The Rural Voice, 2003-10, Page 10"Our experience
assures lower cost
water wells"
103 YEARS' EXPERIENCE
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6 THE RURAL VOICE
Keith Roulston
The view from the top
Keith
Roulston is
editor and
publisher of
The Rural
Voice. He
lives near
Bluth, ON.
The collapse of Communism in
eastern Europe nearly a decade and a
half ago was seen as the ultimate
defeat of top-down centralized
control of the economy, including
farming. So why are we in the
supposedly free western economies
turning more and more to centralized,
top-down controls?
The West's victory over Comm-
unism was hailed as a triumph for the
open market — for the wisdom of the
individual besting that of an elite
group of leaders sitting in a far-off
headquarters making decisions.
And yet now in every direction
we seem to be adopting systems that
reserve decision making for the
people at the top of the pyramid and
the carrying out of those decisions by
the people below who are left little
room for individualism or innovation.
We seem to have two models for
doing business these days: either the
mega -corporation that extends its
control from top to bottom of the
production and marketing chain or
the franchise, in which the lowest
level of the chain is supposedly
operated by entrepreneurs but their
actions are closely circumscribed by
rigid rules set by those at the top.
"1 he franchise system has been the
darling of the retailing sector for a
quarter century now, ever since
organizations like McDonald's
Restaurants discovered there was a
way to make as much money and
have as much control as a top-down
corporation while having individual
owners invest their own money for
the most essential part of the
business: the local store. If there's
one thing better than having an
employee it's having somebody who
buys his or her own factory or shop
but you still control how they operate
it. Every aspect of operation of a
good franchise is planned by the
"experts" at the top, with schools set
up to teach franchisees how to
manage their stores and manuals that
describe how to deal with virtually
any eventuality.
On the other hand we have the
corporation directing thousands of
employees, often in countries around
the world, through an ever-increasing
number of management systems.
There was a time when we worried
these corporations could become too
powerful. With globalization, they
now claim (like our banks) they must
be able to grow in order to compete.
Less competition brings more
competition? Hmm.
Another excuse — er rationale —
for monopolization, is "conver-
gence". Once we worried, for
instance, about radio or television
stations owning newspapers and vice -
versa. Now in the name of converg-
ence, we see it as efficient that stories
from newspapers are used on the
company's radio and television stat-
ions then recycled on internet web-
sites. The newspaper in turn prom-
otes the radio stations and websites.
Of course it's efficient. Monopo-
lies are always efficient — at the
beginning. I'll bet state farms
produced far more than small peasant
holdings when they were first
introduced in Russia.
Of course along the way they
became highly inefficient because the
people giving the orders weren't in
touch with the day-to-day operations
and couldn't adjust to changing
conditions. The people down at the
bottom doing the work, on the other
hand, felt disenfranchised and help-
less to alter things they saw as wrong.
Our food production system, like
most of our economy, is being
reorganized to efficiently deliver
what the consumer wants, as decided
by people at the top of the production
chain. Are those decision -makers
wise enough to avoid the pitfalls of
centralized planning that killed
communism? And if they're wise
enough now, will their successors be
in a decade or so? Only time will tell
but we seem to be stuck on this path
for good or 111.0