NEW INTERNATIONALIST
Serge Latouche, the force behind the French ‘de-growth’ movement, spoke to Julio Godoy in Paris.
He looks like a 70-year-old former professor from the Université de Paris Sud. But the grizzled economist is one of Europe’s leading critics of economic growth and consumerism. Serge Latouche was a late convert to the anti-growth debate. It wasn’t until 2001 that he spoke for the first time at a UNESCO conference in Paris of ‘de-growth’, calling for selective economic contraction to stop environmental decay, using the French word – décroissance.
‘The English translation, “de-growth”, pleased most of the audience, so I stuck with it,’ Latouche recalls. ‘But I would rather speak of “a-growth”, much like we speak of “a-theism”.
“De-growth” is only a catchword.’
Maybe – but in the 10 years since the UNESCO conference, ‘de-growth’ has become a hot idea in France. Even French Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy got the bug, asking Nobel prize-winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen in 2008 to look into new ways of measuring prosperity without relying on the traditional measure of growth, GDP.
Two magazines, La Décroissance and Entropia, help spread the de-growth gospel. And journalists like Le Monde’s Hervé Kempf endorse the idea. Several farmer and consumer organizations rally behind the movement – from the association for organic agriculture to ‘locavores’, people who want to eat seasonal food from their own region.
But Latouche’s influence goes beyond France’s borders. In Italy, the monthly magazine Carta spreads his critique of development and economic growth. And the ‘slow food’ movement is also on the same page. In Spain, several university professors teach courses on de-growth. In the run-up to last December’s Copenhagen climate summit, activists and grassroots environment networks formed Climate Justice Action (CJA), which aims to take ‘the urgent actions needed to avoid catastrophic climate change’, including embracing de-growth as an alternative. There have also been numerous international conferences on de-growth – the last one took place in Barcelona in March 2010. Smaller gatherings recently took place in Vancouver and in Leeds.
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