Chapter 13. Unequal Trades in Agriculture

From the perspective of winning trade wars, the United States has an insurmountable advantage in agriculture. However, sales of most U.S. agricultural products are not only unnecessary, they are morally wrong. While multiplying exporters GDP, these exports destroy native agriculture by usurping their local markets. The smaller level of circulating money within the economy (the sabotage of the multiplier factor) due to paying for imported food limits the development of, or even destroys industries in, other sectors of the economy. Overseas markets are developed for U.S. farmers because they must sell, not because others must buy:

A lot of attention is being paid these days to the developing world as a prime growth market for American farmers…. The United States has become more dependent on the developing world with more than 58 percent of total agricultural exports going to these countries in 1986-87…. Virtually every trade analysis by the USDA stresses the potential sales among developing nations in Latin America, Africa and Asia…. Agriculture Secretary Richard E. Lyng said he most wanted freedom for farmers “to produce what they want to produce” and that to accomplish that would involve solving international trade problems…. [James R. Donald, chairman of the department’s World Agricultural Outlook Board, emphasized] “The developing countries likely will continue to increase global grain imports and could be a source of expansion for U.S. agricultural exports.”a

One of the most sacred illusions of America is that its agriculture is above all reproach. Not only is the United States the “breadbasket of the world,” but the developing world is somehow incapable of emulating America’s productive farming methods. There is one thing Americans are sure about, without their food and generosity, much of the rest of the world would starve.

Yet 40% of the developing world that was once plagued by severe food shortages—China, Guinea-Bissau and—until impoverished by embargoes—Cuba and North Korea produced and distributed the 2,300-to-2,400 calories per day required to sustain an adult. India has finally achieved and maintained self-sufficiency. Angola, Mozambique, and Nicaragua had also achieved self-sufficiency, but their economic infrastructures were sabotaged by anti-government rebels organized, trained, and armed by U.S. or allied intelligence services.1

The countries that are newly self-sufficient in food production have far less cultivable land per person than most of the countries still suffering from chronic food shortages. China, for example, has only .13 hectares of arable land per person; the former North Vietnam had .10; and North Korea (self sufficient before devastation by the Korean War and the embargo) has .07. Despite having more arable land per person, their neighbors are unable to feed themselves. Pakistan has .40 cultivable hectares per person; Bangladesh has .16; and Indonesia has .15 hectares.2

The best-known example of a country that is continually faced with hunger is Bangladesh, where “two-thirds of the population suffers from protein and vitamin deficiencies.” Yet the country exists on a fertile plain blessed with plenty of water, and “grows enough in grain alone to provide everyone in the country with at least 2,600 calories a day.”3 It is obvious that nature has provided this country with the ability to feed more than the present population.

The reasons for such anomalies become clearer when one studies Africa and South America, the two continents with the hungriest populations. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that only 60% of the world’s arable land is farmed. In Africa and South America, the figure averages 20%, and their grain yields are only one-half that of industrialized countries. Brazil, for example, is burdened with a large hunger problem, but, even without the destruction of more rainforests, it has 2.3 cultivable acres per person. In Brazil, as well as most of South and Central America, one-half the acres being farmed—invariably the best land—currently grows crops for feeding cattle or for export.4 The masses are unable to feed themselves because their land is subtly monopolized. Brazil has ranches with up to 250,000 head of cattle (that one owned by the Rockefellers) which monopolizes land capable of feeding hundreds of millions of people.5 Latin Americans and Africans, despite rampant hunger, consume only a small percentage of their land’s agricultural potential while a substantial share is exported.

The remaining hungry nations, mostly in Southeast Asia, have such large populations that the land’s capacity to feed the people entails a much smaller margin of safety. Yet, if they controlled their land, these nations could also produce an adequate supply of food. China, probably the best example of rational land reform, now adequately feeds 1.3-billion people. But when the population was one-third what it is today and the land was monopolized, there were massive famines.

