Savvy Vegetarian Blog

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Tue, 12 Feb 2008

Ronnie Cummins, Organic Consumers Association: Corporate Globalization: Standing at the End of the Road

I just read an excellent article in Common Dreams by Ronnie Cummins, director of the Organic Consumers Association.

Ronnie Cummins writes from Mexico, which has been economically devastated by NAFTA - the North American Free Trade Agreement. He was part of a demonstration against NAFTA in Mexico City: "...one hundred and fifty thousand small farmers, teachers, workers, and neighborhood activists are marching to repeal the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and end the illegal 'dumping' by Cargill, ADM, and Monsanto of billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidized U.S. agricultural crops – beans, rice, sugar, powdered milk, soybeans, and genetically engineered corn – onto the Mexican market."

"NAFTA, pushed through in Mexico, Canada, and the U.S. in 1994 over the opposition of the majority of North Americans, is literally driving Mexico's thirty million small farmers and villagers off the land and into the slums of Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey, Tijuana, Juarez, and other cities; or else, following the path of twelve million others before them, across the increasingly dangerous border into the United States to find work. Rural villages in Mexico have become literal economic ghost towns of women, children, and the elderly. In some municipalities, 80-90% of the men and boys are gone, increasingly joined by the young women."

After describing the effects of NAFTA and similar global agri-business deals - cheap abundant food for the U.S. and starvation for other countries - Ronnie Cummins ponders the way forward from the heartbreaking injustice he describes.

"The simple solution to all this is to scrap NAFTA, make organic and sustainable farming once more the dominant practice in agriculture (as it has been for most of the last 10,000 years), help the globe's two billion farmers stay on the land, make healthy organic foods and lifestyles the norm, and restructure global agriculture and commerce so that sustainable local and regional production for local and regional markets and Fair Trade become the norm, not just the alternative."

"Implementing these obvious alternatives," Cummins states, "will require nothing short of a global grassroots rising."

Savvy Veg sees a peaceful transformation of world consciousness making positive global change inevitable. Evidence of that transformation can be found in the phenomenal numbers of people, all over the world, adopting a vegetarian diet. It's typically spontaneous - people just wake up one day and realize that they have to be vegetarian. Will Tuttle, in his book of that name, calls vegetarianism 'The World Peace Diet', and it's part and parcel of Ronnie Cummins simple solution to corporate globalization.

Read Ronnie Cummins article, Corporate Globalization: Standing at the End of the Road