Global Harming by Rick Perlstein
Let's say you're a farmer. That's not a stretch: According to the new book Views From the South: The Effects of Globalization and the WTO on Third World Countries [Food First Books and the International Forum on Globalization], three-quarters of humanity earns its living from agriculture. You're South Asian; that's not unlikely, either. One-fifth of the world's population lives on the subcontinent. Once upon a time you grew the foods you and your neighbors actually ate, diverse cereal grains, which kept stomachs comfortably full even if they left your village poor in cash. Now you have been globalized -- pressured to raise commodities for sale abroad. Integrating the nation into the "global marketplace" was not your choice -- not even your prime minister's choice. It was, simply, an imperative if India was to receive the International Monetary Fund and World Bank loans it needs to survive.
Unfortunately you grow soybeans. You are forced to charge much more than your competitors in America, who sell their beans at $155 a ton; that's because American farmers get paid outright by the government $193 for every ton they grow. India could never afford such subsidies. But even if it could, that would be illegal; international trade rules disallow such subsidies unless they are already written into national law. And America has been paying off its farmers in this protectionist manner for over 65 years.
It's enough to make a used-car salesman blush. Or cause a farmer to take his own life. In the district of Warangal, acreage once devoted to grains and vegetables has been dug up at the siren song of "white gold" -- miracle hybrid cottonseeds devised in Western laboratories to yield Jack and the Beanstalk-like bounties. Problem is, they don't turn out to yield all that much. And they are so vulnerable to pests that chemical use in the district went from $2.5 million for a typical year in the '80s to $50 million three years ago. And where once farmers saved their seeds to use over again each season, now they have to buy them fresh each year from the global "life science" corporations that own the copyrights. Debt upon debt, hopelessness, no way out; and in 1998, 500 of Warangal's farmers died by their own hand. This is what people are talking about when they talk about the ravages of what those in power prefer to call "globalization."
Views From the South, a splendidly constructed anthology of essays by leading Third World critics of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization, is a book to break your heart. You want to cry when you read about the feisty tools the United Nations' poor majority forged for themselves in the '60s and '70s to achieve record levels of economic growth, only to see them crushed as "protectionist" by nations superciliously demanding a "level playing field" for First World products. Learning how the WTO makes its rules, by a process it prefers to call "consensus," which better resembles the techniques of a street-side bunco artist -- a sensitive soul might just blubber uncontrollably. "I've always been on the side of the little guy," says WTO director general Michael Moore. It's not too much to begin calling the situation by its proper name: evil.
[Full text: http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0111/perlstein.shtml]
Carl
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