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  • From: "E. E. Mitchamore Jr" <emitch@att.net>
  • To: "Healthy soil and sustainable growing" <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Free Trade vs. Small Farmer By Walden Bello
  • Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 11:33:37 -0500

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".
 
E. E. "Mitch" Mitchamore
www.hillcountrynatives.biz
----- 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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