Fifteen of the poorest countries in the world raise and export more agricultural products than they keep for their own use.6 Some of these countries, the exported crops, and the percentage of farmland thus removed from local consumption include: Guadeloupe—sugar, cocoa, and bananas, 66%; Martinique—bananas, coffee, cocoa, and sugar, 70%, and Barbados—sugar cane, 77%. Guatemala plants cotton for export in blocks of 50,000 acres.7

These are all familiar developed world consumer items imported from these impoverished countries. In 1973, the United States imported 7% of its beef, much of it from the Dominican Republic and Central America. Costa Rica alone exported 60-million pounds to the United States in 1975, even though its own per-capita beef consumption dropped from 49 pounds per year in 1950, to 33 pounds in 1971. If Costa Ricans had not exported this increased production, their per-capita consumption would have been 3-times as high, or 98 pounds per year.8

While the United States imports all this beef, two-thirds of the grain it exports is used to feed livestock and much of the rest is distilled into liquors, both for elite consumption. In addition, it requires 40-cents’ worth of imported oil to produce and transport every $1 worth of agricultural exports. “To produce and distribute ‘just one can of corn containing 270 calories’ consumes 2,790 calories of energy.”9

During 1992, U.S. food imports are estimated to have been $22-billion and exports $40-billion.10 Economists teach that there must be balanced trade and, from the perspective of maintaining the status quo, this may be true. However, the status quo reflects the unequal distribution of political and economic power in the world; the “geography of world hunger” is specifically the consequence of entire populations having lost control of their land, and thus their destiny.

The impoverished world does not need America’s, or Europe’s, surplus food. They only need the right to control their own land, the right to industrial capital, and the right to grow their own food. Given those rights, they will not generally be hungry. However, because only the affluent have money to purchase this production, monopolization of land diverts the production of social wealth to those already well off. “The world can simply produce more than those who have money to pay for it can eat.”11 The results are small well-cared-for elite groups, primarily in the developed world, and hunger for the dispossessed.

Hunger is Determined by Who Controls the Land

The often-heard comment that, “There are too many people in the world, and overpopulation is the cause of hunger,” is the same myth expounded in 16th-Century England and this social-control-paradigm (“framework of orientation”) has been revived continuously since. Through repeated parliamentary acts of enclosure, the peasants were pushed off the land so that the gentry could raise more wool for the new and highly productive power looms. They could not have done this and allowed the peasants to retain their historical entitlement to a share of production from the land. Massive starvation was the inevitable result of this expropriation.

There were serious discussions in learned circles that decided peasant overpopulation was the cause of poverty. This was the accepted reason because social and intellectual elites were doing the rationalizing and they controlled the educational institutions that studied the problem. Naturally the conclusions (at least those published) absolved the wealthy of any responsibility for the plight of the poor. The absurdity of suggesting that England was then overpopulated is clear when one realizes that “the total population of England in the sixteenth century was less than in any one of several present-day English cities.”12

The hunger in undeveloped countries today is equally tragic and unnecessary. The European colonizers understood well that ownership of land gives the owners control over what a society produces. Military power is the foundation of all law and the more powerful colonizers redistributed the valuable land titles to themselves, eradicating millennia-old traditions of common use. If rights in common had ever been reestablished, the “rights” of the new owners would have been reduced. For this reason, much of the land was unused or under-used until the new owners could do so profitably. Profits meant selling primarily to the developed world, the local populations, being far underpaid, had no buying power to purchase from each other (short-circuiting the multiplier factor).

This pattern of land use characterizes most developing world countries today. What causes hunger is external control guiding agricultural production to the wealthy developed world, instead of internal control managing production for indigenous use. These conquered people are kept in a state of relative impoverishment. Permitting them any meaningful share of social wealth would negate the historical reason for conquest, which is ownership of that wealth.

The Market Economy Guides the World’s Production to Imperial-Centers-of-Capital

Currently the purchasing power of the poor keeps falling further and further behind that of the wealthy and powerful. André Gorz, in his book Paths to Paradise, explains why a market economy can only work efficiently when the purchasing power of the poor is increased:

This is what we have to understand—growing soya for our [and other wealthy nations’] cows is more profitable for the big landowners of Brazil than growing black beans for the Brazilian masses. Because our cows’ purchasing power has risen above that of the Brazilian poor, soya itself has got so expensive in Brazil that a third of the population can no longer afford to buy either its beans or oil. This clearly shows that it is not enough to ensure the developing world gets ‘a fair price’ for its agricultural exports. The relatively high prices that we would guarantee might merely aggravate hunger in the developing world, by inciting the big landowners to evict their shareholders, buy agricultural machines, and produce for export only. Guaranteed high prices have positive effects only if they can be effectively used to raise the purchasing power of the poor.13

