Feeding the few Read online

FEEDING THE FEW:

  CORPORATE CONTROL OF FOOD

  Susan George

  First published 1979 by The Institute for Policy Studies

  ISBN 0-89758-010-9

  Copyright © Susan George and the Institute for Policy Studies

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  About The Author

  Author’s Foreword

  PART I THE NEW INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ORDER: WHO WOULD BENEFIT?

  The NIEO and Development Choices

  Money Isn't Everything

  PART II NIEO: THE NEW IMPERIALIST ECONOMIC ORDER

  Firms and farms: The US Food System

  Vertical integration

  Agribusiness goes abroad

  Agribusiness upstream from the Third World Farm

  Wiring the Third World Farm into One World Market

  You Take the Risks, I'll Take the Profits

  Agribusiness Downstream from the Third World Farm: Anything They Can Do We Can Do Better

  New Weapons in the Grain Arsenal

  Post Harvest Technology

  Change Their Tastes, Change Their Minds

  NOTES TOWARD A CONCLUSION

  Glossary

  References

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SUSAN GEORGE is the author of fifteen books written in French and English and widely translated. She is president of the Board of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, a decentralised fellowship of scholars living throughout the world whose work is intended to contribute to social justice and who are active in civil society in their own countries. She is also honorary president of ATTAC-France [Association for Taxation of Financial Transaction to Aid Citizens] where she also served as vice-president between 1999 and mid-2006 and remains a member of the scientific council.

  Her most recent books are Whose Crisis, Whose Future [Polity Press 2010]; Hijacking America: How the Religious and Secular Right Changed What Americans Think [Polity Press 2008]; We the Peoples of Europe [Pluto Press 2008]. Other recent books are Another World is Possible if... [Verso, New York and London, 2004] and The Lugano Report: On preserving capitalism in the 21st century [Pluto Press 1999], both available in many other languages.

  She has received honorary doctorates from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and the Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia of Madrid as well as the first “Outstanding Public Scholar Award” of the International Political Economy section of the International Studies Association.

  For a full biography and list of publications, please visit https://www.tni.org/users/susan-george.

  AUTHOR'S FOREWORD

  This study is a contribution to the Transnational Institute's International Economic Order Project directed by Howard M. Wachtel. It is an attempt to place issues concerning food and agricultural commodities in the context of changing world economic relationships. The first part deals with what the Third World is asking for; the second with what, in my view, it is actually getting. As one discussion after another on agricultural raw materials ends in stalemate, new kinds of food systems are meanwhile introduced in underdeveloped countries by the powerful nations of the North, led by the USA. The study is intended, however, less to provide answers than to suggest a critical perspective and perhaps some new tools for analysis of the ongoing takeover of Third World food systems, designed in the image of the developed countries and for their benefit.

  Since many readers of this study and of my book will of necessity be the same people, I have taken what I hope are sufficient pains not to bore them by using a different approach here and by not incorporating examples, data, etc. previously published (at least not by me!). This may result in some unevenness, and I have occasionally resorted to noting that certain important matters are better covered in the book than in this shorter study. Readers interested in my fuller views on the food problem (which have altered only marginally since 1976-77) will find How the Other Half Dies available in the United States through Allanheld, Osmun & Co., 19 Brunswick Road, Montclair, New Jersey 07042 (at $4.95 in paperback and $12.50 in hardback) and in the United Kingdom and Canada through Penguin Books (as a Pelican Original).

  I am most grateful to my colleagues at TNI, Eleanor LeCain and Howard M. Wachtel, as well as to Claude Bourdet, Harris Gleckman, Sylvain Minault and Pierre Spitz; all of whom took the time and trouble to contribute their extremely helpful suggestions for improving this study.