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TechnoratiManufacturing a Food Crisis
When tens of thousands of people staged demonstrations in Mexico last year to protest a 60 percent increase in the price of tortillas, many analysts pointed to biofuel as the culprit. Because of US government subsidies, American farmers were devoting more and more acreage to corn for ethanol than for food, which sparked a steep rise in corn prices. The diversion of corn from tortillas to biofuel was certainly one cause of skyrocketing prices, though speculation on biofuel demand by transnational middlemen may have played a bigger role. However, an intriguing question escaped many observers: how on earth did Mexicans, who live in the land where corn was domesticated, become dependent on US imports in the first place?
The Mexican food crisis cannot be fully understood without taking into account the fact that in the years preceding the tortilla crisis, the homeland of corn had been converted to a corn-importing economy by "free market" policies promoted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and Washington. The process began with the early 1980s debt crisis. One of the two largest developing-country debtors, Mexico was forced to beg for money from the Bank and IMF to service its debt to international commercial banks. The quid pro quo for a multibillion-dollar bailout was what a member of the World Bank executive board described as "unprecedented thoroughgoing interventionism" designed to eliminate high tariffs, state regulations and government support institutions, which neoliberal doctrine identified as barriers to economic efficiency.
Interest payments rose from 19 percent of total government expenditures in 1982 to 57 percent in 1988, while capital expenditures dropped from an already low 19.3 percent to 4.4 percent. The contraction of government spending translated into the dismantling of state credit, government-subsidized agricultural inputs, price supports, state marketing boards and extension services. Unilateral liberalization of agricultural trade pushed by the IMF and World Bank also contributed to the destabilization of peasant producers.
This blow to peasant agriculture was followed by an even larger one in 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect. Although NAFTA had a fifteen-year phaseout of tariff protection for agricultural products, including corn, highly subsidized US corn quickly flooded in, reducing prices by half and plunging the corn sector into chronic crisis. Largely as a result of this agreement, Mexico's status as a net food importer has now been firmly established.
With the shutting down of the state marketing agency for corn, distribution of US corn imports and Mexican grain has come to be monopolized by a few transnational traders, like US-owned Cargill and partly US-owned Maseca, operating on both sides of the border. This has given them tremendous power to speculate on trade trends, so that movements in biofuel demand can be manipulated and magnified many times over. At the same time, monopoly control of domestic trade has ensured that a rise in international corn prices does not translate into significantly higher prices paid to small producers.
It has become increasingly difficult for Mexican corn farmers to avoid the fate of many of their fellow corn cultivators and other smallholders in sectors such as rice, beef, poultry and pork, who have gone under because of the advantages conferred by NAFTA on subsidized US producers. According to a 2003 Carnegie Endowment report, imports of US agricultural products threw at least 1.3 million farmers out of work -- many of whom have since found their way to the United States.
Prospects are not good, since the Mexican government continues to be controlled by neoliberals who are systematically dismantling the peasant support system, a key legacy of the Mexican Revolution. As Food First executive director Eric Holt-Giménez sees it, "It will take time and effort to recover smallholder capacity, and there does not appear to be any political will for this -- to say nothing of the fact that NAFTA would have to be renegotiated."
Creating a Rice Crisis in the Philippines
That the global food crisis stems mainly from free-market restructuring of agriculture is clearer in the case of rice. Unlike corn, less than 10 percent of world rice production is traded. Moreover, there has been no diversion of rice from food consumption to biofuels. Yet this year alone, prices nearly tripled, from $380 a ton in January to more than $1,000 in April. Undoubtedly the inflation stems partly from speculation by wholesaler cartels at a time of tightening supplies. However, as with Mexico and corn, the big puzzle is why a number of formerly self-sufficient rice-consuming countries have become severely dependent on imports.
The Philippines provides a grim example of how neoliberal economic restructuring transforms a country from a net food exporter to a net food importer. The Philippines is the world's largest importer of rice. Manila's desperate effort to secure supplies at any price has become front-page news, and pictures of soldiers providing security for rice distribution in poor communities have become emblematic of the global crisis.
The broad contours of the Philippines story are similar to those of Mexico. Dictator Ferdinand Marcos was guilty of many crimes and misdeeds, including failure to follow through on land reform, but one thing he cannot be accused of is starving the agricultural sector. To head off peasant discontent, the regime provided farmers with subsidized fertilizer and seeds, launched credit plans and built rural infrastructure. When Marcos fled the country in 1986, there were 900,000 metric tons of rice in government warehouses.
Paradoxically, the next few years under the new democratic dispensation saw the gutting of government investment capacity. As in Mexico the World Bank and IMF, working on behalf of international creditors, pressured the Corazon Aquino administration to make repayment of the $26 billion foreign debt a priority. Aquino acquiesced, though she was warned by the country's top economists that the "search for a recovery program that is consistent with a debt repayment schedule determined by our creditors is a futile one." Between 1986 and 1993 8 percent to 10 percent of GDP left the Philippines yearly in debt-service payments -- roughly the same proportion as in Mexico. Interest payments as a percentage of expenditures rose from 7 percent in 1980 to 28 percent in 1994; capital expenditures plunged from 26 percent to 16 percent. In short, debt servicing became the national budgetary priority.
