Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet (10 page)

To Del Monte and Dole, this is development. But development for whom? Small farmers had worked the land for over a generation, yet, as is common in the third world, they had no legal title to it. This made it easier for the corporations to move in. They simply made deals with wealthy local owners of the best banana land. Once these big landowners saw they could make money by producing bananas for Del Monte, Dole, or Standard Brands, they pushed the poor, small farmers off the land, using bribes, false promises of great jobs on the plantations, legal maneuvers, and finally brutal force.

Most of the dispossessed could not get any kind of job on the plantations. Many ended up even worse off—rising at four each morning to line up near the docks in hopes of being picked to help load the banana boats. They had no job security and no place to live except the crowded, dirty “carton” village set up near the docks.

We might have come home demoralized by the degradation and suffering we witnessed, but we didn’t, because we also witnessed the strength of the people.

One morning we got up at four to meet with the men waiting for a day’s work on the docks. They told us of their attempts to organize a real union to represent them—and how everything had to be carried out in total secrecy. Anyone known to be organizing never got another work assignment. Living with little food and no security in the carton village should have sapped these men’s energy, yet they told of their goals and the secret meetings they were planning. They were not resigned.

Maria, a woman who had worked on the banana plantations and was then working through the church community in basic village-level education, was part of the widespread resistance to the Marcos dictatorship. Petite, soft-spoken, Maria did not fit our image of a revolutionary. (But neither did anyone else we met.) Her commitment was not just to the ousting of a dictator but, most important, to the building of a democratic society from the village up. That was why village-level education was a priority. She and her many allies used drama and song to make political and social problems come to life for the peasants.

We asked our new friends how we in the United States could help them. Without hesitation they told us that we should work to end U.S. government support for the antidemocratic dictatorship that rules their country. Without U.S. aid, Maria told us, the Marcos dictatorship would fall. (In 1981 the Philippines was the sixth largest recipient of U.S. development assistance aid and the seventh largest recipient of U.S. military aid.) She urged us to return home to explain to Americans that our security does not rest in supporting dictators abroad.

Maria helped me to understand that our role is not to empower other people. In fact, we
cannot
. Just as only we can confront the unjust concentration of economic and political power within our society, only the poor in the third world can organize to overcome their powerlessness. We must also understand that wherever people are oppressed, there is
already
resistance. That resistance might appear doomed in light of the mighty forces working against the poor—but many observers belittled the chances of success of our own American Revolution, fought by a minority of colonists. The struggle of the African colonies against Portuguese colonialism was dismissed just two years before its success. And even as late as spring of 1979, many doubted that the Nicaraguans would be able to overthrow the Somoza dictatorship, as they did in July of that year.
^*

Three years after my eye-opening trip to the Philippines, Joe Collins, David Kinley, and I wrote
Aid as Obstacle: Twenty Questions about Our Foreign Aid and the Hungry
, fully documenting this analysis. In the process, I learned that ending military and economic aid to repressive governments is not a separate “human rights” cause, because where people’s human rights are denied, so are their food rights.

Lessons from Africa

In the summer of 1978 I set out again, this time on a different quest. In so much of our work we study and concentrate on what is wrong in the current economic order—the injustice, the waste, the destruction. Yet we know that we will not be successful unless we are also working
for
something. Here we face a tough dilemma: how can we develop a vision without falling into the trap of believing that there is a “model” social order that everyone can simply follow?

In struggling with this dilemma, we came up with the theme of “lessons, not models.” While no society has achieved a model social order, there are powerful lessons that we can learn by studying the experiences of people in other countries, people attempting to establish democratic political and social institutions to meet the needs of all. Behind this belief is the assumption that something new
is
possible—that human beings are capable of building social institutions more life-giving than those known anywhere in the world today.

We try to make “lessons, not models” a basic theme of our work. Yet some people attack
Food First
for offering idealized “models” of alternatives. From these reactions we have learned that our readers—especially North Americans—are not accustomed to thinking in terms of lessons from abroad. Thus, when we praise some feature of another society, we are sometimes accused of suggesting wholesale adoption of their entire system. Wherever possible we seek to break out of this bind by speaking from actual experience and pointing out both the positive and negative lessons to be learned from other societies.

All this explains why I went to Africa in the summer of 1978 with my colleague Adele Negro. I wanted to see what it was like to be in countries where the land is not owned by a small elite and where the government is not merely the brutal defender of the power of this elite minority. We visited two neighboring African countries whose governments claim to be progressive—Tanzania and Mozambique. At the time, Tanzania was in its eighteenth year of independence from British colonial rule, Mozambique its fourth from Portuguese colonial rule.

In neither country did I see the degradation of the majority of people that I had witnessed in northwestern Mexico, the Philippines, or Guatemala. While most Mozambicans and Tanzanians are poor, I did not see decadent wealth flaunted in the face of miserable poverty. I did not see widespread starvation in the midst of abundance.

In Mozambique we visited a cooperative farm. Begun by 33 families in 1976, it included 300 families by the time of our visit. We talked all afternoon to one of its founders. In spite of setbacks of every imaginable kind—flooding, late arrival of seeds, transportation breakdowns, and theft—the cooperative was thriving. The cooperative could not have been organized without the support of the government, which provided the initial loans. Although it was one of a handful of successful cooperatives at that time, it was the kind of organization for development that the government hoped would flourish.

