Clinton Apologizes For Helping Crush Haitian Farmers

I can hardly believe it, but Change.org is reporting the former President Clinton has apologized for his role in bringing (so-called) free trade to Haiti, helping lead to a situation of exacerbating poverty, where "six pounds of imported rice now costs at least a dollar less than a similar quantity of locally-grown rice. So how can a Haitian farmer compete? The past 15 years have shown they simply can't."

Ruth Messinger points out in the piece that

Prior to the era of so-called "free trade," Haiti could feed itself, importing only 19% of its food and actually exporting rice. Today, Haiti imports more than half of its food, including 80% of the rice eaten in the country. The result is that Haitians are particularly vulnerable to price spikes arising from global weather, political instability, rising fuel costs and natural disasters, such as earthquakes that register 7.0 on the Richter scale. In fact, since the January earthquake, imported rice prices are up 25%.

As was pointed out in a previous J-post on Haiti by J-friend K. McAfee

Like other networks and op ed pundits, CNN reporters refer to Haiti's extreme material poverty despite, they say, a history of US efforts to "help". None have any sense of whom was actually helped by the 1915-35 US occupation (US & French banks, agribusiness, and the small Haitian elite), US support of Duvalier and other dictators (same beneficiaries, plus sweat-shop owners), the US aid & trade policies that undermined staple food production and created dependence on US rice exports, or US-backed neoliberal "adjustment" loan conditions and deliberate, ongoing undermining of the imperfect but legitimate Aristide and Preval governments by the US government and the Clinton Foundation.

It's nice to see someone in our government admit to any of this, even if it's after they're out of office. Better than never after all! -- or -- the interesting example where Colin Powell expressed "regret"* at the US role in the Chilean coup of September 11, 1973 that the US most certainly helped instigate (with former SecState Henry Kissinger playing a key role in that particular 9/11 disaster that set a dictatorship into motion that would, among other things, claim over 3,000 lives, among his other adorable war-criminalistic-sheningans that have led him to having to consult a team of lawyers to figure out where he can travel that he may not be extradited to Chile!), but (as can be seen in the same article above) this was followed by the Administration coming out and "clarifying" Powell's regret, so as to give no hint of an admission of guilt, to re-obscure the open secret of our actions in Chile and elsewhere.

If you've read the J/Anekantavada before, you know this isn't the first time I've looked askance at US actions, to say the least. To see us looking back on any of our "mistakes" (which I put in scare quotes because they were often the intentional action of our leaders) and, if this is true about Clinton, apologizing, well... I can't say it gives me hope, or quite makes me particularly proud to be an American, or makes up for the then and continuing actions of American Empire, but... gosh darn it, admitting when we Fucked Someone Else for fun and profit is a step, and a rarely taken one, much less apologizing for it. So, 1.5 cheers I suppose.

*An excerpt of Powell's 2003 comments can be found here. The money shot, in reference to a question of how the US could be the "moral superior" looking to bring democracy to Iraq, after our actions against democracy and human rights with respect to supporting the Chilean dicatorship:

So it is the will of the international community that Iraq disarm, and not just the moral superior position, as you describe it, of the United States. We have no desire to impose upon the Iraqi people a leadership that is to our choosing, but to give them an opportunity to choose their own leadership.

With respect to your earlier comment about Chile in the 1970s and what happened with Mr. Allende, it is not a part of American history that we're proud of. We now have a more accountable way of handling such matters and we have worked with Chile to help it put in place a responsible democracy.

One of the proudest moments of my life was going to Chile in the late '80s and speaking to all of the military officers in the Chilean armed forces, all the senior officers, and talking to them about democracy and elected representative government and how generals such as them and me -- I was a general at the time -- are accountable to civilian authority so that incidents of that kind or situations of that kind no longer arose.

There's quite an interesting implicit admission of wrong-doing here, considering the emphasis he puts on how things "of that kind" can't happen again, despite, of course, the fact that they happened many times before and many times since...

Reasonable words on GM Foods

I'm rather skeptical of genetically modified foods myself, both on grounds of safety and efficacy in addressing hunger (and I realize these are heavily contested points and I'm just not going to venture back into them now), but an article at The Guardian maintains that the new synthesis is in, and it's one I largely agree with:

On Wednesday night a debate on GMOs at the illustrious Royal Society of Chemistry HQ in London suggested a breakthrough. Afterwards the feeling was that it was a win on points for the GM sceptics... But [GM proponents] can take heart: the debate was less a defeat for GM than for the way it has developed. The corollary is that if the government really believes that the only way to increase yields is through GM technology, it will have to fund this itself.

