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Title: Starving the Poor
Author: Noam Chomsky
Date: May 15, 2007
Language: en
Topics: food poverty, free trade
Source: Retrieved on 14th October 2021 from https://chomsky.info/20070515/
Notes: Published in the Khaleej Times.

Noam Chomsky

Starving the Poor

The chaos that derives from the so-called international order can be

painful if you are on the receiving end of the power that determines

that order’s structure. Even tortillas come into play in the ungrand

scheme of things.

Recently, in many regions of Mexico, tortilla prices jumped by more than

50 per cent. In January, in Mexico City, tens of thousands of workers

and farmers rallied in the Zocalo, the city’s central square, to protest

the skyrocketing cost of tortillas.

In response, the government of President Felipe Calderon cut a deal with

Mexican producers and retailers to limit the price of tortillas and corn

flour, very likely a temporary expedient.

In part the price-hike threat to the food staple for Mexican workers and

the poor is what we might call the ethanol effect — a consequence of the

US stampede to corn-based ethanol as an energy substitute for oil, whose

major wellsprings, of course, are in regions that even more grievously

defy international order.

In the United States, too, the ethanol effect has raised food prices

over a broad range, including other crops, livestock and poultry.

The connection between instability in the Middle East and the cost of

feeding a family in the Americas isn’t direct, of course. But as with

all international trade, power tilts the balance. A leading goal of US

foreign policy has long been to create a global order in which US

corporations have free access to markets, resources and investment

opportunities. The objective is commonly called “free trade,” a posture

that collapses quickly on examination.

It’s not unlike what Britain, a predecessor in world domination,

imagined during the latter part of the 19^(th) century, when it embraced

free trade, after 150 years of state intervention and violence had

helped the nation achieve far greater industrial power than any rival.

The United States has followed much the same pattern. Generally, great

powers are willing to enter into some limited degree of free trade when

they’re convinced that the economic interests under their protection are

going to do well. That has been, and remains, a primary feature of the

international order.

The ethanol boom fits the pattern. As discussed by agricultural

economists C Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer in the current issue of

Foreign Affairs, “the biofuel industry has long been dominated not by

market forces but by politics and the interests of a few large

companies,” in large part Archer Daniels Midland, the major ethanol

producer. Ethanol production is feasible thanks to substantial state

subsidies and very high tariffs to exclude much cheaper and more

efficient sugar-based Brazilian ethanol.

In March, during President Bush’s trip to Latin America, the one

heralded achievement was a deal with Brazil on joint production of

ethanol. But Bush, while spouting free-trade rhetoric for others in the

conventional manner, emphasized forcefully that the high tariff to

protect US producers would remain, of course along with the many forms

of government subsidy for the industry.

Despite the huge, taxpayer-supported agricultural subsidies, the prices

of corn — and tortillas — have been climbing rapidly. One factor is that

industrial users of imported US corn increasingly purchase cheaper

Mexican varieties used for tortillas, raising prices.

The 1994 US-sponsored NAFTA agreement may also play a significant role,

one that is likely to increase. An unlevel-playing-field impact of NAFTA

was to flood Mexico with highly subsidised agribusiness exports, driving

Mexican producers off the land.

Mexican economist Carlos Salas reviews data showing that after a steady

rise until 1993, agricultural employment began to decline when NAFTA

came into force, primarily among corn producers — a direct consequence

of NAFTA, he and other economists conclude. One-sixth of the Mexican

agricultural work force has been displaced in the NAFTA years, a process

that is continuing, depressing wages in other sectors of the economy and

impelling emigration to the United States. Max Correa, secretary-general

of the group Central Campesina Cardenista, estimates that “for every

five tons bought from foreign producers, one campesino becomes a

candidate for migration.”

It is, presumably, more than coincidental that President Clinton

militarised the Mexican border, previously quite open, in 1994, along

with implementation of NAFTA.

The “free trade” regime drives Mexico from self-sufficiency in food

towards dependency on US exports. And as the price of corn goes up in

the United States, stimulated by corporate power and state intervention,

one can anticipate that the price of staples may continue its sharp rise

in Mexico.

Increasingly, biofuels are likely to “starve the poor” around the world,

according to Runge and Senauer, as staples are converted to ethanol

production for the privileged — cassava in sub-Saharan Africa, to take

one ominous example. Meanwhile, in Southeast Asia, tropical forests are

cleared and burned for oil palms destined for biofuel, and there are

threatening environmental effects from input-rich production of

corn-based ethanol in the United States as well.

The high price of tortillas and other, crueler vagaries of the

international order illustrate the interconnectedness of events, from

the Middle East to the Middle West, and the urgency of establishing

trade based on true democratic agreements among people, and not

interests whose principal hunger is for profit for corporate interests

protected and subsidised by the state they largely dominate, whatever

the human cost.