Thus the market guides the world’s production to those with money. The defeated, dispossessed, dependent, and impoverished have no money because their labor is far underpaid, and historically there has been no serious intent to let them have agricultural and industrial capital to produce their own wealth and pay themselves well. The world’s natural wealth automatically flowed to the money-center countries where these basic commodities were processed into consumer products by high-paid industrial labor to produce both consumer products and buying power which is the essence of a wealthy society.

The industrialized world is the prime beneficiary of this well-established system. Great universities search diligently for “the answer” to the problem of poverty and hunger. They invariably find it in “lack of motivation, inadequate or no education,” or some other self-serving, social-control-paradigm. They look at everything except the cause; the powerful own the world’s social wealth.

The major beneficiaries have much to gain by perpetuating the myths of overpopulation and cultural and racial inferiority. The real causes of poverty must be ignored; how else can this systematic siphoning away of others’ wealth through inequality of trades be squared with what people are taught about democracy, rights, freedom, and justice?

If people have rights to their own land and the industrial capital to produce the tools to work it, every region in the world could feed itself. This access would have to be permanent and consistent. Any alienation of land rights, or underselling of regional agricultural production with cheap imports, disrupts food production, retards industrial development, and ensures hunger and poverty.

With capital and undisturbed access to their land, the developing world would have little need for the surplus food of the United States. Consequently, there would be no reason to plant the one-quarter of U.S. crops that are for export.14 The current U.S. agricultural export multiplier of possibly $100-billion (60% of $50-billion in exports which go to the developing world times an estimated multiplier of 3.5) would then be working its magic in developing countries as they produced, processed, and distributed their own food as well as other consumer products for which the increased buying power would create a market.

Stevia: Sweeter than Sugar

Subsidies, acreage permits, and import restrictions to protect the developed world’s beet and cane sugar industries are well-recorded history. But the Indians of South America have known of the leaves of a plant today called Stevia which is 30-times sweeter than sugar and it does not require expensive processing as does sugar beets and sugar cane.

Needing only harvesting, drying, and grinding into powder or squeezing out the oils, the labor costs of raising and processing Stevia are minimal. Requiring one-thirtieth as much to sweeten foods even as it costs roughly 10% as much to raise and process, this natural sweetener would sell for a fraction of the cost of sugar. Scientifically tested for safety and used extensively in Japan, Brazil, and China, Stevia is kept out of American markets by classifying and regulating this beneficial leaf as an herb.15

Besides the elimination of substantial amounts of unnecessary labor spent producing sugar, sugar is undoubtedly the primary cause of most developed world health problems (diabetes, overweight). Through replacing sugar with Stevia here would be a huge savings to the world’s health care industry while simultaneously increasing the quality of life.

Where many monopolies are hard to bypass, the sugar monopoly is not. Using Stevia (or a couple of other similarly sweet plants in Africa) as a sweetener throughout the world would quickly raise the quality of life both by being able to simultaneously enjoy sweet foods and good health.

Beef: “A Protein Factory in Reverse”

In Diet for A Small Planet, Frances Moore Lappé teaches that:

(1) The human body can manufacture all the 22 amino acids that are the building blocks of protein, except eight (some say nine)—these are called the essential amino acids;

(2) these nutrients are found in grains, vegetables, and fruits but not all eight (nine) amino acids exist in any one non-meat food;

(3) if any essential amino acid is missing or deficient in a person’s diet, that sets the limit on the human body’s ability to build protein; when consuming vegetables, grains, and fruits that include all eight (nine) essential amino acids in adequate amounts, the body builds its own protein; to fulfill the need for human protein, an amino acid is an amino acid whether it is in meat or vegetables;16

(4) and chemically there is no difference between an essential amino acid, such as lysine, whether the source is meat, vegetables, grains, or fruits.