Spending on agriculture fell by more than half. The World Bank and its local acolytes were not worried, however, since one purpose of the belt-tightening was to get the private sector to energize the countryside. But agricultural capacity quickly eroded. Irrigation stagnated, and by the end of the 1990s only 17 percent of the Philippines' road network was paved, compared with 82 percent in Thailand and 75 percent in Malaysia. Crop yields were generally anemic, with the average rice yield way below those in China, Vietnam and Thailand, where governments actively promoted rural production. The post-Marcos agrarian reform program shriveled, deprived of funding for support services, which had been the key to successful reforms in Taiwan and South Korea. As in Mexico Filipino peasants were confronted with full-scale retreat of the state as provider of comprehensive support -- a role they had come to depend on.
And the cutback in agricultural programs was followed by trade liberalization, with the Philippines' 1995 entry into the World Trade Organization having the same effect as Mexico's joining NAFTA. WTO membership required the Philippines to eliminate quotas on all agricultural imports except rice and allow a certain amount of each commodity to enter at low tariff rates. While the country was allowed to maintain a quota on rice imports, it nevertheless had to admit the equivalent of 1 to 4 percent of domestic consumption over the next ten years. In fact, because of gravely weakened production resulting from lack of state support, the government imported much more than that to make up for shortfalls. The massive imports depressed the price of rice, discouraging farmers and keeping growth in production at a rate far below that of the country's two top suppliers, Thailand and Vietnam.
The consequences of the Philippines' joining the WTO barreled through the rest of its agriculture like a super-typhoon. Swamped by cheap corn imports -- much of it subsidized US grain -- farmers reduced land devoted to corn from 3.1 million hectares in 1993 to 2.5 million in 2000. Massive importation of chicken parts nearly killed that industry, while surges in imports destabilized the poultry, hog and vegetable industries.
During the 1994 campaign to ratify WTO membership, government economists, coached by their World Bank handlers, promised that losses in corn and other traditional crops would be more than compensated for by the new export industry of "high-value-added" crops like cut flowers, asparagus and broccoli. Little of this materialized. Nor did many of the 500,000 agricultural jobs that were supposed to be created yearly by the magic of the market; instead, agricultural employment dropped from 11.2 million in 1994 to 10.8 million in 2001.
The one-two punch of IMF-imposed adjustment and WTO-imposed trade liberalization swiftly transformed a largely self-sufficient agricultural economy into an import-dependent one as it steadily marginalized farmers. It was a wrenching process, the pain of which was captured by a Filipino government negotiator during a WTO session in Geneva. "Our small producers," he said, "are being slaughtered by the gross unfairness of the international trading environment."
The Great Transformation
The experience of Mexico and the Philippines was paralleled in one country after another subjected to the ministrations of the IMF and the WTO. A study of fourteen countries by the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization found that the levels of food imports in 1995-98 exceeded those in 1990-94. This was not surprising, since one of the main goals of the WTO's Agreement on Agriculture was to open up markets in developing countries so they could absorb surplus production in the North. As then-US Agriculture Secretary John Block put it in 1986, "The idea that developing countries should feed themselves is an anachronism from a bygone era. They could better ensure their food security by relying on US agricultural products, which are available in most cases at lower cost."
What Block did not say was that the lower cost of US products stemmed from subsidies, which became more massive with each passing year despite the fact that the WTO was supposed to phase them out. From $367 billion in 1995, the total amount of agricultural subsidies provided by developed-country governments rose to $388 billion in 2004. Since the late 1990s subsidies have accounted for 40 percent of the value of agricultural production in the European Union and 25 percent in the United States.
The apostles of the free market and the defenders of dumping may seem to be at different ends of the spectrum, but the policies they advocate are bringing about the same result: a globalized capitalist industrial agriculture. Developing countries are being integrated into a system where export-oriented production of meat and grain is dominated by large industrial farms like those run by the Thai multinational CP and where technology is continually upgraded by advances in genetic engineering from firms like Monsanto. And the elimination of tariff and nontariff barriers is facilitating a global agricultural supermarket of elite and middle-class consumers serviced by grain-trading corporations like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland and transnational food retailers like the British-owned Tesco and the French-owned Carrefour.
There is little room for the hundreds of millions of rural and urban poor in this integrated global market. They are confined to giant suburban favelas, where they contend with food prices that are often much higher than the supermarket prices, or to rural reservations, where they are trapped in marginal agricultural activities and increasingly vulnerable to hunger. Indeed, within the same country, famine in the marginalized sector sometimes coexists with prosperity in the globalized sector.
