Annihilation of Food Producing Mechanisms

".... men and women of the poorest 20%, are reduced to cogs in this machine, the bottom rung in global production, valued only as cheap labor, other-wise altogether disposable. The machine cannot and does not measure their suffering. The machine also does not measure the suffering ofour planet.....

In today’s global marketplace trillions of dollars are traded each day via a vast network of computers. In this market no one talks, no one touches. Only numbers count. And yet today this faceless economy is already five times larger than the real, or productive, economy.

We know other marketplaces. On a plain highin the mountains of Haiti, one day a week thousands of people still gather. This is the marketplace of my childhood in the mountains above Port Salut. The sights and the smells and the noise and the color overwhelm you. Everyone
comes. If you don’t come you will miss everything. The donkeys tied and waiting in the woods number in the thousands. Goods are displayed in every direction: onions, leeks, corn, beans, yams, cabbage, cassava, and avocados, mangoes and every tropical fruit, chickens, pigs,
goats, and batteries, and tennis shoes, too. People trade goods and news. This is the center; social, political, and economic life roll together.
A woman teases and coaxes her client: “Cherie, the onions are sweet and waiting just for you.” The client laughs and teases back until they make a deal. They share trade, and laughter, gossip, politics, and medical and child-rearing tips. A market exchange, and a human exchange.

We are not against trade, we are not against free trade, but our fear is that the global market intends to annihilate our markets. We will be pushed to the cities, to eat food grown on factory farms in distant countries, food whose price
depends on the daily numbers game of the firstmarket. “This is more efficient,” the economists say. “Your market, your way of life, is not efficient,” they say. But we ask, “What is left whenyou reduce trade to numbers, when you erase all
that is human?”

Globalization:
A View from Below
BY JEAN-BERTRAND ARISTIDE