Ms. Lappé points out that vegetables, grains, and fruits—properly balanced for amino acids—can provide more protein per acre than meat. Each 16 pounds of perfectly edible human food in the form of grain fed to cattle produce only one pound of beef. This is “a protein factory in reverse.”17 Lappé’s calculation is conservative; prime-fed cattle have 63% more fat than standard grade, and much of it is trimmed off, cooked away, or left on the plate. Even the fat that is eaten is usually not wanted. Subtracting the unwanted fat demonstrates that it requires more than 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat.

Cattle are ruminants with multiple stomachs that efficiently convert roughage (grass) into muscle. But they are inefficient converters of grain to meat and, in that effort, consume large amounts of this human food. If the grains fed to cattle were consumed directly by the world’s hungry, the available protein from those foods would increase by 16-times, 1,600%. But when fed to cattle, the overwhelming share of grain is converted into worthless fat, bone, intestines, and manure. Professor David Pimentel of Cornell University estimates that the grain now fed to livestock worldwide would feed 1-billion people.18

While cattle are efficient consumers of roughage, the grain fed to them is subtracting from, not adding to, the already short supply of protein. With a digestive system designed by nature for that purpose, if cattle were fed only roughage, and the high-quality grains they once consumed were consumed by the human population, hunger would be eliminated while reducing the pressure on the environment.

If the developed world returned to the practice of growing cattle on roughage and feeding grain for only a short time before slaughter, the quality of the beef would be higher (measured by leanness, not by marbling) and the quantity available only slightly reduced. At 1991 prices, just eliminating the last 2 weeks of cattle feeding (finishing) would have saved American consumers at least 40-cents per pound.19

Counting the grain required to produce the meat they eat, the consumption by the well to do of 8,000-to-10,000 calories per day is a major cause of world hunger.20 Global production exceeds 3000 calories of food per day for each person, while the daily need is only 2,300-to-2,400 calories, and the potential world calorie production could be raised much more by planting high-protein, high-calorie, crops. On the average, the proper combination of leafy vegetables produces 15-times more protein per acre than grain-fed beef, while peas, beans, and other legumes produce 10-times more, and grain produces only five-times more.21

By ignoring the multiplier factor and subsidies, highly mechanized farms on large acreages can produce units of food cheaper than even the poorest paid farmers of the developing world. When this cheap food is sold, or given, to the developing world, their local farm economy is destroyed.

If the poor and unemployed of the impoverished world were given access to land, access to agricultural tools, access to industrial tools, and protection from cheap imports, they could plant high-protein, high-calorie, crops and become self-sufficient in food. Consumers would buy their food from local producers, those farmers would spend that money in the community, and the producers of those products and services would spend it on their needs. Purchasing of local production multiplies by however many times that money circulates within an economy.

Although the multiplier factor varies, for simplicity, 350% is a good figure to use. Because the circulation of money energizes production and creates wealth, reclaiming their land and utilizing the unemployed would cost these societies almost nothing, feed them well, and save far more money than they now pay for the so-called “cheap” imported foods.

Conceptually Reversing the Process of Free Food

If American farmers were undersold by subsidized agricultural surpluses from another society or that imported food was given to American consumers, U.S. farmers could not sell their crops. They would go bankrupt, the tractor and machinery companies would go bankrupt, the millions of people depending on these jobs would be without work, resources and production of remaining industries would have to be sold to other societies to pay the import food bill, and America would quickly become impoverished. In a country not yet industrialized, the natural resources must be sold to pay for food and consumer products from the industrialized world and debt traps are put in place to maintain that dependency.22 This process is currently at work in Mexico. As their food imports rose to 60% of their needs, wages fell drastically, industrial production shrunk substantially, and debts increased dramatically.

Many believe that the developing world “does not understand and will never change.” But they do not consider that massive subsidies permitting underselling of regional agricultural production shatter already weak economies. Thus sincere, but misinformed, people go on producing for others what they could produce for themselves if permitted the technology. This process siphons the wealth from the already poor and perpetuates their poverty.