This is not simply the erosion of national food self-sufficiency or food security but what Africanist Deborah Bryceson of Oxford calls "de-peasantization" -- the phasing out of a mode of production to make the countryside a more congenial site for intensive capital accumulation. This transformation is a traumatic one for hundreds of millions of people, since peasant production is not simply an economic activity. It is an ancient way of life, a culture, which is one reason displaced or marginalized peasants in India have taken to committing suicide. In the state of Andhra Pradesh, farmer suicides rose from 233 in 1998 to 2,600 in 2002; in Maharashtra, suicides more than tripled, from 1,083 in 1995 to 3,926 in 2005. One estimate is that some 150,000 Indian farmers have taken their lives. Collapse of prices from trade liberalization and loss of control over seeds to biotech firms is part of a comprehensive problem, says global justice activist Vandana Shiva: "Under globalization, the farmer is losing her/his social, cultural, economic identity as a producer. A farmer is now a 'consumer' of costly seeds and costly chemicals sold by powerful global corporations through powerful landlords and money lenders locally."
African Agriculture: From Compliance to Defiance
De-peasantization is at an advanced state in Latin America and Asia. And if the World Bank has its way, Africa will travel in the same direction. As Bryceson and her colleagues correctly point out in a recent article, the World Development Report for 2008, which touches extensively on agriculture in Africa, is practically a blueprint for the transformation of the continent's peasant-based agriculture into large-scale commercial farming. However, as in many other places today, the Bank's wards are moving from sullen resentment to outright defiance.
At the time of decolonization, in the 1960s, Africa was actually a net food exporter. Today the continent imports 25 percent of its food; almost every country is a net importer. Hunger and famine have become recurrent phenomena, with the past three years alone seeing food emergencies break out in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, and Southern and Central Africa.
Agriculture in Africa is in deep crisis, and the causes range from wars to bad governance, lack of agricultural technology and the spread of HIV/AIDS. However, as in Mexico and the Philippines, an important part of the explanation is the phasing out of government controls and support mechanisms under the IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programs imposed as the price for assistance in servicing external debt.
Structural adjustment brought about declining investment, increased unemployment, reduced social spending, reduced consumption and low output. Lifting price controls on fertilizers while simultaneously cutting back on agricultural credit systems simply led to reduced fertilizer use, lower yields and lower investment. Moreover, reality refused to conform to the doctrinal expectation that withdrawal of the state would pave the way for the market to dynamize agriculture. Instead, the private sector, which correctly saw reduced state expenditures as creating more risk, failed to step into the breach. In country after country, the departure of the state "crowded out" rather than "crowded in" private investment. Where private traders did replace the state, noted an Oxfam report, "they have sometimes done so on highly unfavorable terms for poor farmers," leaving "farmers more food insecure, and governments reliant on unpredictable international aid flows." The usually pro-private sector Economist agreed, admitting that "many of the private firms brought in to replace state researchers turned out to be rent-seeking monopolists."
The support that African governments were allowed to muster was channeled by the World Bank toward export agriculture to generate foreign exchange, which states needed to service debt. But, as in Ethiopia during the 1980s famine, this led to the dedication of good land to export crops, with food crops forced into less suitable soil, thus exacerbating food insecurity. Moreover, the World Bank's encouragement of several economies to focus on the same export crops often led to overproduction, triggering price collapses in international markets. For instance, the very success of Ghana's expansion of cocoa production triggered a 48 percent drop in the international price between 1986 and 1989. In 2002-03 a collapse in coffee prices contributed to another food emergency in Ethiopia.
As in Mexico and the Philippines, structural adjustment in Africa was not simply about underinvestment but state divestment. But there was one major difference. In Africa the World Bank and IMF micromanaged, making decisions on how fast subsidies should be phased out, how many civil servants had to be fired and even, as in the case of Malawi, how much of the country's grain reserve should be sold and to whom.
Compounding the negative impact of adjustment were unfair EU and US trade practices. Liberalization allowed subsidized EU beef to drive many West African and South African cattle raisers to ruin. With their subsidies legitimized by the WTO, US growers offloaded cotton on world markets at 20 percent to 55 percent of production cost, thereby bankrupting West and Central African farmers.
According to Oxfam, the number of sub-Saharan Africans living on less than a dollar a day almost doubled, to 313 million, between 1981 and 2001 -- 46 percent of the whole continent. The role of structural adjustment in creating poverty was hard to deny. As the World Bank's chief economist for Africa admitted, "We did not think that the human costs of these programs could be so great, and the economic gains would be so slow in coming."
In 1999 the government of Malawi initiated a program to give each smallholder family a starter pack of free fertilizers and seeds. The result was a national surplus of corn. What came after is a story that should be enshrined as a classic case study of one of the greatest blunders of neoliberal economics. The World Bank and other aid donors forced the scaling down and eventual scrapping of the program, arguing that the subsidy distorted trade. Without the free packs, output plummeted. In the meantime, the IMF insisted that the government sell off a large portion of its grain reserves to enable the food reserve agency to settle its commercial debts. The government complied. When the food crisis turned into a famine in 2001-02, there were hardly any reserves left. About 1,500 people perished. The IMF was unrepentant; in fact, it suspended its disbursements on an adjustment program on the grounds that "the parastatal sector will continue to pose risks to the successful implementation of the 2002/03 budget. Government interventions in the food and other agricultural markets... [are] crowding out more productive spending."