As I talked with the cooperative’s founder, I could not help but flash back in my own mind to the banana plantation in the Philippines. In the Mozambican cooperative, every member had one vote. Those who worked the land decided what to grow and what to do with the profits. On the banana plantation the workers were not only powerless but lived in fear of the power of the owner, backed up by the government’s military.

It was dusk by the time my host let us leave. Even though I was exhausted and eager to begin the long drive back to the city, he wouldn’t let us go until he had taken us out into the well-tended, irrigated fields. For years he had fought against Portuguese colonialism, but he seemed prouder of these budding crops than of the victory over colonialism. For him, the struggle to build a new society was an even greater challenge. And I think he is right: societies formed and deformed over hundreds of years of colonial rule will not emerge within a few years as just societies. Patience is a necessity.

My African trip also showed me the inadequacy of the labels used to describe the two dominant theories of economic organization—capitalism and socialism. Americans are taught to associate capitalism with democracy and socialism with totalitarianism. Yet in the world today we see extremely antidemocratic economic structures in both “socialist” and “capitalist” systems. And we can see democratic elements in both systems, too. In the Philippines, a “capitalist” country, I saw few signs of democratic participation; in “socialist” Mozambique I saw the beginnings of democratic participation from the village up. Every member of the production cooperative had a vote; moreover, everyone could participate in choosing representatives for the country’s decision-making bodies, the governing party and the representative assemblies.

As our stereotypes crumble, we have to get better and better at perceiving the important distinctions. Instead of talking in “isms,” we must learn to determine how power is actually distributed in a society. For example, both of these African countries have a one-party system, so some might place them in the “totalitarian” category. I learned that what matters most is not the number of parties in the government, but whom the government really represents—and whether it is accountable to the majority of people.

Unlearning our rigid categories means learning to think of every society as in a
process of change
rather than static. (A friend of mine once observed: “What’s wrong with Americans is that we want progress without change.”) Americans do sense the dramatic changes taking place all around us, and many feel overwhelmed and paralyzed. To break out of our fears, we at the Institute believe, we must first make sense out of these changes—we must understand their roots and their consequences. This is the first step toward moving our society in constructive change. So the Institute has launched a major new investigation. It is not taking me to Maputo, Mozambique, or Davao City, the Philippines. Rather, I am asking: What is the meaning of the critical changes taking place in our food and agricultural system here in the United States?

The Underdevelopment of U.S. Agriculture

Studying third world agricultural problems for ten years, I began to see a pattern of “underdevelopment” that included these three elements: the
concentration of economic power
as the gap between the rich and the poor widens;
dependency and instability
of both the society as a whole and of more and more people within it; and finally,
the mining of agricultural resources
for the benefit of a minority.

The agriculture of so many third world countries can be described in these terms. But what about the United States? Doesn’t it have the world’s most productive agriculture? Don’t we have a system of family farms, not plantations run by a landed elite? And don’t we have long-established conservation programs to prevent the mining of our soil and water?

Many believe so, but what I am learning is that each of these patterns of underdevelopment—the kind of society I don’t want—is taking hold right here in America.

C
ONCENTRATION OF
E
CONOMIC
P
OWER

Control over farmland is becoming increasingly concentrated. In just 20 years, it is predicted, a mere 3 percent of all farms will control two-thirds of farm production.
⁴
The amount of farmland controlled by absentee landlords will increase. (Already almost half of U. S. farmland is owned by nonfarmers.
⁵
) Donald Paarlberg, among the most highly regarded agricultural economists in the country, warns us: “We are developing a wealthy hereditary landowning class, which is contrary to American tradition.”
⁶

U. S. farmland, at present anyway, is actually much less tightly controlled than the rest of the food industry, which is now dominated by what economists call “shared monopolies.” This means that in almost any given food category, only four corporations control at least half of the sales. In 33 categories, only four companies control
two-thirds
of the sales. For some foods, the monopoly power is much greater: three corporations—Kellogg’s, General Mills, and General Foods—capture over 90 percent of breakfast cereal sales.
⁷

Such market power spells profits: between 1973 and 1979, food industry profits rose 46 percent faster than consumer food expenditures. And this monopoly power spells higher food costs for all of us. Monopoly power in the food processing industry results in close to $20 billion in overcharges to American consumers each year, or almost $90 per year for every single American.
⁸
That’s how much more we pay compared to prices in a more competitve food economy.

In fact, at every stage of the food industry concentration is tightening. During just the last ten years 20 “Fortune 500” corporations have acquired at least 60 U.S.–based seed companies.
⁹
In just ten years the top four pesticide manufacturers increased their control from 33 percent of the market to 59 percent.
¹⁰
Just two corporations now control about half of tractor sales.
¹¹

The meat industry is no exception to these trends. Just three decades ago, cattle were fed in thousands of small feedlots (fenced areas where cattle are fattened for market). During the 1960s, 7,500 feedlots folded each year. By 1977, half of the 25 million cattle fed in the United States passed through only 400 feedlots.
¹²

At the next stage of production—beef packing—four corporations control one-third of the market. One of these, Iowa Beef Processors, was just grabbed up by Occidental Petroleum. Having made a killing through its control of one scarce commodity—fossil fuel—Oxy is hoping to do the same with another. Its board chairman told
Business Week
shortly before the 1981 merger: “Food shortages will be to the 1990’s what energy shortages have been to the 1970’s and 1980’s.”
¹³