You mentioned an encounter with an HEB manager a
while back. Do you suppose that supermarket chains could become more
interested in local produce as their bottom line is affected by transportation
costs? We often assume corporations will do whatever it takes to make a
profit, but we don't usually expect those actions to be "good
things".
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, April 30, 2007 10:38
AM
Subject: [Livingontheland] Free Trade vs.
Small Farmer By Walden Bello
I'm not posting the whole article because it's long and
gets into the economics of world agriculture and trade. How we grow and eat
is, in the end, a profoundly political act. Those interested should
check the link.
paul tradingpost@lobo.net -----------------------------------------
Free
Trade vs. Small Farmer By Walden Bello http://www.countercurrents.org/bello300407.htm April
27, 2007
More and more people are beginning to realize that local
production and culinary traditions are intimately related, and that
this relationship is threatened by corporate control of food
production, processing, marketing, and consumption. This is why Jose
Bove's justification for dismantling a MacDonald's resonated widely
in Asia: "When we said we would protest by dismantling the
half-built McDonald's in our town, everybody understood why -- the
symbolism was so strong. It was for proper food against malbouffe
[awful standardized food], agricultural workers against
multinationals. The extreme right and other nationalists tried to
make out it was anti- Americanism, but the vast majority knew it was no
such thing. It was a protest against a form of production that wants
to dominate the world."
Many economists, technocrats,
policymakers, and urban intellectuals have long viewed small farmers
as a doomed class. Once regarded as passive objects to be
manipulated by elites, they are now resisting the capitalist,
socialist, and developmentalist paradigms that would consign them to
ruin. They have become what Karl Marx described as a politically
conscious "class-for-itself." And even as peasants refuse to "go
gently into that good night," to borrow a line from Dylan Thomas,
developments in the 21st century are revealing traditional
pro-development visions to be deeply flawed. The escalating protests
of peasant groups such as Via Campesina, are not a return to the
past. As environmental crises multiply and the social dysfunctions
of urban-industrial life pile up, the farmers' movement has
relevance not only to peasants but to everyone who is threatened by
the catastrophic consequences of obsolete modernist paradigms
for organizing production, community, and
life.
------------- Walden Bello is Executive Director of Focus on
the Global South, a Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute,
and a Professor of Sociology at the University of the Philippines at
Diliman. A longer version of this piece comes out in the April 2007
issue of Global Asia. It is republished with
permission.
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