By the time an even worse food crisis developed in 2005, the government had had enough of World Bank/IMF stupidity. A new president reintroduced the fertilizer subsidy, enabling 2 million households to buy it at a third of the retail price and seeds at a discount. The result: bumper harvests for two years, a million-ton maize surplus and the country transformed into a supplier of corn to Southern Africa.
Malawi's defiance of the World Bank would probably have been an act of heroic but futile resistance a decade ago. The environment is different today, since structural adjustment has been discredited throughout Africa. Even some donor governments and NGOs that used to subscribe to it have distanced themselves from the Bank. Perhaps the motivation is to prevent their influence in the continent from being further eroded by association with a failed approach and unpopular institutions when Chinese aid is emerging as an alternative to World Bank, IMF and Western government aid programs.
Food Sovereignty: An Alternative Paradigm?
It is not only defiance from governments like Malawi and dissent from their erstwhile allies that are undermining the IMF and the World Bank. Peasant organizations around the world have become increasingly militant in their resistance to the globalization of industrial agriculture. Indeed, it is because of pressure from farmers' groups that the governments of the South have refused to grant wider access to their agricultural markets and demanded a massive slashing of US and EU agricultural subsidies, which brought the WTO's Doha Round of negotiations to a standstill.
Farmers' groups have networked internationally; one of the most dynamic to emerge is Via Campesina (Peasant's Path). Via not only seeks to get "WTO out of agriculture" and opposes the paradigm of a globalized capitalist industrial agriculture; it also proposes an alternative -- food sovereignty. Food sovereignty means, first of all, the right of a country to determine its production and consumption of food and the exemption of agriculture from global trade regimes like that of the WTO. It also means consolidation of a smallholder-centered agriculture via protection of the domestic market from low-priced imports; remunerative prices for farmers and fisherfolk; abolition of all direct and indirect export subsidies; and the phasing out of domestic subsidies that promote unsustainable agriculture. Via's platform also calls for an end to the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights regime, or TRIPs, which allows corporations to patent plant seeds; opposes agro-technology based on genetic engineering; and demands land reform. In contrast to an integrated global monoculture, Via offers the vision of an international agricultural economy composed of diverse national agricultural economies trading with one another but focused primarily on domestic production.
Once regarded as relics of the pre-industrial era, peasants are now leading the opposition to a capitalist industrial agriculture that would consign them to the dustbin of history. They have become what Karl Marx described as a politically conscious "class for itself," contradicting his predictions about their demise. With the global food crisis, they are moving to center stage -- and they have allies and supporters. For as peasants refuse to go gently into that good night and fight de-peasantization, developments in the twenty-first century are revealing the panacea of globalized capitalist industrial agriculture to be a nightmare. With environmental crises multiplying, the social dysfunctions of urban-industrial life piling up and industrialized agriculture creating greater food insecurity, the farmers' movement increasingly has relevance not only to peasants but to everyone threatened by the catastrophic consequences of global capital's vision for organizing production, community and life itself.
Walden Bello is senior analyst at and former executive director of Focus on the Global South, a research and advocacy institute based at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. He is the author or co-author of many books on politics and economic issues in the Philippines and Asia, including, most recently, Deglobalization (Zed), and recipient of the 2003 Right Livelihood Award, also known as the "Alternative Nobel Prize." In March he was named Outstanding Public Scholar for 2008 by the International Studies Association.
Copyright © 2008 The Nation
30 Comments so far
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You say "the practicality is simple chemical fertilizers work and people don't starve." but that is only one aspect, organic farming methods in Kenya increase yields up to 100% without using expensive chemical fertilizers that can have a detrimental effect on human health and th eenvironment: See www.biotech-info.net/ordinary_miracle.html
In addition, 400 scientists from around the world have recently pointed out that a shift to organic fertilizers would assist in turning around the currect food crises.
Informative article & discussion.
To understand the impact of bio-fuels on food supplies one needs the numbers on supply & demand which are lacking both historical and present. Since these numbers are usually years behind, history will determine the facts of increased demand from bio-fuels or decreased supply. If the decreased supply comes about from monopolies gouging the consumers & starving the poor should the world court prosecute the corporate leaders for murder? Since rice is not used in bio-fuels what's up with that supply/demand equation?
I found the term Neo-liberalization of trade offensive as most of the cited changes happened during the Reagan administration. I would have called them neo-conservative & totally pro big business.
About Malawi the reason they could thumb their noses at the World Bank is their international debt was forgiven (~2003) thus they were no longer beholden to the bankers. And no they do not use organic fertilizers. They burn last year's crop to kill the bugs (I refer to this as releasing the topsoil) we need to keep in mind they are generally uneducated less than 4% go to high school (I though high school there for two years). They are traditional subsistence farmers with a hoe on depleted land. While there are many technical & educational methods to increase yield, the practicality is simple chemical fertilizers work and people don't starve.
While using Malawi as an example we need to remember Zimbabwe which kicked the white farmers off the land & gave it to Mugabe's cronies (is not democracy great). Now food production is at an all time low. Technology & larger farms were replaced with subsistence farming to the determent of agriculture production.
