SELF RELIANCE perate with another district ln the same province; if that does not work have the province search for another province ln the same country; if that does not work cooperate with another country in the same sub-region (meaning Grupo Andino, ASEAN, West or East African communities etc.); If that does not work try the larger region (meaning the ECLA, the ECA, or the ACAFE regions); if that does not work try for Third World cooperation - and ultimately, if that does not work either: some type of limited cooperation with the "developed" countries. in a slmplified version this leads to three levels of selfreliance: local self-rellance, national self-reliance and collective (sub-regional, regional, Third World) self-reliance. The relations among these three levels pose important problems to be studied below. Thus, far from being antithetical to trade and exchange and cooperation a consistent policy of self-reliance may even increase the exchange level in the world because lt will engender much more cooperation between neighbors in geographlcal and social space. The point is not to eut out trade but to redlrect it and recompose lt by glving preference to cooperation with those in the same position, preferring the neighbor to the more distant possibility, cooperatlon to exchange, and intrasector to inter-sector trade. Working outwards from oneself and oneSelf, in a set of oceanic clrcles as Gandhi might have said 13 is Just the opposite of the prevalent pattern today linklng the periphery of the Periphery to the center of the Center through a series of costly middlemen with obvious vested lnterests and power to fii:tht for the status quo. includlnq the lntellectual power to rationalize the status quo through concepts iike comparative advantages.14 At this point let us summarize in a negative way by listing what self-reliance (SR) ls not: u Gandhi may be seen as one of the ideologists, and practltioner,s of selfreilance, through the ssrvodsys concept (local level) and swsdeshl concept (more appiled at the national ievel) - lnslde a pattern of local capltailsm, but of the type normatlvely regulated through what Gandhi refer.red to as the "horizontal" aspects of caste. " The concept ls probably, as Myrdal fias argued, meanlngful for courltrles at the same level of development, maklnçi exohanges of products et roughly spealdng the same level of process•lng, thus balanclng the externalltles and keeplng terms of trade relatlvely stable. 57
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