The craft of sustainable development.

• Position: Inter-American System

In Latin America there are some twenty-five million artisans and thousands of middlemen, many of whom are farmers who use craft to supplement their income. Seventy percent of these craftspeople are women, and many are indigenous. These artisans generate millions (perhaps billions) of dollars a year.

Both the artisans and the income they generate, as well as the impact on them of policies related to environment, free trade, health, and other issues are largely invisible in economic and social statistics for a variety of complex reasons. Over the past five years the OAS Department of Cultural Affairs, through its Multinational Project of Popular Culture, has worked to generate information necessary to both artisans and policymakers and, in collaboration with the member states, utilize traditional crafts as the focus for strategies for sustainable development.

In the past, artisans in Latin America have been treated as either part of the national patrimony that must be preserved or as nimble fingers that must be put to work. In both cases their craft has been considered an anachronism, a form of production that has been superseded by industry and an art that teachers nostalgically encourage schoolchildren to practice. The reality is, in fact, quite different. Traditional crafts account for an important element in the export economies of many Latin American nations as well as a large sector of their informal economies.

Why are crafts, a pre-industrial form of manufacture, still alive in the post-industrial world? Artisan production continues to thrive because crafts offer distinct advantages: minimal start-up capital, flexible work hours, ability to work at home, and freedom to manage one's own business. As a means of livelihood, crafts provide an appropriate avenue for creative, independent entrepreneurs. Craftspeople become part of a cultural tradition in which every handmade object reflects the heritage of the past and builds on the work of contemporaries. Whether their products are purely utilitarian or highly expressive, artisans answer a particular need and fill a special role in their communities, which, in turn, confer varying degrees of economic support and status.

Traditional crafts offer the member states a unique focus and an opportunity to develop an integral response to the principal priority concerns of the OAS today: free trade, economic opportunities for women and indigenous groups, protection of the environment, development of...