We westerners need to lobby out government to stop the subsidies of farmers. It repeatedly has been shown to keep the third world countries farmers poor.
good2go
Here is an authorative article on biofuels: "Biofuels--Myths of the Agro-fuels Transition"
http://www.foodfirst.org/node/1711
Also keep in mind that just because the Malawian biofuels/food story was widely reported does not make it true, as it was also widely reported that Saddam Hussien had weapons of mass destruction.
You need to know which sources you can trust.
good2go
I question your logic, you say "Plenty of stories out there revealing biofuels not the reason for global food shortages". Who are these stories put out by? George W Bush incorporated? Monanto? Firms trying to sell biofuels?
You ignore the four year study done by 400 agricultural experts I posted with a link to, why?
jp:
In re: "And here I thought they hate us because we are free"
What makes you think we are "free?"
A Taynton
Plenty of stories out there revealing biofuels not the reason for global food shortages. You just have to cut through msm to find them for the most part. Did you read Bello's piece? It pretty much shreds that myth.
Your other statements do have validity. But I do believe the Malawi success story, it was widely printed elsewhere if you'd care to look. Unfortunately as you do, I part company with Biopact on inorganic fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides and their benefits- they seem to think there are some. I don't think they are a corporate bunch, though, I don't think they approve of GMO's and such or Monsanto. But I could be wrong.
I think the success factor in the Malawi story has more to do with telling World Bank to go take a leap and then going ahead and growing enough food for themselves. My argument is any country can do that, if allowed the means and so forth.
Please note the alcoholcanbeagas.com link has an advisory board from across the world, all full of people who are not corporate and only want to see more people benefit from making their own liquid fuel in conjunction with producing more food. Africa and South America are primed to do it. Southeast Asia as well.
Tech2, this same said link mentions CSE's, community supported energy coops. So coops are indeed a good option. Few people want to be farmers, but this may have to change with rising food prices. It'll be where the jobs are.
link
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article3943779.ece
As the rice shortage has unfolded this year, Japan sought permission to re-export the rice their people did not like, preferring Japanese grown rice, and so it was fed to pigs instead. They were required to buy from the US by WTO. Permission to re-export it countries in need of rice like the Philipines was required from the US, and refused.
"If that distortion were removed, said researchers at the Washington-based Centre for Global Development, and the 1.5 million tons of unwanted US rice were released from Japan's storage silos, the crisis that has sent the price of the crop that feeds half the world would be instantly solved. Rice prices, suggested the group's forecasts, could even halve between now and June.
Standing in the way of that, however, is a rule that prevents Japan from re-exporting its reserves of US rice without permission from Washington – permission that has not been forthcoming until now, but which The Times has learned may be just hours away from being granted."
The good news is it might be granted soon. The bad news is obvious. WTF would we delay approval?
rtdury- an excellent summary- thanks
jude11 thanks pal
everyone- i forgot my customary Vandana Shiva link. here
http://www.navdanya.org/earthdcracy/index.htm
Too much freedom for the big trade consortiums, too many imports of necessities in too many places, too much exporting of decent jobs, too much lionizing trade, free trade leading to development and prosperity. Yes, but development and prosperity for whom? It's time to start implementing parecon, everyone who works should get some ownership of the enterprise.
A good detailed article, without the typical fanatic progressive shock headline and article full of abusive language! There may still be hope for this website...
Its easy to fall into the trap of hating this corporate dominated system, and its destructive power, but how do we get out of this mess?
How can anyone compete with subsidized industrial agriculture, while still working within the economic system as it is today? IF you want to know where Mexico is headed, just look at rural America - small family farms disappeared - only farmers who go big or specialize survive.
Its impossible to compete on the basis of price alone.
Also, these large corporations are skillfully limiting access to seed and fertilizer.
There is a solution that the author touched on, and that is the Co-op. Co-ops are a way to let the individual farmers
work independently on small plots, but also provide the ability to market product in direct competition to the big corporations.
Problem in North America is - few people want to be farmers.
Kids want to be movie stars, or rock musicians, or international corporate executives. There is still hope in places like Mexico and other developing countries.
People banded together in co-ops during the depresssion of 1930's and they ran successfully throughout North America for many years.
Lets look at the weaknesses of global agribusiness corporations:
1)they treat farming like manufacturing, and expect the same economy of scale, but we are now finding out this does not necessarily work.
2) in terms of quality, a smaller operation can do it cheaper. Maintaining quality in large operations has resulted in overdependence on chemicals and fertilizer.
3) large agribusiness is hooked on production levels, so even the seeds they develop are designed not for health, but for production/storage/yield characteristics. Example, many high yield broccili varieties result in plants with a very high water content instead of a smaller product with concentrated nutrients. Also some tomato varieties with excellent shelf life are popular, but the chemicals that give them this property are toxic to the human body.
Large Agribusiness strong points:
1) unlike ITSA...WORLD.. above who had a chance to taste a real cherry - the general public does not know what high quality produce and meat tastes like so they don't know any better, so they buy the garbage produced by corporate agriculture.