The winning argument on Wednesday was not really about science at all, but about the ethics of a method of increasing yields that delivers such power into the hands of the multinationals... GM may be a small part of the answer. But it has a mixed record in Asia, where it has tended to enrich the rich and impoverish the poor, and it is unlikely to be any part of the answer to food security in Africa for the foreseeable future. As the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation pointed out last year, there is enough food for everyone. It just isn't available in the right places... globally the need is for publicly funded science to investigate sustainable agriculture in the widest possible meaning of the word: better farming practices, a viable pricing system and, for the global north, a radical change in patterns of consumption.

The "consensus position" (of three or four people I've talked with) is that a reasonable position genetic modification includes a much larger public sector involvement and relative decrease in blockages from Intellectual Property Regimes (if not directly challenging established patents, then developing GM products in the public domain via universities and government funding; many have pointed out that whatever the pluses and minuses of the "first" Green Revolution, a key component of it was the public rather than proprietary nature of a significant portion of its technologies), AND most (of the three or four I've had an extended discussion with) agree as well that large-scale public epidemiology trials should be conducted. GM proponents often proclaim that it's the most widely tested, heavily regulated technology, yet there have been no systematic human feeding trials that I've ever heard of, and certainly no longitudinal ones. Since we're already eating them anyway, seems to me it only makes sense to do large-scale trials taking some people "off" GMs to the extent possible (this would pose a challenge but could be done in part using organic foods) and comparing to a paired sample of people maintaining a GM-diet (not hard since most corn and soybean in the US is already GM). Such trials would be complicated, but there seems little reasonable rationale for not doing them, and doing them would begin to settle much between proponents and opponents (not all, not by half, but much, and would be a substantial improvement on the status quo).

Of course, the thing about the consensus over making GMs:
a) publicly funded/public domain
b) widely, openly and long-term tested
is that it seems quite unlikely to happen, whatever we agree to. GM companies and most governments have no intention of vigorously supporting either position... making articles like that in the Guardian all the more important. If all those of good intent can agree on these two propositions (or something like them) and bridge the divide between people legitimately concerned with hunger and justice but with different evaluations of GM, we can force the hand of governments and companies. Arguing between ourselves has produced more heat than light; hopefully the event reported by the Guardian can be the foundation of a new direction?*




*Rather reminds me of an article a friend recently posted: Let's All Agree: Factory Farming is the Real Evil, Not Vegans. Which I can rather agree to, if one adds the corollary that "factory farms are the enemy, not meat-eaters. Even unconscientious meat-eaters aren't the enemy; we don't want to wipe them out, we want to convince them. Vegan/vegetarianism is threatening and foreign to many people, and trying to shock and shame them into better behavior seems to more commonly generate anger than conversion. Surely, vegans have as much a responsibility as small-farm omnivores to promote co-operation and reasonable discourse, and all of us have a responsibility to convince others. In looking to do so, we should evaluate what's most effective, not necessarily what seems most morally satisfying, most extreme, or most attention-getting. All of those have a time and a place, but it's not always the time and place for all of them. I don't read a lot of vegan writing, but it seems to me there's responsibility on both sides for toning down rhetoric and looking to work together against factory farming, rather than against each other. (Especially because I think consumer activism is severely limited and mainly symbolic by itself, without political agitation and structural change, anyway.)

Organic Agriculture can feed the... Africa.

"UN report concludes organic farming offers Africa the best chance to feed itself"

The report is over a year old (news reporting on it can be found here, the report here), and it seems largely based on pre-existing methodology and links by University of Essex's prominent agroecologist Jules Pretty and colleague Rachel Hine.

It seemingly belies the trope that the case of food security in Africa is too desperate, too urgent, and too important to leave to something silly like organic agriculture, though I'm sure the argument will continue in earnest, despite the apparently growing evidence mostly on the side of organic agriculture. (Though the evidence is not unequivocal, perhaps.)

Starving during surplus; surplus of starving

Another bit here reinforcing the importance poverty/lack of socio-economic power in causing hunger and malnutrition (a topic J recently got in an extended discussion with J-friend NP; to be re-posted here eventually).

