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Do-It-Yourself Money And The New Alchemists - growing movement in France known as SEL and a recent history of local currencies
Ecologist, The, March, 2001 by David Boyle
There are alternatives to the global economy. David Boyle explores the worlds local currencies.
It was a small courtroom near the Pyrennees that, in the last few days of 1997, put France's successful new local currency on the map. Three locals, all of them born and bred in the UK -- Sarah Two, Roger Evans and John MacCullough -- were on trial in the local court in Foix, in the rural Ariege departement, for what the prosecutor called 'working illegally'.
It wasn't that they were illegal immigrants or anything -- these are, after all, the days of the EU Single Market. Their crime was to have been paid for work using a local homegrown do-it-yourself money.
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The men had repaired Sarah's roof, but they hadn't been paid in francs -- the 'acceptable' currency recognised by the global economy. They had been paid with 2,000 'grains of salt', the local currency organised by a growing movement in France known as SEL, French for salt but also the acronym of the Societe d'Echanges Local.
Maybe it was because Sarah Two was a member of the local vegan collective that she enraged a local farmer -- though she was also a flautist, drum-maker and former postmistress from High Wycombe. Either way, he reported her to the authorities and the three of them were soon facing a tough sentence of up to 248 hours of community service.
'This kind of behaviour upsets traditional structures and institutionalises a parallel economy,' said the lawyer representing an angry federation of local builders. 'It is destructive to our entire political and social system.'
The prosecutor agreed: the French civil code says that service exchanges have to be of equal value -- and roof tiling and tofu weren't.
'So let's say a SEL is worth one franc,' said the confused magistrate.
'No, it doesn't quite work like that,' said Sarah -- who ended up with a suspended fine and symbolic one franc damages to the local builders' guild, only to be acquitted on appeal.
And it doesn't work like that. SEL is similar to the idea of the local exchange systems LETS, hundreds of which began in the UK in the early 1990s. It means that local people can trade without cash, but using a notional currency that stays circulating locally and doesn't flow out of the area to drag in imports from across the globe.
It also means that people can break out of the global money system as the one and only measuring rod for success.
'Once financial values dominate everything, there's no longer room for anything else,' says Alain Bertrand, the small business adviser who moved from Paris to Ariege to set up the first SEL in 1994. 'Many of the members there also had no money at all. Without SEL they wouldn't be allowed to do anything -- let alone mend their roof. It is inhuman that people are forced to define production and exchange only in money terms.'
The case meant enormous publicity for the whole idea of SEL and Bertrand and his colleagues were overwhelmed by groups across France wanting to start similar systems themselves. Soon there was an organisation dedicated to the idea, SEL'idaire.
Ariege turned out to be particularly fertile soil. Although Tony Blair's family had famously chosen the area for their 1997 summer holiday -- just as the local builders were getting hot under the collar about the roof -- this is a poor rural area of France.
What with farmer Jose Bove's famous attack on McDonald's in Millau, rural France is increasingly aware that the global economy can be devastating to traditional life.
The first SEL was launched with the help of the local Alliance-paysans-ecologistes-consommateurs, as part of their on-going battle with the WTO and GM food. They gathered in the town hall in Foix in December 1994; three months later, 300 people were using grains de sel.
And in the years that followed, Alain's efforts have generated over 350 SEL groups -- nurtured in their early days by SEL'idaire -- and a total of about 45,000 people trading around the country.
'What power have we got to change things?' asks Bertrand. 'The answer has to be bringing things back to local level. By inventing their own specific kind of money, people involved in SEL are able day by day to change the way things are produced and choose their own kind of society.'
Since the trial, even the French Government's attitude has moved from outright hostility to praise from and a request to meet the minister in charge of a new division of the Finance Ministry known as 'Economie Solidaire'.
'The point is that we are able to do something they're not able to do,' says Bertrand. 'When we start a group and it starts to grow, people start to build relationships with each other again, they start to link with other groups -- maybe producing organic food. They start to trust.'
That's the key to the whole idea. Local currencies like SEL, time banks and LETS in Europe -- and the highly successful printed notes known as 'hours' in the USA -- are all in their different ways able to rescue a sense of local community. They rebuild people's confidence, and they re-discover local resources -- often people's skills -- that the global economy simply forgets.