2) even though a small operation can compete on quality - the margins are so small that the small operation cannot make enough money to live on.
3) corporations have the money to get goverment on their side.
4) BIGGEST ADVANTAGE is, PACKAGING and MARKETING. Large corporations can take lower quality food and package it for very reliable storage, and can transport it right close to where you live.
My opinion is this:
1) high quality food is really expensive to produce. Weather, competition from everything from deer to insects and unpredictable weather makes it a tough business.
2)the average consumer is not willing to pay for quality.
2) the fact is most people in North America just want to go to the grocery store and buy whatever is available and within their price ceiling.
3)Large corporations are pretty good at doing this.
We eat what we are.
good2go
I am suspicious of the link in which you say "The following is a good piece about Malawi's recent success."
http://biopact.com/2007/12/malawis-super-harvest-proves-anti.html
First of all I have learned when vested interests start knocking NGO's they have an agenda up their sleeve. Biopact want to sell biofuel from Africa to Europe. They will spin us that it is beneficail to the world's poor. The GM seed industry have been putting out fake "GM success stories" for years.
Secondly, what Biopact claim goes against a four year study done done by 400 agricultural experts from around the world. See:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/16/food.biofuels
My fist impression is the Biopact article on Malawi is nothing but corporate spin.
Mike Corbiel-
- the article does say the Malawians are being subsidised to use inorganic fertilizer.
We have to keep a very vigilent eye open for corporate spin, the Malawian article is selling us on the idea of biofuels and agri-business products.
One of the main causes of the current food crises is food crops for biofuels, ask any economist. Biofuels from crops are good for the global seed and synthetic fertilizer companies.
Hello abuelito,
I think I remember you from the once-interesting Global Affairs :-) Keep up the good work :-) - desoc111
good2go,
Yes, thanks for the links, and with this said, there is a little more that I believe to be fitting to say.
*) There is absolutely NO need for synthetic chemical fertilizers and I hope that this shit isn't what the people of Malawi are using. The use of the crap should be banned by all govts. There's no use for it that makes it such that it can't be easily enough replaced with wholly natural, and preferably organic, fertilizers. Have they tried growing buckwheat and hemp, f.e.; for these are good to grow when it's for food or other practical uses, but also for replenishing soil fertility. I've known, a little, a local community of Claritan or Claretan nuns (Clarisses, the name used in french anyway, though apparently also by some anglophones or English-speaking people, and for the very contemplative 'Franciscan sisters', aka 'Poor Clares', anyway); well, they did not try to grow any food one year, though maybe this lasted for two. Instead, they were growing grain and I asked them why, given that they normally grew a very good variety of vegetables and possibly herbs or spices for their community. They told me this was buckweat and being grown for the specific purpose of re-enrichening their gardens' soil.
It worked very well, so I don't need to look elsewhere to find evidence showing that, indeed, growing buckwheat is an excellent way of re-fertilizing depleted soil. And if that's true, then I expect that it'd be true whereever the grain can grow.
Should that not be possible in some places where soils need to be re-enriched, then there are other wholly Natural ways of achieving the same end.
*) 'Peak oil' is likely all BS; just another prank to screw the people of Earth, for getting them to believe this bs makes people more ammenable to accepting to pay ever higher fuel prices. F. William Engdahl has a good article with a copy at www.globalresearch.ca and via the author's index for him there. It's about how Russia became a major OIL producer, based on the scientifically determined theory that OIL is NOT fossil ... anything at all, but of geological formation and starting from very DEEP within the planet. Not many, but a few geologists in the USA have said that the theory applied by Russia makes much more sense than the fossil theory does, and I had such a thought long enough ago, but certainly don't possess the scientific education to be able to go any further than just to think the fossil theory is questionable; minimally. Otoh, I'd like to obtain the scientific details on how the whole geological formation of OIL happens, from very beginning until it becomes petrol. oil.
It's much easier for the geological theory to be considered credible, as opposed to the fossil theory, for it's VERY doubtful that the HUGELY VAST amounts of petrol. oil could have been generated as per fossil theory of origin. Or maybe there can be a combination, while the geological formation remains predominant cause, say.
After all, all natural organisms wholly consist, biologically, of elements of Earth; even the Book of Genesis says God created Adam out of clay, so not a new matter is it for us to be able to believe, one way or another, that we are composed of natural elements of Earth. But the theory employed by Russia has permitted Russia to be rate-wise MUCH more successful than Western Big Oil cies have been, for the latter restrict their searches for petrol. oil on the basis that it's of fossil origin, and Russia wouldn't have become the major oil producer that it is if they had relied on the fossil theory.
That's if Engdahl is truthful and was given truthful information, but I don't see why I should think that that is not what he presents in his article. I believe the following is the article.
"War and "Peak Oil"
Confessions of an 'ex' Peak Oil believer
by F. William Engdahl
Global Research, September 26, 2007"
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=6880
Whether or not people who read that article believe what it says,
everyone still should READ it; as well as discuss it and/or help to spread awareness of it. If what the article states is false, then this will not be explicitly addressed, publicly, until enough people inquire about the geological formation or origin theory.