Quoting Ms. Nierenberg of the WorldWatch Institute,

One of the most interesting things Thurow explained was how the success of African farmers became their failure-in 2001, the Ethiopian harvest was the best most farmers had ever seen. They had record yields and had more food than ever to feed their families, as well as to bring to market. But that surplus caused prices to collapse more than 80 percent. Farmers couldn’t pay their debts and they cut back their expenses the next season-they planted less, they used less inputs like fertilizers and hybrid seeds, and planted just enough to (hopefully) feed their families. When the famine hit hard in2002-2003 , the same farmers, write Thurow and Kilman, who had carried their surplus grain to market the season before, were now carrying their malnourished and starving children to food aid centers. And at the same time, Ethiopian grain traders had warehouses packed to the ceiling with surplus food because foreign aid agencies were buying foreign-mostly U.S. grain-instead of from local suppliers. As a result, while millions of people in Ethiopia went hungry, more than 300,000 tonnes of grain rotted either in fields or in storage.

This is rather similar to a story that was formational in the J-career related to food issues, from a 2002 NYT story, Poor in India Starve as Surplus Wheat Rots (original article is here, but I wanted to make sure readers weren't blocked by a possible NYT subscription wall). Not to pick another debate with NP, but these articles reinforce the pivotal role of poverty/lack of political power in hunger, as in both cases, there are surpluses that are going to waste rather than feeding people (although the details seem reversed, with farmers getting high, possibly inflated prices in one circumstance but underpaid in another, although J highly suspects that the farmers benefitting in India in 2002 were primarily large farmers). Fortification or yield increases or self-generation of pesticides (through genetic modification or other means) would none of them address the problems of hunger confronting the millions of people in these cases, because neither production nor nutrient content were the problem. (The argument with NP to be reprinted here revolved somewhat over Golden Rice (yes, again); one of his points was the fact that it might not solve "the" problem is not a reason it can't solve "a" problem; we'll leave it here by saying that is at least plausibly true, even if I think it to not be the case in the overwhelming majority of the time that genetic modification can solve hunger problems when market/governance problems are at root in the examples given, so even granting his point it appears like it may not be generally applicable solution, beyond potential safety and health problems J sees with GMOs... BID (but i digress)). One certainly can't make the point that production could have a secondary positive effect by lowering food prices in the Ethiopia case as in that case, low food prices (and a reliance on agricultural sales rather than self-sufficiency) contributed to hunger via farmer poverty; in the Indian case it appeared that the government was controlling the distribution of surpluses based on international and domestic political pressures, so price and supply themselves weren't necessarily prime factors there either.

BONUS J
Great quote from J-friend JCR, in response to a quote from another J-friend (""Americans are a stupid people by and large--we pretty much believe whatever we’re told.” -- Det. Norris, Baltimore PD, "The Wire"):

We have a very long history of mistrusting the government and believing in the importance of the individual over the community. We're steeped in it, and we don't often question it. This fundamental attitude is easy to manipulate, so that health care for everyone is bad (because you need more government investment to do it), while tax cuts for the rich are good (on the assumption that someone who is rich got that way by individual merit).

We're no lazier or dumber than the rest of the world, but our basic beliefs don't serve us as well as they could.

For the record, JCR partly credits this blog post by Frank Schaeffer for what he calls a not "completely original" sentiment. (Of course he's right; "There's nothing new under the sun", but then again, genius is, in a way, saying what others have thought but perhaps did not realize: "In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.")

Clear-headed, sobering words on food

Fantastic interview with UK food policy researcher Tim Lang here from GRAIN's 2008 issue of Seedling. He says the world is "sleepwalking" its way through the food crisis, expresses his belief/analysis that the present crisis is not a "blip" as others were but rather presages long-term change for the worse (though in the short-term food prices may again lower for some brief period), lays out the 8 interconnected features under threat with today's "productionist" food system and politics, and expresses hopeful cynicism about the ability of humanity to change the system for the better before a dire and harsh shock to the system comes about in the form of even worse crises.

I used to think, until about five years ago, that an orderly transition was possible. I now wonder if we’ve missed the moment. I hope not. But events are now determining the room for manoeuvre. It’s more likely now that shock will change things. As a rationalist, I want that least. Shocks are messy with dire consequences. But certainly, it looks likely that we might be sleep-walking into a world in which blood flows, metaphorically and at times actually, due to mistakes over food policy. All of us need to raise our voices and our game to prevent those mistakes going unnoticed. Ultimately we have to side with food democracy over food control.

