Sustaining local communities in global economies. In 2008, for the first time in history, there are more people living in urban areas than in rural areas. The move to the cities is partly the culmination of a move that has been going on for centuries, but it is partly also a response to the increasing un-viability of farming in many parts of the world. Food production – farming and food processing and the industries that support it – has traditionally been the major income producing activity of many rural and remote areas. There are many reasons for the move to the cities, some of them more or less entirely determined by local circumstances, but two stand out as generalisable globally. First, global markets have changed they way that food is traded in many parts of the world, and in doing so they have changed the ways in which it is produced. For instance, Sachs reports that in order to sustain themselves and their families, people living in ” remote villages in Africa increasingly deliver flowers, vegetables, or sewn fabrics to markets in Europe, and the United States, linked by cell phones, bar-code monitoring, GPS tags, (to monitor physical location) and other instantaneous tracking devices (Sachs 2008:397). This involves changes to what is produced and how it is produced, it changes what is available to the local community (diminishing access to local goods, increasing access to foreign currency and all that it can buy). It also recalibrates communication practices, foregrounding certain forms of English literacy, especially literate practices generated by remote, technologically enabled engagement. What happens in those African villages is likely to affect vegetable and flower producers in Australia who are increasingly trading in the same global markets. It not only changes what and how they produce, it changes how they trade and how they communicate with their clients. Second, environmental degradation and climate change have made farming an economically marginal activity in many parts of the world. Many farms can no longer offer a current livelihood, let alone sustainable employment for future generations. New forms of farming must be developed and adopted but this alone will not provide work and income for local communities. Fewer people will farm and they will farm differently. It is becoming harder and harder to sustain local regional communities in global economies, although the local communities which are being sustained tend to be the ones that can engage with global economies on something of their own terms. If rural and regional communities are to be sustained then existing industries must be expanded, new forms of production and trading evaluated, new industries must be developed and ways of engaging with global economies that sustain rather than threaten local communities need to be developed. This is environmentally, economically and socially challenging for individuals, communities and policy makers at local and national levels. It is these challenges that workforce education must address. In this paper I want to focus on the role of literate practice in structural adjustment.