*) I don't see any mention of climate change or global warming in the article on Malawi that good2go provided a link for. It's a very interesting article, but I don't believe the fossil origin theory for petrol. oil, and have read enough times, now, that the production and/or burning of biofuels contributes, and seriously so, to global warming and that humans are primarily, often stated as wholly, responsible for the climate change we're presently going through.
(Burning, as in use as fuel for engines; not motors, which use electricity for "fuel", while engines depend on other sources of energy, or such was the differentiation a few decades ago anyway.)
That's something Biopact should definitely address in an article like the one on Malawi; though only if humans really are the main cause of our present climate change phen.
*) Lastly, what that article says on Malawi sounds great to me, but it still needs independent confirmation. To believe what it says and states well, being well written without independent confirmations is to be a wishful, but that's not enough when wanting to LEAD others; not unless NO ONE knows what direction to take and they agree to do whatever one individual of the group says.
MOST people can't afford to travel to Malawi even if time isn't the issue, so most people can't go there for a while in order to witness first-hand what the Biopact article says for ourselves. And independent sources are not always unbiased, so truly trustworthy verifiers are needed. Lying is something too many people like to do, though perhaps especially in the West.
Sounds GREAT though.
Oh, wherein I above wrote, "There's no use for it that makes it such that it can't be easily enough replaced with wholly natural, and preferably organic, fertilizers", I don't mean 'organic' as in necessarily requiring certification, for it's not the only way to conduct organic agri. Other methods which there's apparently no certification for, such as sustainable and environmentally or ecologically friendly, including perma-culture, are FINE, good, as long as truthfully being this.
And, in that case, there's no point in saying 'preferably organic', given that I already stated that govts should ban use of synthetic chemical fertilizers; synthetic chemical ... anything applied in agri., or simply in wholly, universally absolute terms, meaning NO MORE of synthetic chemicals, LEARN to work with Nature, which has all we humans needed for many thousands of years, and which we just need to more fully learn (about).
Synthetics that are wholly Natural, environmentally safe, are not what I have a problem with; it's all the BAD crap too many farmers allowed themselves to be fooled into buying into, instead of LEARNING how to work with Nature.
Maybe if the peasants in the rest of the world can wrest control of their food away from the World Bank, we local peasants can dig up the front yard and plant potatoes again. A little goat and a few chickens in a garden shed out back would be nice too. Food sovereignty is a good idea for everybody.
The global capital vision was to have each region specialize in some "cash crop" for participation in the petro-fired capital-intensive global market. Refrigerator ships should be plying the oceans to bring out of season everything to everyone on the planet, especially meat cuz that multiplies economic activity by ten.
Governments were to stay out of the way, except to help enforce the global capitalist rules. Corporate food wholesale and supermarket chains were to span the globe. Asphalt pavement and 18 wheel tractor trailers to all ends of the earth. Monsanto, Cargill, Dow and DuPont were to supply the petro-chemical synthetics and any soil deficiencies created by industrial monoculture were to be addressed by ever more synthetics.
All of this was supposed to contribute to ever growing economic activity which every peasant should view as the new gravy train to take away their peasanthood forever. They should hop aboard after abandoning centuries old traditions without hesitation and go to the cities and flip hamburgers at McDonalds. This is the western world making its contribution to the advancement of civilization so you will surely like it. Never mind the destruction of cultures, traditions, dignity, independence, food stability, food security, selection freedom and diversity of foods, biosphere and human health.
test
Kman2- No, that's not why. Sure, the plains had good soil and could grow corn. But Mexico became dependent on U.S. imports for entirely contrived and artificial reasons. Corn is subsidized by the u.s. government, so they can sell it as cheap as they want to. Mexican farmers grow their corn with no help, and can only make money if they sell it for more than it costs to produce. Which is not true for u.s. farmers, or more precisely, agribusiness giants. Before NAFTA, Mexico could protect their farmers by tariffs, but after nafta, backed by the WTO, Mexico had to open their markets, and that allowed u.s. agribusiness to dump their corn, which ruined most Mexican corn farmers. This is the ugly reality behind what is called "free trade". "Free trade" means stacking the deck in favor of u.s. agribusiness, and impoverishing the poor people in the Global South. This is what the wto has done all over the Global South, so that money continues to be forcibly extracted from the poorest people in order to make the richest still richer.
And that's why Walden Bello and Vandanda Shiva, and billions of small farmers in the majority world continue to fight.
Anne: You're right about switchgrass, but corn ethanol is great for the fact that once the starch is removed the "spent" grain is outstanding animal feed with most of the protein and nutrients remaining without the carbohydrates. In fact, it probably could have great potential in human foods as well once we figure out how to take advantage of it. In the case of animal feed, the "spent" grain is better for livestock than actual whole kernel corn. If nothing else, we should ensure that all grain marked for livestock feed is first used for ethanol production in order to maximize what we get from it.