Read the rest of the insightful interview here; and if you're in the upstate New York area in a couple weeks, come see him give the Plenary talk at Visible Warnings: The World Food Crisis in Perspective, April 3 & 4 at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Veggie

Ok, not really, but I am once again going to reassert my efforts to be more vegetarian.

I love meat. I LOVE meat. Part of the hard part of giving up meat is the contented feeling it gives me -- it's one of those things where I'm near guaranteed to feel happy, if not after then at least during. And it's hard to intentionally deprive oneself of happiness, no? Indeed it is.

But reading Raj Patel's excellent blog post on meat eating I am reaffirmed in my desire to emulate him, and to fulfill really the logical implications of my personal beliefs and my research agenda in food security, both of which tell me that most of the meat produced and consumed in the US is bad for the environment, bad for public health, bad for my personal health, excessive, contributing to antiobiotic resistance, usually unnecessarily torturous to the food animal, part of the corporate over-infrastructure that I abhor, and monstrously inefficient use of water and food resources (i.e. tons of grain fed to animals each year that could go towards feeding many times the same number of people -- the grain fed to livestock in the US alone could theoretically feed 800 million people rather than, say, 1/4 to 1/8 that number, and the 100,000 Liters of water required to produce each kilogram of beef -- see work by Cornell's David Pimentel among other sources, such as Michael Pollan's relatively excellent Omnivore's Dilemma).

But on the other hand, I've wildly failed each time I've tried this. Well, perhaps not always wildly -- sometimes I only gradually failed. But perhaps I can do it this way -- no cold, er, turkey, but rather cutting at least the all-round worst offender from my diet.

Can I stop eating beef?

Well, ok, to be honest my goal is even more modest still.

Can I stop eating non-grass-fed beef? (Grass-fed beef is likely far, far far more efficient and better for you than its grain-fed industrial equivalent.) That's my first challenge. WHEN I conquer that, we'll try cutting out, well, either all beef, or perhaps rather cut out all non-free-range/sustainable chicken.

It's not much, but it's an important (re)start.

This Sunday, SUNDAY, SUNDAY!

A message from Amanda Edmonds, ace Executive Director of local (Ypsilanti, Michigan) food security/organic urban gardening/food sovereignty nonprofit Growing Hope (see also post from the Growing Hope Blog):

Friends, Neighbors, Colleagues...

You know you love the Corner Brewery. If you haven't been there, you will love it-- promise. I don't even like beer YET STILL I love the Corner Brewery's beer. And, the Corner is smoke-free! Soooo, this Sunday we're having a fundraising beer tasting for GH and I'd love for you to come and support us, drink good beer, and hang out with other lovers of the Growing Hope... Beer for a good cause is good beer.

Join supporters of Growing Hope and connoisseurs of fine brew at Corner Brewery in Ypsilanti to support Growing Hope on August 26th from 3-5pm. Tickets price is $20 per person, which includes beer tasting (open bar!) for two hours plus appetizers. Tickets will NOT be sold at the door. You can buy tickets online from our website-- www.growinghope.net, down at the bottom of the main page-- or reserve your spot by calling or emailing us. Give a hollar at 734.786.8401 or send an e-mail to info@growinghope.net and we'll put your name down! And there's more-- if you want to go ahead and get your tickets for Hope's Harvest (Sept 23 at Cobblestone Farm!) you can also get those on our website!

Growing Hope Beer Tasting
Corner Brewery
720 Norris St
Ypsilanti, MI 48198

Sunday, August 26, 2007
3:00PM-5:00PM
$20 (for lots and lots of beer and food!!!)

Bring a friend or seven! If you're a blogger, please post for us!! Pass around to your colleagues and friends and neighborhoods. We've also got a few remaining spots for people to get in free by volunteering to be beer pourers. If you want one of those, drop a line!

See ya Sunday!
Amanda

Growing Hope is dedicated to helping people improve their lives and communities through gardening. Based in Ypsilanti, Michigan, we work with neighborhoods, schools, community groups, and families to develop and sustain organic community growing spaces; we build on the strengths of individuals and the community to bring the benefits of gardens to all.

Here it comes, walking down the street...!

