THE GREEN GIANT DOESN’T LIVE IN CALIFORNIA ANYMORE - Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America - page 54

to become a year-round producer and exporter of fresh asparagus, even shipping it during the part of the
growing season when California growers have historically produced it for the American market.
These trade agreements were also promoted as a strategy for addressing poverty in the developing
world. Pro-free trade advocates cite the benefits for farmers in these countries. Unfortunately, nothing
could be further from the truth. Growing crops for exports not only results in less food production for do-
mestic consumption; it also often results in the removal of peasant farmers from their small landholdings
by large agribusiness interests, so that large acreages of land can be cultivated for export crops.
Many proponents of global food trade, who assert that it helps lift peasant farmers out of poverty, have
ignored this trend. When peasant farmers in places such as Mexico are driven off their plots of land into
urban slums, they often find no employment or are paid extremely low wages.
Anuradha Mittal, director of the Oakland Institute, who has written extensively on this issue, says that
growing for export has displaced small farmers and facilitated the concentration of landholdings by rich
landlords. “Displaced from their lands, farmers have been forced to eke a miserable livelihood in cities
where they form the core of cheap labor for the sweatshops.”
Mittal notes that it has also resulted in land grabs—the purchase or lease of vast tracts of land in poor,
developing countries by private investors to produce crops for export. She says, “Rapid acquisitions of cru-
cial food-producing lands by foreign private entities pose a threat to rural economies and livelihoods, land
reform agendas, and other efforts aimed at making access to food more equitable and ensuring the human
right to food for all.”
Despite the promise of low-cost produce from global trade, imports overall have not improved the
affordability of produce for Americans either. Even adjusted for inflation, most retail prices increased
between 2001 and 2010 for produce such as navel oranges, strawberries, Red Delicious apples, tomatoes,
potatoes, and broccoli. Only banana and iceberg lettuce prices fell over this period.
Free trade has also resulted in a loss of American jobs. Lower U.S. tariffs combined with loosened
investment rules have encouraged U.S. food-processing companies to invest in factories overseas and to
shutter plants in the United States. This means that the produce grown for processing moves to the country
where the new plants are located. Foreign plants in the developing world generally operate under weak-
er environmental and workplace safety regulations, which reduces production costs for American-owned
factories. Lower labor costs have been a key factor in the foreign investments and plant relocations of U.S.
food-processing companies.
Several large American food-processing companies invested in Mexico, as NAFTA went into effect,
to take advantage of lower wages and weaker environmental rules. Green Giant began to shift its produc-
tion there from California, eventually closing a Watsonville, California, frozen-food factory. Green Giant's
Mexican workers earned about $4.30 each day, compared to the $7.60 an hour that workers earned at the
Watsonville plant. As these U.S. investments increased, the share of imports that are essentially shipments
between food company affiliates or subsidiaries increased, with different corporate divisions shipping in-
gredients or products to one another across national borders.
The share of processed fruit and vegetable imports that comes from foreign operations of U.S. com-
panies and transnational corporate affiliates has been rising: between 2000 and 2007 it grew to nearly 35
percent. About half of the processed fruit and vegetable imports from NAFTA partners Mexico and Canada
between 2000 and 2007 were from corporate affiliates. This means that every other can of imported tomato
paste or imported package of frozen sweet corn was manufactured at a U.S.-owned factory in Mexico or
Canada and shipped to the United States. These same export arrangements have emerged under trade deals
with China and Chile. Imports of processed produce from corporate affiliates in China quadrupled, to more
than 20 percent, and from Chile they rose 74 percent between 2000 and 2007.