[This is the third post of this blog]
THE CURSE OF “MONOCULTURE”
From Open Veins of Latin America, by Eduardo Galeano, 1971:
“Sugar had destroyed Brazil’s Northeast. The humid coastal fringe, well watered by rains, has a soil of great fertility, rich in humus and mineral salts, and covered by forests. This region of tropical forests was turned into a region of savannas. Naturally fitted to produce food, it became a place of hunger. Where everything had bloomed exuberantly, the destructive and all-dominating latifundio [large, privately owned commercial landed estates, usually raising cash crops for export] left sterile rock, washed-out soil, and eroded lands. At first there had been orange and mango plantations, but these were reduced to small orchards surrounding the sugar-mill owner’s house. Fire was used to clear the land for cane fields, devastating the fauna along with the flora: deer, wild boar, tapir, rabbit, pacas, and armadillo disappeared. All was sacrificed on the altar of sugarcane monoculture.
“And it was similarly catastrophic with coffee which some people rank almost on a par with oil in its importance on the international market. With Brazil’s abolition of slavery in 1888, an army of ‘free’ farmhands would accompany coffee on its travels. The Rio Paraiba became the country’s richest area, to be quickly ruined by a plant whose destructive form of cultivation left forests razed, natural reserves exhausted, and general decadence in its wake. Previously virgin lands were pitilessly eroded as the plunder-march of coffee advanced.
“The same is true for other coffee countries, such as El Salvador which found it necessary to import the people’s only sources of protein—-corn, vegetables, and other foods the country had traditionally produced. A quarter of all Salvadorans die of severe vitamin deficiency. As for Haiti, more than half of its children are anemic. The wages Haiti requires by law belong in the department of science fiction: actual wages on coffee plantations vary from $.07 to $.15 a day! In Colombia, too, coffee is king. According to a Time magazine report in 1962, only 5 percent of the price yielded by coffee on its journey from tree to U.S. consumer goes into the wages of the workers who produce it. The price breakdown is as follows: 40 percent for middlemen, exporters, and importers; 10 percent for transport; 5 percent for publicity by the Pan-American Coffee Bureau; 30 percent for plantation owners; and 5 percent for worker’ wages.
“In the United States and Europe, coffee creates income and jobs and mobilizes substantial capital; in Latin America it pays hunger wages and sharpens economic deformation. It provides work for more than 600,000 people in the United States: those who distribute and sell Latin American coffee earn infinitely more than the Brazilians, Colombians, Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Haitians who plant and harvest it on the plantations. [The 3rd World ‘participates’ in global capitalism the same way that the victim, with puncture marks on its neck, participates in vampire-ism.]”
And from How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, by Walter Rodney, 1972:
[Walter Rodney, from Guyana, was an internationally acclaimed author, historian, and social and political activist in pursuit of African self-determination and advancement. In June of 1980, he was killed by a bomb placed in his car.]
“The term ‘monoculture’ is used to describe those colonial economies which were centered around a single crop. Liberia was a monoculture dependent on rubber, Gold Coast on cocoa, Dahomey and southeast Nigeria on palm produce, Sudan and Uganda on cotton, Tanganyika on sisal. In Senegal and Gambia, groundnuts accounted for 85 to 90 percent of money earnings. In effect, two African colonies were told to grow nothing but peanuts. Every farming people has a staple food, plus a variety of other supplements. Historians, agronomists, and botanists have all contributed to showing the great variety of such foods within the pre-colonial African economy. There were numerous crops which were domesticated within the African continent, there were several wild food species and Africans had shown no conservatism in adopting useful food plants of Asian or American origin. Diversified agriculture was within the African tradition. Monoculture was a colonialist invention.
“Sometimes, cash crops were grown to the exclusion of staple foods—-thus causing famines. For instance, in Gambia rice farming was popular before the colonial era, but so much of the best land was transferred to groundnuts that rice had to be imported on a large scale to try to counter the fact that famine was becoming endemic. (From a capitalist viewpoint, monocultures commended themselves because they made colonial economies entirely dependent on the metropolitan buyers of their produce.)”
And from Empire of Cotton, a Global History, by Sven Beckert, 2014:
“Cotton production for export typically produced a quagmire of poverty, debt, and underdevelopment. As the director of the Gharbieh Land Company in Cairo reminded his audience in a speech to an international federation of cotton manufacturers, ‘You have only to go to the villages and see the dwellings our people live in, their very small interest in life, their hard work from morning till evening without distractions would give you an idea as to how the Egyptian peasant lives his gloomy existence.’
“In 1877 and again in the late 1890s, Berar [India] as well as northeastern Brazil, witnessed the starvation of millions of cultivators as cotton prices fell while food grain prices rose, putting food out of reach of many cotton producers. The 1870s famine was not caused by a lack of food (indeed, food grains continued to be exported from Berar), but by the inability of the poorest agricultural laborers to buy urgently needed food grains. In India alone, between 6 and 10 million people died in the famines of the late 1870s. Observed one gazetteer, ‘Had Berar been an isolated tract dependent on its own resources, it is possible that there would have been no famine.’ High prices had made food unavailable to many peasants and agricultural laborers, and during the 1900 famine, another 8.5 percent of the population of Berar died. The British medical journal The Lancet estimated that famine deaths during the 1890s totaled 19 million, with fatalities concentrated in the tracts of India that had recently been recast to produce cotton for export. In the town of Risod, a contemporary observe that people ‘died like flies’” . . . . [Was it socialism that caused all this??]
Our next post will come next week and move into other related facets of global capitalism’s draconian measures of exploitation of the 3rd World nations that has shaped them into what they are today. It’s not pretty.