For some ungodly reason, I can't get Firefox to let me title this post, but:

OUR ARTICLE'S FINALLY BEEN PUBLISHED! After several years of work, and after being accepted over a year ago, and an unexplained 2 week delay in the stated publication date, "Organic agriculture and the global food supply" has finally been published in the journal Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems née The American Journal of Alternative Agriculture.

The editor's said it's already caused a bit of a stir and controversy, before it's even been published, and we've already received a couple of critical missives from both those who I consider complete quack flacks and those who have above-board criticisms. Also, we got favorable mention at a recent Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO, of the United Nations) conference, and in a resulting Associated Press article about elements of the conference, titled "Switch to organic crops could help poor." For general information, our article analyzes as many studies of organic vs. conventional and organic vs. low intensity agriculture as we could find from reputable sources (both peer-reviewed academic studies and works from established agricultural data sources, such as the FAO). We find that organic agriculture indeed can provide enough food to "feed the world" -- now, and into the future. We also find that there's enough organically acceptable nitrogen -- that is, non-synthetic nitrogen sources (chemically synthesizing nitrogen is incredibly resource-intensive) such as green manuring (using plant residues) to provide the required fertilization for organic crops. Things are, of course, enormously more complicated than even our article could go into, but the bottom line is, our research indicates there's not a present scientific basis for saying organic food can't provide enough to sustain the world's population.*

I wonder if this really means I'm going to be thrown into the deep end of a sustained controversy, or if this article will lay quiet among those outside certain circles... many friends of ours have been eagerly awaiting its publication, so they can cite it themselves. If anyone else steps into the fray remains to be seen. However, our corresponding authors say that they've received overwhelmingly positive notices from people who've read the paper -- many of whom we've never met before and have no ties to (i.e. not necessarily biased in our favor), and only a couple of negative notices.

In any case, our article seems destined to stir up a bunch of debate, some scientifically rigorous, much not, I'd expect... There are a lot of oxes to be gored in refuting, even tentatively, the "Organic agriculture won't provide enough food for the present or future" argument.

I'm not sure what this means for me long-term. I'm still a bit of an anomaly -- ok, presently a complete anomaly in my department, and ecologists tend to see themselves, in my opinion, as "pure scientists" who shouldn't get involved in messy politics and hard-to-study humans. So on the one hand, I figure that anyone ever interested in hiring me is going to realize from Day 1 I don't hew to the traditional boundaries; on the other hand, I wonder what potentially being in the middle of a contentious debate where it's even easier than normal to mix legitimate scientific concerns and hogwash will bring in terms of favorable and unfavorable attention from future employers.

Since I'm not even sure what sector my future employers will be in, though, I'm not so concerned as of yet. But curious.

Let the games begin!

*(It's useful to note that we didn't find that organic agriculture can necessarily produce more than "conventional" Green Revolution agriculture. Rather, we found it could provide enough food for everyone. More food than can be eaten is not any kind of necessary boon, so the idea that conventional can produce more than organic becomes much less meaningful when producing "more" means food beyond what is sufficient for a healthy and active life with a variety of satisfying foods available to all. As a colleague once said, "Eat until you're satisficed." Indeed, we Americans certainly don't need to eat more on average than we do now...)

An Inconvenient Idea: Poppies and Cocaine for Food

I'm reading -- skimming -- presently a book called Ecoagriculture by J.A. McNeely and Sara Scherr. Color me deeply unimpressed so far, but it has inspired in me another idea that, of course, makes sense but will, of course, be dismissed or poo-pooed or ignored, either because it goes against the supposedly inexorable logic of capitalism, which governs all space-time, and is thus impractical, or simply because it goes against capitalism and therefore those whose oxes would be gored just wouldn't wanna do it. (Of course, the latter is the cause of the former, but somehow this constitutes immovable realities, around which pragmatic progressives should reshape their dreams.)

What the hell am I talking about? yes, sorry, i'll get on with it.

Ecoagriculture is about feeding the world and the growing human population while saving wild biodiversity. The authors point out the existence of widespread hunger, poverty, especially rural poverty and the poor farmers forced to intensify production and encroach on valuable biodiverse habitats to stay afloat... yadda yadda yadda, all things I agree with. Of course, they somehow (so far) fail to see that a) there's more than enough food being produced today, the problem is distribution, and b) intensification (more food on less land) tends to, economically, draw more people to produce as it gets easier to produce more (yay capitalism!), incurring further price declines of the type what makes being a farmer difficult. (And c) several studies at least have consistently shown it's the rich, large farmers who cause the most damage to conservation-valuable lands... go figure, huh? Why oh why wouldn't people and governments want to go after big business? The mind boggles.)

