Address delivered by Roger Burbach at The Other Economic Summit, (TOES), Denver, June 22, 1997

Just a little over half a year ago, the governments of the world gathered in Rome to hold a World Food Summit under the auspicies of the Food and Agriculture Organization. In the summit's final declaration, they stated that everyone has "the right to food." But this declaration is little more than hollow rhetoric, not unlike the first Food Summit held in Rome in 1974 which declared that hunger would be abolished in a decade. Moreover the conference in November, 1996 invoked the tired old neo-liberal panacea of "free trade" and open markets as the way to deal with hunger. Small wonder that the assemblage limited itself to the modest, but probably unrealistic goal, of halving the number of hungry people in the world by 2015.

The U.S. government wouldn't even accept this meager goal. It's delegation released a separate statement at the end of the conference stating that it would not be legally bound by any of the Food Summit's declarations.

The reason for these limited goals and the recalcitrance of the US government can only be understood in the context of globalization. Recent changes in global agricultural production have led to the emergence of what has been called by some "a new international food regime." Here the term "regime" needs to be understood in the same way that we talk about "authoritarian regimes", in that our food supplies are controlled by an elite group of controlling interests at the apex of the global economy.

Three aspects of globalization are particularly devastating for agriculture: First, market liberalization which discriminates against small farmers. Particularly important in this regard are global and regional trade pacts, such as NAFTA, which contain specific clauses dealing with the liberalization of trade in agricultural products. Secondly, as part of the globalization process, agribusiness corporations are acquiring ever increasing control over all aspects of the world agro-food provisioning system. And third, the restructuring of many national economies, often under the auspices of structural adjustment programs, has driven a new export-oriented emphasis in agriculture, often at the expense of local food crops and internal consumption.

In general, globalization in agriculture has a dark and adverse impact. It spawns new economic and social inequalities, uproots the peasantry as it accelerates the historic migration from the countryside to the megacities, retains a rural work force often employed on modern agricultural estates at less than subsistence wages, generates major environmental problems that threaten our planet, disempowers countries in their quest for national food security, and perpetuates a modern form of famine for the one out of every six human beings on the planet who suffer from hunger and malnutrition.

This impact of globalization on food has pushed the issues of hunger, agricultural production and adequate food reserves into the limelight in the ongoing drama of world politics and economics in the late twentieth century. Even the leading business publications recognize some of the actual and impending problems. In May of 1996 Business Week came out with a special issue titled "The New Economics of Food" prompted by dwindling cereal stocks, a robust demand for staples in China, and the growing import dependency of eighty Third World countries. Earlier the London-based Economist in its survey of the food industry spoke of a new era of globalization in which the major North Atlantic transnationals, like Coca Cola, Kellogg and Nestle, "will spend more on acquisitions in the developing world" yet confront a period of "unprecedented turmoil."

There is no doubt that humanity has reached a new and decisive phase in its agricultural and dietary history. For the first time, it is conceivable that every person on the planet could have an adequate diet, along with regular work and appropriate housing.

And yet the very economic system that has created this potential for freedom from hunger--globalized capitalism--has also created tremendous tensions and antagonisms. The farms and fields of the globe are ever more rapidly falling under the sway of agribusiness interests. These interests employ an expanding stream of agricultural workers, most of whom are migrants and/or uprooted peasants. In many parts of the world, including the United States, there are disquieting reports of worsening conditions for rural laborers, with a particular intensification of the exploitation of women and even child labor. In the food processing industry there are also signs that globalization is having an adverse impact, as many processing plants run by corporations like Del Monte and Green Giant are automated and downsized while others are shifted to cheap labor havens, particularly in the third world.

These patterns are most visible in an expanding group of what are called NACs or Newly Agricultural Countries, which includes nations as diverse as Thailand, Brazil, Chile, and Costa Rica. The Brazilian orange juice industry, which is now second only to that of the US is instructive of trends in the NACs. Encouraged by the former military regime in the 1970s and 1980s, the orange juice industry today is dominated by agribusiness capital with some forty orange juice processors (including Coca Cola and Tropicana), controlling 95% of Brazil's production.

The Brazilian orange juice industry is completely modernized from the fields to the factories. However the working conditions of the orange juice workers are "primitive" according to many reports from the fields. While none of the transnational juice processors and very few of the domestic processors are directly involved in the ownership of orange groves, they contract with the local growers for the oranges, thereby distancing themselves from direct responsibility for the grim conditions of the workers. Wages are often below the legal minimum, and women and children work alongside the men in the fields. Virtually all attempts at unionization have failed because the orange growers refuse to allow union representatives on their lands and the work force is largely migratory. Labor practices of the growers violate national laws as well as international labor accords that Brazil has signed onto.

