Re: Henwood: Collapse in Cancun

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Collapse in Cancun
>  by Doug Henwood
>
>  http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20031027&s=henwood

This article marks an extraordinary decline in Doug Henwood's political
evolution and I urge everybody to take a look at it. Basically it questions
the wisdom of global justice protests, such as the kind that took place in
Cancun, against agricultural free trade. Cagey as ever, Henwood does not
single out Mexican farmers who took part in this protest, but their South
Korean brethren. He writes:

"What is progressive about using public resources to support farming on
cold, snowy, mountainous land? Isn't the benefit of trade exactly to
address something like this? South Korea isn't an impoverished country
whose population is dominated by a peasantry that would be ruined by
opening up to food imports--it makes cars and cell phones. Why shouldn't
South Korea import food?"

Mind you, the South Korean peasant leader who took part in these protests
stabbed himself to death while hundreds looked on in horror. Henwood is
very good at raising these sorts of questions without having the guts to
answer them himself. Obviously he has the same "modernization" politics as
Paul Krugman but is reluctant to articulate them in a forthright manner for
fear of alienating his celebrity friends on the left.

There are signs that even this might be too much for some of his allies,
including John Mage who exercises an enormous amount of power at Monthly
Review. Mage, a regular on Henwood's email list who obviously enjoys the
sort of gossip and petty quarreling that goes on there, took Henwood to
task. This is a first, as far as I can tell.

===

Those "inefficient" peasants - and the recently pauperized urban
ex-peasants - are way more than half the world's population. If there were
the slightest fragment of global democracy, their interests would take
precedence over _everything_ else.

Samir Amin's piece in the current MR
<http://www.monthlyreview.org/1003amin.htm> sets out the ABCs. Below is an
excerpt that spears the program of the agricultural "free trade" G-21
governments and their NGO allies, and suggests the alternative.

john mage

"Modernization through capitalist market liberalization, as suggested by
WTO and its supporters, finally aligns side by side, without even
necessarily combining, the two components: the production of food on a
global scale by modern competitive farmers mostly based in the North but
also possibly in the future in some pockets of the South; and, the
marginalization, exclusion, and further impoverishment of the majority of
the three billion peasants of the present third world and finally their
seclusion in some kinds of reserves. It therefore combines a
pro-modernization and efficiency-dominant discourse with an
ecological-cultural-reserve set of policies allowing the victims to survive
in a state of material (including ecological) impoverishment. These two
components might therefore complement, rather than conflict with, one another.

Can we imagine other alternatives and have them widely debated? Ones in
which peasant agriculture would be maintained throughout the visible future
of the twenty-first century, but, which simultaneously engage in a process
of continuous technological and social progress? In this way, changes could
happen at a rate that would allow a progressive transfer of the peasants
into non-rural and non-agricultural employment.

Such a strategic set of targets involves complex policy mixes at national,
regional, and global levels.

At the national level it implies macro policies protecting peasant food
production from the unequal competition of modernized farmers and
agribusiness corporations--local and international. This will help
guarantee acceptable internal food prices--disconnected from international
market prices, which are additionally biased by the agricultural subsidies
of the wealthy North.

Such policy targets also question the patterns of industrial and urban
development, which should be based less on export-oriented priorities
(e.g., keeping wages low which implies low prices for food) and more
attentive to a socially-balanced expansion of the internal market.

Simultaneously, this involves an overall pattern of policies to ensure
national food security--an indispensable condition for a country to be an
active member of the global community, enjoying the indispensable margin of
autonomy and negotiating capacity.

At regional and global levels it implies international agreements and
policies that move away from the doctrinaire liberal principles ruling the
WTO--replacing them with imaginative and specific solutions for different
areas, taking into consideration the specific issues and concrete
historical and social conditions."



Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org


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