Standing at the End of the Road

[Guest guest]

February 11, 2008

 

Corporate Globalization

Standing at the End of the Road

By RONNIE CUMMINS

 

Mexico City.

 

Standing at the end of Avenida Madero (Madero Avenue) on the last day

of January 2008, a stone throw from the Zocalo or City Center of

Mexico City, I am swept along in a sea of thousands of farmers and

laborers, carrying signs and banners. Streaming from the historic

statue of the Angel of Independence, symbolically setting fire to a

decrepit tractor, one hundred and fifty thousand small farmers,

teachers, workers, and neighborhood activists are marching to repeal

the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and end the illegal

" dumping' by Cargill, ADM, and Monsanto of billions of dollars of

taxpayer subsidized U.S. agricultural crops-beans, rice, sugar,

powdered milk, soybeans, and genetically engineered corn--onto the

Mexican market.

 

NAFTA, pushed through in Mexico, Canada, and the U.S. in 1994 over the

opposition of the majority of North Americans, is literally driving

Mexico's thirty million small farmers and villagers off the land and

into the slums of Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey, Tijuana,

Juarez, and other cities; or else, following the path of twelve

million others before them, across the increasingly dangerous border

into the United States to find work. Rural villages in Mexico have

become literal economic ghost towns of women, children, and the

elderly. In some municipalities, 80-90% of the men and boys are gone,

increasingly joined by the young women.

 

A dark-skinned peasant woman, wearing her kitchen apron, approaches

me. I stand out in the crowd, an obvious gringo with my Code Pink anti-

war T-shirt and my Organic Consumers Association baseball cap. The

farm woman patiently explains to me how NAFTA has broken up her

family. Her two sons and her daughter, like millions of other jovenes

(young people), she explains, desperate for a living wage, did not

want to leave their community or abandon their families, but they had

no choice. And now, with the militarized border, so-called illegal

aliens, like her children, can no longer take the risk of coming back

home to visit. Her spons amnd daughter, like most other immigrants,

send back remesas (money) to help support their families. This twenty-

four billion dollar annual lifeline is the only thing standing between

Mexico's rural population and utter poverty.

 

Moving up behind the farmers, flanked by banners protesting the

imminent sell-off of Mexico's publicly owned electricity and oil

industries, union workers and students fill the massive square in

front of the National Palace. Mexican workers, whose minimum wage is

1/12 that of the U.S., are already suffering from high prices for

electricity and gasoline. But once U.S. and European corporations take

over the petroleum and electricity sectors, prices will inevitably

skyrocket.

 

Passionate speakers from the podium call for a repeal of NAFTA and the

restoration of food and energy sovereignty, but everyone knows that

Big Business and Agribusiness call the shots in Mexico City, Ottawa,

and Washington. Short of a miracle, rural and urban poverty will

increase, as will the power and obscene wealth of the industrial

agriculture, oil, and utilities multinationals. In July 2006 Mexicans

launched an impressive though ultimately abortive ballot box

revolution, turning out in droves for the anti-NAFTA presidential

candidate, Manuel Lopez Obrador, from the left-of-center PRD (Party of

Democratic Revolution). Although Obrador won the popular vote,

according to reliable exit polls and election experts, in a U.S.-style

electronic vote theft, the elections were stolen, and Felipe Calderon,

a pro-NAFTA corporatist was installed as President. As a Mexican

activist friend reminds me today, we are at the end of the road for

polite protest. Nothing short of a second Mexican (and American)

revolution will save us.

 

Corporate globalization, savagely embodied by NAFTA, is not just a

threat to Mexican farmers and rural villagers. The economic, health,

and social damage created by industrial agriculture, corporate

globalization, and the patenting and gene-splicing of transgenic

plants and animals, are inexorably leading to universal " bioserfdom "

for farmers, deteriorating health for consumers, a destabilized

climate (energy intensive industrial agriculture and long-distance

food transportation and processing account, directly or indirectly,

for 40% of all climate-disrupting greenhouse gases), tropical

deforestation, and a rapid depletion of oil supplies. Lest we forget,

forty percent of the world's population are still small farmers and

rural villagers. If we allow corporate agribusiness and so-called

" free traders " to continue to drive these last two billion peasants

from the land, replacing them with chemical and energy-intensive,

climate disrupting industrial farms, cattle ranches, and agrofuels

plantations, we are doomed.

 

Fortunately practical solutions are at hand, although implementing

these obvious alternatives will require nothing short of a global

grassroots rising. The simple solution to all this is to scrap NAFTA,

make organic and sustainable farming once more the dominant practice

in agriculture (as it has been for most of the last 10,000 years),

help the globe's two billion farmers stay on the land, make healthy

organic foods and lifestyles the norm, and restructure global

agriculture and commerce so that sustainable local and regional

production for local and regional markets and Fair Trade become the

norm, not just the alternative. And of course as we begin this great

turning away from corporate control, we will also begin to be able to

address and solve the global energy crisis (at the root of the wars in

Iraq and Afghanistan) as well as the global climate crisis, through

conservation, economic re-localization, and drastic greenhouse gas

reduction in the agriculture, transportation, and utilities sectors.

Unfortunately none of the " major contenders " for the White House are

offering any real alternatives, other than rhetoric, to address the

current Crisis. Our job is daunting, but standing here at the end of

the road, it appears we have no choice.

 

Ronnie Cummins is director of the Organic Consumers Alliance. He can

be reached at: ronnie

 

 

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.

Confucius