That's all good to hear but it does little good to those of us who don't live in the cornocopic climate of California. I still don't see how petty commodity producers overcome the problems of capitalist AG, they may increase the potential for democratic control over the economy but historically local producers and markets have not meant increased economic democracy or decreased exploitation.
>
> Instead of conspiracy theory, what I see is money, which always involves
> a conspiracy to hide the processes of capitalism. There are some
> conspiratorial elements in the form of lobbies, deals over water use,
> pesticides, herbicides and a lot of behind closed doors meetings in
> state and local government agencies. The point to that government
> secrecy is seen in public attitudes that would and have rejected many of
> these secret deals.
>
> US state involvement in agribussiness is not new and it is important to
point out the linkages, but this is just the first step. One needs to fill
in how capitalism has lead agriculture where it is not by monopoly control
over the state but by its process of enlarging commodification.
> When I wrote about local production, that wasn't intended to mean small
> is beautiful. It was intended to mean within a country or region that
> rejected the efforts of US corporations to move into regions and start
> overhauling some previously working system. Twenty years ago, there was
> no such thing as Mexican hot house tomatoes which are tasteless.
> Meanwhile, fifty years ago, produce I ate in Guadalajara was local and
> was the most delicious stuff I ever tasted. I was forbidden to eat it,
> but I did any time I could.
>
Yeah that stuff tasted great, but I would not have wanted to be a women
living under such patrilocal conditions, or for that matter a peasant
digging in the hot sun all day. I actually am not so sure that those
systems really where working- infant mortality, oppressive gender relations,
children's labor, life expectancy. That is not to say that US corporations
should come in and overhaul them. Just that we need to have a vision that
both understands the resistance to capitalism's push to shift and is forward
looking and will make peoples lives better.
>
> So what I am saying is that while on paper it looks like the neoliberal
> GMOs and food production systems might be on the wane, the whole mental
> world through which that was developed, doesn't seem to have suffered. I
> don't say that as a conspiracy theory crack pot, but because I've tried
> to think about the lost of a certain `moral' character about doing
> science. I am pretty certain HB would have been involved in some
> capacity with the movements to save the rain forest from agribusiness
> exploitation. I think he already was to some degree. He spent summers in
> a Costa Rican field station where those issues were already becoming a
> problem back in the 70s. The way the issue was framed back then, was
> preservation of natural forests as a national treasure, i.e. not a
> resource. This was done through a system of national parks and
> biological reserves.
>
>
> CG
>
> Oh, I never meant to say that neoliberalism and capitalist AG was on the
wane, just that it is not the same as it was before. US FDI into Ag TNC's
from the south is huge. So US corporations, and hedge and pension
funds, are just investing in local AG-corporations rather than
having international subsidiaries. This is how the trends are changing. It
is never static and HG and others on this are actually behind the curve and
either have not seen or choose to not look at the emperical data that show
this. All this means that we need to have new analysis and stratigies.
Brad