everyday citizens who want to make
tangible investments in local food systems. Feasibility work is underway on
“Slow Munis” (bonds dedicated to
local food investing), in collaboration
with leading investors and land trust
professionals. A number of Slow
Money Alliance founding members
are launching funds, including Farmland L.P. and the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund.
Organic processing companies
can pursue financing through a mix
of investments from local communities and the national Slow Money
Network, along with funding from
foundations that have values-aligned
investing and mission-driven lenders
such as RSF Social Finance. Altogether, it’s quite possible for a company to get the support it needs to
grow organically through the Slow
Money approach.
(continued on page 44)
A Look Inside the Book The following is an excerpt from Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms and Fertility Mattered:
There is such a thing as money that is too fast.
Money that is too fast is money that has become
so detached from people, place and the activities
that it is financing that not even the experts understand it fully. Money that is too fast makes it impossible to say whether the world economy is going
through a correction in the credit markets, triggered by the subprime mortgage crisis, or whether
we are teetering on the edge of something much
deeper and more challenging, tied to petrodollars, derivatives, hedge funds, futures, arbitrage
and a byzantine hyper-securitized system of intermediation that no quant, no program trader, no
speculator, no investment bank CEO, can any longer fully understand or
manage. Just as no one can say precisely where the meat in a hamburger comes from (it
may contain meat from hundreds of animals), no one can say where the money in this or
that security has come from, where it is going, what is behind it, whether—if it were to
be “stopped” and, like a hot potato, held by someone for more than a few instants—it
represents any intrinsic or real value. Money that is too fast creates an environment in
which, when questioned by the press about the outcome of the credit crisis, former
treasury secretary Robert Rubin can only respond, “No one knows.”