Because they do not have industrial capital to produce manufactured wealth from their natural wealth, undeveloped countries have much bigger problems. To pay for their “cheap” imported food, their natural resources must be sold to pay for that food and other consumer products from the industrialized world and trade rules and debt traps have been put in place to maintain that dependency. Once those monopolies are in place, “free trade” is simply a method to siphon the wealth of the periphery, or even defeated powerful nations to the victorious imperial-centers-of-capital. Witness what happened to the former Soviet federation whose resources are now pouring into the West to feed their industries.

The Periphery of Empire is a Huge Plantation Providing Food and Resources to the Imperial Center

That the periphery of empire functions as a huge plantation system providing agricultural products and resources to the imperial center can be determined by analyzing who consumes those agricultural products and resources. While Somoza was kept in power in Nicaragua by America, 22 -times more farm land was utilized to produce crops for exports than was used for domestic consumption and 90% of all agricultural credits financed those agricultural exports.23 Running the same statistical analysis on the agriculture of many countries on the periphery of empire will expose similarly high percentages of their land providing food for the imperial center. The same analysis on natural resources (timber, iron, copper, diamonds, et al.) on the periphery will show an even higher level of consumption by the imperial center and lower level of consumption by the periphery. World hunger and poverty exists because:

(1) Colonialism, mercantilism and neo-mercantilism (now transposed into corporate imperialism) dispossessed hundreds of millions of people from their land. The current owners are the new plantation managers producing for the mother countries.

(2) The low-paid undeveloped countries sell to the highly-paid developed countries because there is no local market—the defeated, dispossessed, and underpaid have no money. Thus it is highly unequal pay for equally-productive work that creates invisible borders guiding the world’s wealth to imperial-centers-of-capital.

(3) And—as the periphery producing food and resources for the developing world requires exports to the center to pay for those imports—cheap, subsidized, agriculture exports from the wealthy world is part of the process of stripping the natural wealth from the impoverished world to provide exotic foods, lumber, minerals, and—so long as the developed world financiers and intermediaries still maintain control of the direction of the flow of money—even manufactured products for the imperial center. To eliminate hunger:

(1) There must be equalizing managed trade to protect both the developing world and the developed world, so the dispossessed can reclaim use of their land. The simplest reclamation of those rights would be society collecting the landrent. Under that Henry George philosophy only the most productive would own that land and absentee ownership would disappear (see chapter 24).

(2) The currently underfed people can then produce the more labor-intensive, high-protein, high-calorie, crops that contain all eight essential amino acids.

(3) And those societies must adapt dietary patterns so that vegetables, grains, and fruits are consumed in the proper amino acid combinations, with small amounts of meat or fish for protein and flavor. Though population control must be practiced so as to take the pressure off of dwindling resources and the environment, with similar dietary adjustments among the wealthy, there would be increased, improved, and adequate food for everyone.

With highly-subsidized food exported from the wealthy world to the impoverished world leading to typically 40% to 70% of their food being imported and their local agriculture impoverished, developing world farmers and common labor understand well that, through the multiplier factor running in reverse, every hundred dollars of imports subtracts several hundred dollars from their economy and, through that multiplier factor in forward motion, adds several hundred dollars to the exporting nation’s economy. b

They also recognize that this is true of every commodity produced. For a healthy economy, every nation or region requires, on balance, sovereignty over their food supply, their fiber, their shelter, and consumer products. Sovereignty can only be attained through equal sharing of resources, technology, and markets, and equal pay for equally productive labor.

Footnotes

1. Don Kendall, “U.S. Farmers Look to the developing world,” AP, The Spokesman-Review, January 5, 1988, p. B5; Diane Johnstone, “GATTastrophe: Free-Trade Ideology Versus Planetary Survival,” In These Times, December 19-25, 1990, p. 12-13. Brian Tokar, Redesigning Life? The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering (London: Zed Books, 2001) and Vandana Shiva’s books, Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (Boston: South End Press, 1997) and Stolen Harvest: The HIJACKING of the Global Food Supply (Boston: South End Press, 2000) addresses how corporations are gaining genetic patent titles to the genes of food plant varieties that societies all over the world have spent thousands of years breeding. Having domesticated 60% of the food plants in use, the American Indians were the greatest horticulturists the world has ever known and both India and China have domesticated far more food plants than Europe. Yet, due to those patent titles, the farmers descended from these early horticulturists (whose intellectual and physical labors for centuries created 99% of the use-value in those plants) cannot save seeds from those gene patented crops and are forced to buy from seed companies whose business span the globe. And Terminator seeds, crops which produce food but the seeds will not sprout, totally monopolizing seed stocks, are planned. Back to text
2. In the documentary “This is What Free Trade Looks Like,” the common people easily laid out how it is the structure of international trade which maintains their impoverishment. Back to text

