An empirical difficulty standing between the recommended intervention, spinning, and the expected effect, money in the pockets of the poor, was that it was hard to sell khadi because it was expensive. According to the argument outlined above, one might expect khadi to be cheap, because the inputs required were, according to the argument, virtually costless. But it turned out in practice that khadi was more expensive than mill cloth. (18) The poor people who made it could not afford to wear it. The only way to sell it was to persuade consumers who could afford it to pay more for coarser cloth. 

It should not be surprising that manufactured cloth is cheap and of high quality. The dominant paradigm, i.e. the legal framework that governs the global economy, provides for commercial freedom. It organizes market relationships through the principles of the law of contracts. Nobody has to pay more for coarser cloth. The dynamic implicit in the paradigm drives the entrepreneur to seek the most cost-effective way to produce cloth. What common sense calls inevitable technical progress is therefore guaranteed by the paradigm and its dynamic. Whatever the state of the art may be in any given branch of business, it must necessarily be a technique that makes the product at a cost that allows it to be sold at prices that attract buyers. 

Vandana Shiva’s proposals for local democratic control of the food supply will not escape the dynamics of the paradigm that ensnared M.K. Gandhi’s proposals for local democratic control of the cloth supply. Somebody will be tempted to buy up grain supplies where they are cheap and sell grain where it is dear. Somebody will be tempted to sell food not to those who are most hungry but to those who have the most money to pay for it. Somebody will be tempted –as Vandana Shiva is well aware—not to sow grain at all, but to plant their fields in orchids to be exported and sold to the society elite of the first world. There will be demands like those of Cobden and Bright in England in 1830 to cheapen the price of food for the city masses by selling it at free competitive prices that drive the small producer --and the producer who pays fair wages to labor-- to the wall. There will be a tendency –the same tendency Fernand Braudel identified as a key to the modernizing process that produced capitalism in the 15^th and 16^th centuries—to equalize the price of grain across all markets. This tendency will tend to aggregate under the control of big capital the localities and bio-regions that Shiva’s plan had dis-aggregated in order to form true communities with food security guaranteed by local self-reliance and fraternal outside help when needed. (18A)