Globalization is all about Profits for Industry

While listening to the glowing news from the occupied White House about the booming economy that they see from the viewpoint of servicing only the very wealthy, a view of the other world may just be invisible if you're disinclined to accept criticism. In the world generally, the wage losses of the working people is making life ever more difficult. Without disposable income, the green stuff left over after paying for the basics of living, there haven't been great sales during this supershopper, aka Christmas, season.

Living off the land, our neighbors are facing a precipice in Mexico's farming communities. Right, that's the community that was supposed to be saved by NAFTA creating all those great industries to employ them. Look very hard. Those industries have not materialised, while prices have not proved enough of a boost for the tiny farmsites that prevail in nearby Mexico.

For 15 years, Mexican farmers have feared the day when the last import protections end for the country's ancestral crops of corn and beans.

But as Jan. 1 draws near, farmers say the damage has already been done: Mexico has plunged deeply into a model of globalized agriculture where farmers are ill-prepared to compete, and even people who don't farm for a living are suffering.
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"It isn't enough to live on, and besides, we have to plant with mules and a hand plow, because there have not been any programs to provide us a tractor," Lopez said.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. Officials in 1993 said the 15-year transition period would give farmers here a chance to modernize, diversify their crops and begin to export them, or at least find seasonal work at a new wave of factories the trade pact was expected to bring to the Mexican countryside.

None of that happened, says Victor Suarez, the leader of a farm cooperative group that works to start storage silos and direct farm-to-consumer sales of corn tortillas.

"There was no transition period like they promised 15 years ago," Suarez said. "We are not ready (for the trade opening), the only ones who are ready are the 20 big agribusiness corporations."

In fact, Mexico's government has already allowed global market forces to be strongly felt in Mexico. For years, it has allowed more corn imports under lower tariffs than NAFTA requires. This is why the U.S. ethanol boom caused a spike in tortilla prices early this year, which in turn sparked street protests in Mexico.

For a country long used to a highly regulated agricultural market, the "tortilla crisis" was a bitter taste of the power of agribusiness consortiums that allegedly hoarded corn and speculated with prices.

The globalization of our economy has meant a drain of high-tech jobs as well as most of our former manufacturing sector. It has been a cheat as well to other countries' workers, and has revealed itself to be only a ruse to convince our leaders, and voters, that letting businesses set up internationally is going to make them act responsibly toward their workforce. This has proved not to be the case.

It's become increasingly obvious that our corporate representatives are determined to betray their workers, and ignore the need to insure they can afford what they produce. We won't be sorry when they find the profits aren't coming in from a third world world.

Increasingly, finding out they have been cheated is turning Latin America away from the U.S., where their interests have been betrayed.