Endnotes

1. Frances Moore Lappé, Joseph Collins, Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity, (New York: Ballantine Books, 1979) p. 486; Susan George, Ill Fares the Land (Washington, DC: Institute for Policy Studies, 1984), pp. 8-9; Susan George, How the Other Half Dies (Montclair, NJ: Allen Osmun, 1977), p. 36; David Goodman, “Political Spy Trial in Pretoria.” In These Times, September 19-25, 1984, “The Buffalo Battalion—South Africa’s Black Mercenaries.” Covert Action Bulletin (July/August 1981): p. 16; “Hunger as a Weapon.” Food First Action Alert (San Francisco: Institute for Food and Development Policy), undated. Back to text
2. George, How the Other Half Dies, p. 36. Back to text
3. Lappé and Collins, Food First, p. 20. Back to text
4. Ibid, pp. 14-19, 48. Back to text
5. Gerald Colby, Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil (New York: Harper Collins, 1995). Conversation with the authors. Back to text
6. Richard Barnet, The Lean Years (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980), p. 153. Back to text
7. Lappé and Collins, Food First, pp. 42, 71. Back to text
8. Ibid, pp. 238-39, 289. Back to text
9. James Wessel, Mort Hartman, Trading the Future (San Francisco: Institute for Food and Policy Development, 1983), p. 4; Jeremy Rifkin, Biosphere Politics (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 83. Back to text
10. “Ag Export Value Projected to Climb.” AP, Great Falls Tribune, March 5, 1992, p. 6c. Back to text
11. Lester Thurow, Head to Head: The Coming Economic Battle Among Japan, Europe, and America (New York: William Morrow, 1992), p. 62. Back to text
12. Lappé and Collins, Food First, p. 27. Back to text
13. André Gorz, Paths to Paradise: On the Liberation From Work (Boston: South End Press, 1985), pp. 94-95. Back to text
14. Statistical Abstract of the U.S., 1992, charts 1094, 1112 (1990); “Ag Export Value Projected to Climb”: p. 6c. Back to text
15. Linda Bonvie, Bill Bonvie, Donna Gates, “Stevia: The Natural Sweetener that Frightens Nutrasweet, Earth Island Journal (Winter 1997-98): pp. 26-27. Back to text
16. Frances Moore Lappé, Diet for a Small Planet, (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978), pp. 66-7; Frances Moore Lappé and Anna Lappé, Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet (New York: Penguin Putman, 2002). For the full story of how “The Great American Steak Religion” developed, read Jeremy Rifkin’s Beyond Beef (New York: Dutton, 1992). Back to text
17. Lappé, Diet For A Small Planet, pp. 7, 17-18. Agricultural studies show that seven to nine pounds of grain produce one pound of meat. But that is for live weight and Lappé’s is for dressed weight. Back to text
18. Jeremy Rifkin, “Beyond Beef.” Utne Reader, March/April 1992, p. 97. Excerpts from his book, of the same title. Back to text
19. Lappé, Diet For A Small Planet, pp. 17-18, roughly adjusted for 1991 beef prices; Low Cholesterol Beef Produced on State Ranches.” The Missoulian, October 15, 1986, p. 18. Back to text
20. Barnet, Lean Years, p. 151; George, Ill
    Fares the Land, p. 48. Back to text
21. Lappé, Diet For A Small Planet, p. 10. Back to text
22. See Bhagirath Lal Das, WTO: The Doha Agenda: The New Negotiations on World Trade (London : Zed Books, 2003) and his many other books. See also: Vandana Shiva’s Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (Cambridge: South End Press, 2000). Back to text
23. Holly Sklar, Washington’s War on Nicaragua (Boston: South End Press, 1988), p. 9. Back to text

This is a chapter from the book, Economic Democracy; The Political Struggle for the 21st Century. Visit that link for more information about the book.