The Violence of the Free Market: Globalization Leads to Struggle for Food that Imperils Filipino Poor
....."All over this warming planet, from India to Sudan to Peru, farmers are struggling with lower yields and greater uncertainty. Smaller farmers, of course, who lack the resources to adjust, feel the pain sharpest. As the world faces the uphill battle of feeding its people in the coming years, neoliberalism and globalization only add insult to injury. Seventy percent of the world’s population are small farmers, according to the United Nations. Their survival is essential to feeding the hungry, but trade injustice, a lack of state support and corporate agriculture threaten them. The Philippines is, sadly, just one venue of many where global factors are wreaking havoc on small farmers and their food."
"I am walking through an alleyway between the highway and the fish market. It is strewn with garbage and foul-smelling water runs in the gutters. I usually hurry through this alley, but what I see today stops me in my tracks. A bone-thin woman and her pants-less child are squatting near the gutter, eating off the ground. In a country that not so long ago fed itself with rice grown in its own paddies, this mother and child, and millions like them, are reduced to eating others’ trash. Then I look closer. What they are eating is even more cruel. They are picking bits of white rice off of a scrap of plastic bag."
http://zcommunications.org/the-violence-of-the-free-market-globalization-leads-to-struggle-for-food-that-imperils-filipino-poor-by-erika-eichelberger