My apologies for my absence for the past few weeks due to other duties. I will now continue by replacing my third post, which was inadvertently deleted, with a close approximation and will then, hopefully, present one or two posts per week, continuing the theme of the consequences of global capitalism from the viewpoint of the vast majority of the world’s population.
THE CURSE OF “MONOCULTURE”
From Open Veins of Latin America, 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 left to their fate, or reduced to small orchards surrounding the sugarmill owner’s house. Fire was used to clear 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. In the city of Recife in the Northeast, a third of the population lives in miserable hovels; in one district, more than half the babies die before they are a year old.
“And some people rank coffee 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.
“Coffee is also basic to the economies of El Salvador and Haiti. ‘Monoculture,’ [an economy forced to rely largely on the export of one crop or other raw material] makes it necessary to import the beans [as well as] the people’s only source 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, it has Latin America’s highest death rate, and 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, also, 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 workers’ wages.
“In the Unite 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 there 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.]
“The United Nations published [in the mid-1950’s] the results of a study of nutrition in Colombia: 88 percent of Bogota [the capital city] schoolchildren suffered from avitaminosis, 78 percent from riboflavinosis, and more than half were below normal weight; avitaminosis affected 71 percent of workers and 78 percent of Tensa Valley peasants. The study showed ‘a marked insufficiency of protective foods—-milk and its derivatives, eggs, meat, fish, and some vitamins, and salt.’ It is not only the flash of gunfire that reveals social tragedy. Coffee locked the region firmly into the [capitalists’] world market.”
from How Europe underdeveloped Africa, 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.]
“In recent times, economists have been recognizing in colonial and post-colonial Africa a pattern that has been termed ‘growth without development.’ That phrase has now appeared as the title of books on Liberia and Ivory Coast. It means that goods and services of a certain type are on the increase. There may be more rubber and coffee exported, there may be more cars imported with the proceeds, and there may be more gasoline stations built to service the cars. But the profit goes abroad, and the economy becomes more and more a dependency of the metropoles. In no African colony was there economic integration [inter-connected branches of economic development], or any provision for making the economy self-sustained and geared to its own local goals. Therefore, there was growth of the import-export sector, but the only things which developed were dependency and underdevelopment.
“A further revelation of growth without development under colonialism is [as was previously noted as well in the countries of Latin America] the over-dependence on one or two exports. 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 plants of Asian or American origin. Diversified agriculture was within the African tradition. Monoculture was a colonialist invention.
“And, at all times, the price fluctuations (which were [and are] externally controlled) left the African producer helpless. From a capitalist viewpoint, monocultures commended themselves most because they made colonial economies entirely dependent on the metropolitan buyers of their produce.”
Next post: Free and open markets?