What drives me crazy is that more farm land is growing corn to make ethanol ! Corn is a FOOD crop. It should be used for food, not ground up to make ethanol. The US government even subsidizes farmers to grow corn for ethanol. There is a better alternative:Switch Grass. It is a weed, grows about 6 ft tall, and about 6 feet below ground. So, it brings nutriments from the deep soil and other goodies from the air into the grass. it is a perennial. It cannot be used for food, but can be used to make ethanol. Why would anyone ever use corn to make ethanol????
"However, an intriguing question escaped many observers: how on earth did Mexicans, who live in the land where corn was domesticated, become dependent on US imports in the first place?"
Why? because the old tall grass prairie of the U.S. Midwest turned out to be some of the most fertile land in the world. Immigrant farmers found 6' deep black topsoil in some spots when they first plowed the native prairie grass.
Yes, the birth place of maize (corn) was in Mexico, but there happens to be a place that it can be grown with excellent results over a huge area in the U.S. (from eastern SD to IN).
In the southern states of Mexico there was an average corn yield of 27 bushels per acre in 2003. Some irrigated land in northen Mexican states got 143 bu/acre. The old tall grass prairie can yield well over 200 bu/acre without irrigation, easy.
A quite scary story is the strange disappearance of bees. Some researchers in their concern blame mobile telephone radiation for the collapse of communities. Already the United States and large parts of Europe are without them. If natural connection is taken out of the reproductive chain then all we have to keep up a large part of nature are laboratory seeds. I am sure Monsanto and the likes welcome the scenario. The mad desire to destroy our toy has not yet subsided. So near the end we - or some of us – still want to move forward. But what has going forward brought us since the invention of capitalism? We have to turn back. There is no alternative. We have to literally go back in time, diminish ourselves, live simpler. We don't have to waste out knowledge. There's plenty of room for development. But this freaked out running towards the abyss, like an angry suicidal schoolboy, really should be replaced by more sensible behaviour.
Understanding the many valid points in this article is important to us all... even those living in the 'centers of privilege'.
I live in the SF Bay area. When I first came here, this was a region of plenty; cherries (reputedly the best in the world) were so abundant that it took me awhile to realize they weren't free…
Orchards were everywhere and at least for some months of the year, my friends and I gorged ourselves on pounds of tree-ripened fruit...
Yesterday, my husband and I went to Trader's Joes. We buy 'organic'... generally its non-tree ripened fruit from Chile or Mexico, New Zealand, etc.
Sometimes I can eat a piece or two a day... but it isn't appetizing. I crave the abundance that once was... we have all lost.
We still depend to farmworkers to grow most of our food. Now, we also depend upon them to fight our war against biosphere extinction... I wonder, will these unsung heroes ever be accorded the gratitude they are due?
Here's a hopeful article about rejecting commodity agriculture and reviving ancient farming practices in Mexico:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/world/americas/13oaxaca.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=mexican+farmer&st=nyt&ore...
And here I thought they hate us because we are free.
hi,
no statement made against Bello. Rather, against the mainstream media that has run numerous stories putting the finger on biofuels, as though the other factors mentioned in Bello's piece were unworthy of discussion. (Business Week excepted) Even someone as dumb as Bush saw through that argument. Bello is the one who puts it all together nicely.
Hi,
"Better late than never"? - Walden Bello has been writing and working his tail off for decades to expose "globalization" and the global institutions that ram it down our throats, like the IMF, WB, and WTO.
ACC
Yeah, I guess you could say globalization begins at home. I have a quote from a Guardian reporter on my computer that is kind of old. But here's what it says.
"If I want to say yes to capitalism, but not on the terms proposed under the WTO millennial round, to whom do I say it, short of joining the protest on the street? If i want to say yes to trade, but only if the workers in south China's free trade zone factories can get labor protection, whom do I lobby? If I want to say yes to internationalism, but no to a world in which international institutions are a thin disguise for dominating US corporations, to whom do I address my postcard?"
The US and EU haven't really been helped that much, just a few select companies represented by economic hitmen. Whenever the US govt sez, our country is benefiting or some such, I fear it always means, "our corporate oiligarchy."
No wonder everyone wants to go local.
solari.com is a good site as well
good2go: thanks for the links. Yes, the piece is better late than never. We can be a little more generous than that. It has taken a long time for people in the developing world to get over their instinctive fear of their own governments and the extensions of the Western governments, the IMF and the World Bank, which they knew were hostile in their intent. The model the US and the EU have been busily forcing down the throats of the rest of the world's countries has been ruinous for everyone but themselves. The kind of agricultural capitalism the West practices is vicious in its motives and ruthless in its profit-seeking, and totally divorced from anything having to do with human well-being. Nothing could be better than to see the IMF and World Bank wither and die. It will probably happen eventually, as everyone in the developing world catches on. The WTO is no friend to the developing world either. It operates for its large corporate masters.
So much for hopes for a social global village, eh?
THis piece is better late than never, I suppose. Put the blame where it belongs: squarely on World Bank policies and corporate agriculture and greed. Relocalize agriculture for human needs instead, including energy.
The following is a good piece about Malawi's recent success.
http://biopact.com/2007/12/malawis-super-harvest-proves-anti.html
http://www.alcoholcanbeagas.com?bid=2&aid=CD8&opt=