Jeff & Sara so far seem to be saying we should hurry up and help tropical farmers intensify, and sell tropical products to us so that we pay them enough money that they can then buy grain from us! (You see, thereby saving their biodiversity, because they won't have to bother with growing their own food, they can just sell us coffee and bananas and passion fruit etc.)

So. Can't call them out there, insofar as that this is a pretty traditional view. But wait: let's set a moment and think: if we were designing a system that made sense, and the stakes are really high (widespread hunger: check; rapid biodiversity loss: check), would we figure, instead of carting produce around the world in extremely resource-intensive planes as fuel prices are likely to climb and global warming increases, wouldn't it be better for the Developed Countries to just directly aid the so-called Developing ones, with just normal aid payments to encourage programs that support small farmers, support local agriculture and local markets, and in general look to reduce everyone's ecological footprint as much as possible? Do they have to grow luxury items to sell to us to get money to buy food items from us in turn? Doesn't that seem, I don't know, stupid?

So, what's occurred to me recently is that none of the food & environment-concerned folks (or none that I know of, including me 'till recently) are advocating a turning over of luxury crop land to food land. A coffee plantation, when rustic coffee is grown, can actually provide a lot of food & fiber crops. Pasture systems can become silvo-pastoral (integrated with some amount of forestry) and provide a variety of useful products locally, as well. Why doesn't the US stop paying so fucking much for new clothes we throw away a year from now and instead encourage and support foreign countries in subsidizing the conversion of cotton crops into diversified food & fiber systems for local use? And you know what: if subsidies and price structures were set up such that food prices were a decent living, people growing cocaine and poppies or what have you would probably start growing food. Oh, not today or tomorrow, but if the future is as dire as it may be -- and Sara & Jeff seem to be trying to paint a very dire picture, indeed -- food prices may skyrocket! Then, of course, it would be more profitable to grow food than drugs. But why wait that long, and worry of the effect on consumers? Since farmers only get ~$0.20 on every dollar we spend in food (see handy reports from the U. of Michigan Center for Sustainable Systems, especially the work of Marty Heller & Greg Keoleian, a friend and colleague and a former professor of mine, respectively), and advertisers get a whole bunch of the rest... well, you do the math. Should people starve, or food prices go up, or farmers get an unfair price, or... should we market, and eat, locally, making sure the money AND RESOURCES are used well and used in our own communities?

Some factoids from Marty & Greg (not Jeff & Sara):

Marketing of domestically grown and consumed food, including charges for transportation, processing and distribution, cost an estimated $466 billion in 1998[44]. That represents 80% of the $585 billion that consumers spent on foods originating on U.S. farms. Marketing costs rose 54% from 1988 to 1998. Nearly 88% of the $186 billion increase in consumer expenditures for domestically grown food resulted from increases in the marketing costs[47]. The cost of labor composed nearly half of the 1998 marketing bill. The remainder of the marketing cost is balanced between packaging, transportation, energy, advertising, business taxes, net interest, depreciation, rent, and repairs (see Figure 1). The relative cost of marketing different food items is reflected partly in the farm value as a percentage of retail price seen in Table 9. As mentioned earlier, the farm-to-retail price spread has increased every year for the past 30 years. While retail food prices rose 2.4% from 1996 to 1997, farmers received 4.4% less for the food they produced[57]. In 1997, food manufacturers (including the tobacco industry) received an after-tax profit return on stockholder equity of 19.8% (5.6% as a percentage of sales), a culmination of 5 years of increasing profits. Food retailers averaged a 17.3% return on stockholder equity in 1997 (1.6% of sales)[45].

Surely, there are places where resources and costs must be cut and reallocated that would represent wiser choices in a sustainability-challenged world than advocating and increasing silly exportation? (I.e. the luxury food-for-money-for regular food example given here. See also: Nicaragua's Caribbean Coast, where they export bananas and other food to Costa Rica because it fetches better prices there. Then, of course, they have to buy food for themselves, and end up importing some of the same foods from abroad. These are perverse systems, capitalism or no, and I don't think they can survive the harsh gaze of sustainability, ecoagriculture or no...)