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From: riddle@im4u.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: The role of America in world hunger & red spread
Message-ID: <424@im4u.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 15-Aug-85 14:38:08 EDT
Article-I.D.: im4u.424
Posted: Thu Aug 15 14:38:08 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 19-Aug-85 07:48:58 EDT
References: <295@SCIRTP.UUCP> <10996@rochester.UUCP> <143@unc.unc.UUCP>
Reply-To: riddle@im4u.UUCP (Prentiss Riddle)
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>> When the 3rd-world plantations grow bananas, sugar, and coconuts,
>> the plantation owners can sell the crop for money, which they then
>> keep for themselves, spending it on luxuries, or depositing it in
>> Swiss banks.  The peasants get none of it and thus starve.

It can get even more blatant than that.  Many of the plantation crops
(coffee, for instance) require only seasonal labor.  In order to guarantee a
sufficient supply of willing labor at harvest time, plantation owners in
many places (notably in Central America) have been known to use force, legal
trickery and any other means at their disposal to make sure that peasants
remain landless.  Otherwise, the peasants might prefer to attend their own
subsistence crops at harvest time rather than work at starvation wages for
the big boys.  Large plantation economies based on cash crops for export not
only encourage mass poverty, they often *depend* on it.

Not that you have to go Central America to find examples of this principle;
the migrant farmworkers who do so much of the harvesting in this country
often suffer from the same principle.

--- Prentiss Riddle ("Aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada.")
--- {ihnp4,harvard,seismo,gatech}!ut-sally!riddle   riddle@ut-sally.UUCP
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