Talk:Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act of 1954
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Food for Peace sounds nice, but if you look at its consequences, it’s something else. Food for Peace is a gift from the U.S. taxpayer to U.S. agribusiness. It’s not a gift from agribusiness. So U.S. taxpayers are paying agribusiness to send essentially free food to other countries. What happens when you pour U.S. wheat into Colombia, essentially free? It wiped out wheat production. It’s no longer a major wheat producer. It was a coffee producer, still is. Coffee is one of the major commodities in international exchange, second to oil. Coffee, like most commodities, fluctuates pretty radically in price. They’ll be high one year and low the next. If you’re a big agribusiness corporation, that doesn’t bother you. You take a loss here, make a gain there. Suppose you’re a peasant with a couple of acres of coca plant. You can’t tell your children, Don’t bother eating this year. Maybe we’ll have some food next year. If commodities fluctuate in price, small producers are essentially wiped out. That’s understood in Western society." - Noam Chomsky