No view of globalization's impact on agriculture would be complete without a discussion of what it means for the peasantry. It is striking that the first manifesto of the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico declared that NAFTA represents "a death certificate" for the peasant and indigenous populations of Mexico. An international conference of over 100 peasant and farmer organizations from 45 countries held in Mexico in 1996 similarly declared that trade liberalization "is destroying the small farmers and peasants means of subsistence."

In the era of globalization, where all of the world's problems are allegedly to be solved by the free market, an estimated 480 million people lived in countries in 1996 where crops and import capacity failed to meet their usual levels of consumption; 455 million lived in households too poor to obtain the energy sufficient for minimal activity among adults and for the healthy growth of children.

On a planetary scale, the process of globalization in agriculture posses major questions regarding the ravaging of the globe's agroecology. The continued flow of peoples into urban areas, the growing use of agrichemicals, the spread of industry-like techniques to the agricultural sphere, and the shift in diets as some people move up the food chain from cereals to meats--all these factors place enormous strains on water and land resources and adversely affect the environment.

Technology of course is a central issue affecting agriculture and the environment. The general consensus is that the first green revolution, which accelerated the abuse of land and nature, has largely spent itself, and that we are on the brink of a new revolution based on biotechnology. This new biotech revolution, however, given the fact that it is driven by large scale capital, will have an impact similar to the first revolution. It will also lead to substantial increases in productivity for the agribusiness corporations while at the same time concentrating land ownership and marginalizing those smaller producers who are bereft of capital and unable to obtain the new technologies. Biotechnology under the current food regime will accentuate hunger and malnutrition.

There is increasing awareness that the rise of a new food regime in the era of globalization has undermined national regulatory policies and the ability of individual countries to encourage national food production and even maintain their own food reserves. Open market economies mean that agricultural commodities and food reserves are moved ever more rapidly from one corner of the globe to another by the agribusiness corporations, depending on the movement of prices and profits. It is not simply a question of drought or bad weather causing a decline in food reserves. The marketing exchanges in the major agricultural exporting nations, especially the United States, respond to rising prices by selling off their stocks. National governments, wedded to the idea of neo-liberal policies, are by and large unwilling to intervene to prevent the rapid rise in prices, or even to halt the export of needed grain reserves that could cushion the price shock for their own populations.

It is increasingly clear that the issue of food security is now too important to be left to the politicians, national governments, or "the market place." International, rather than merely national, policies are now needed to help coordinate the production and flow of agricultural commodities. A "globalist perspective"--rather than globalization which is tied to markets and private gain--is necessary to provide food security, to eradicate hunger, and to coordinate agricultural production on a global scale.

At the same time, solutions to the lack of food security must also be local and regional. The United Nations Development Program recently released a study showing how many cities are producing increasing portions of their dietary needs through the development of urban agriculture. There can be no megascript for increasing food production and providing adequate diets for all of the world's inhabitants. The decollectivized societies of the erstwhile Soviet Union will need a far different approach to rejuvenate their agricultural production than will the NACs, given the fact that countries like Brazil already have robust export markets while dire poverty and hunger are rampant among the country's urban poor and agricultural workers.

The same is true for the implementation of "sustainable agriculture," a term that is now employed so widely that it is virtually meaningless. The policies and technologies necessary to increase production while safeguarding the environment will be very different on Mexico's ejidos from those needed in California's rich central valley dominated by agribusiness interests.

I do not necessarily believe that "small is beautiful," especially when projections indicate that the globe's population may almost double in the next century. What we need is a "postmodern agriculture," one that deals with the destructive aspects of modernization while allowing "two, three, many forms" of agricultural production and distribution to take hold around the globe. A new "globalist" perspective is essential, one that confronts the problems of globalization while also avoiding the pitfalls of a national or "traditionalist" approaches to food and agriculture. The rich diversity of traditional agriculture as well as many of the innovations and changes that have occurred under globalization will all need to be incorporated into the globe's future agricultural development processes if the peoples of the world are finally to free themselves from the ancient scourge of hunger.

In conclusion I'd like to read a few lines from the poem "The Great Tablecloth" by Pablo Neruda:

Let us sit down soon to eat with all those who haven't eaten, let us spread great tablecloths, put salt in all the lakes of the world, set up planetary bakeries, tables with strawberries in snow, and a plate like the moon itself from which we will all eat.

For now I ask no more than the justice of eating.