Cheap (44 page)

161
the final major reform of the New Deal:
Jerold L. Waltman,
The Politics of the Minimum Wage
(Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 28.

161
“ever adopted here or any other country”:
A bit of hyperbole offered during one of Roosevelt’s customary “fireside chats,” June 24, 1938. Cited in, for example, Conrad Black,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, Public Affairs,
2003, 455.

161
Model T’s his workforce assembled:
William C. Richards,
The Last Billionaire: Henry Ford
(New York: Charles Scribner’s & Sons, 1948), 13.

161
veritable blip on our historical screen:
German philosopher and social theorist Friedrich Engels first introduced the notion of the “labor aristocracy” in a number of letters to Karl Marx stretching from the late 1850s through the late 1880s. Engels was grappling with the growing conservatism of the organized sectors of the British working class. He argued that those British workers who had been able to establish unions and secure stable employment—skilled workers in the iron, steel, and machine making-industries and most workers in the cotton textile mills—constituted a privileged and “bourgeoisified” layer of the working class, a “labor aristocracy.”

161
cheap goods cannot be had without “cheap help”
: Howard Zinn, Dana Frank, and Robin D. G. Kelly
, Three Strikes
,
Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 70.

161
“Does Wal-Mart Sell Inferior Goods?”:
Emek Basker, “Does Wal-Mart Sell Inferior Goods?” University of Missouri Department of Economics Working Paper 08-05, April 2008.

161
beating Wall Street estimates:
“Wal-Mart June Sales up; Raises Earnings Forecast,”
Reuters,
July 10, 2008.

161
also enjoyed sales growth:
Michael Barbaro, “Discounters Fared Well in Quarter,”
New York Times,
May 14, 2008.

162
benefit both its workers and its core clientele:
Interview with Nelson Lichtenstein, July 2006.

162
“is market potential unrealized”:
Larry Copeland, “Wal-Mart’s Hired Advocate Takes Flak,”
USA Today
, March 15, 2006.

163
from their exploits in the New World:
Jeff Chapman, “The Impact of the Potato,”
History Magazine
, January 2000.

163
such as leprosy and syphilis:
C. Graves (ed.),
The Potato, Treasure of the Andes from Agriculture to Culture
(Lima, Peru: International Potato Center, 2001).

164
cheap fuel for cheap labor:
Redcliffe N. Salaman, William Glynn Burton, and John Gregory Hawkes,
The History and Social Influence of the Potato
(Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 420.

164
with one or two herring on the side:
Leslie A. Clarkson and E. Margaret Crawford,
Feast and Famine: Food and Nutrition in Ireland, 1500-1920
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 74-75.

164
“Women boiled hardly anything but potatoes”:
Cecil Woodham-Smith,
The Great Hunger: Ireland, 1845-1849
(New York: Penguin Group, 1992, reissue edition).

164
into a foul-smelling black slime:
Redcliffe N. Salaman et al.,
History and Social Influence,
163.

164
food exporter, shipping meat and grain:
See, for example, Kenneth F. Kiple,
A Movable Feast: Ten Millennia of Food Globalization
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 216.

164
staggering 925 million worldwide
: U.N. News Centre, “High food prices plunge another 75 million people into hunger, says UN agency”;
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=28099&Cr=Food&Cr1=Crisis
. This is a conservative estimate. International relief organization Oxfam estimates that at least 100 million additional people were added to the hunger roles due to the food crises. See
Another Inconvenient Truth
, Oxfam Briefing Paper, June 2008.

165
families in the developing world—to the brink
: See, for example, Bart Minten, “The Food Retail Revolution in Poor Countries: Is It Coming or Is It Over?” Economic Development and Cultural Change, 56 (July 2008): 767-89. Minten points out that food prices offered by global retailers in the developing world tend to be much higher—in fact, 40 to 90 percent higher—than prices in traditional retail markets, and therefore the poor do not benefit.

165
than it was a generation earlier:
See, for example, “The End of Cheap Food,” The
Economist.com
, December 6, 2007.

166
Europe, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, and Cuba:
See company Web site at
http://www.riceland.com
.

166
$554,343,039 in government handouts
: See the Environmental Working Group Farm Subsidy Database at
http://farm.ewg.org/farm/top__recips.php?fips=00000&progcode=total
.

166
less than what it cost the average U.S. farmer to grow:
IATP, “United States Dumping on the World Markets,” 2005.

167
“into the cities to burgeoning slums”:
Jane Regan, “Some Areas Really Miss Tariff,”
Miami Herald
, October 26, 2003.

167
all-time high of over 37 million in 2007:
Julia Preston, “Immigration at Record Level, Analysis Finds,”
New York Times
, November 29, 2007.

167
“de-peasantization” of the developing world
: Walden Bello, professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines, well represents the views of this breed of social critic in “Manufacturing a Food Crisis,”
The Nation,
May 15, 2008. Oxford University researcher Deborah Bryceson is credited with coining the phrase “de-peasantization” in her article “African Rural Labour, Income Diversification and Livelihood Approaches: A Long-term Development Perspective,”
World Development
24, no 1: 97-111.

168
75 percent of the world’s poor
: Tiina Huvio, Jukka Kola, and Tor Lundström, eds., “Small-Scale Farmers in a Liberalized Trade Environment,” proceedings of a Seminar at Haikko, Finland, 2005. Available online at
http://www.mm.helsinki. fi/MMTAL/abs/Pub38.pdf.

168
enough land to support the string of generations
: Naturally, this is just one scenario. There are many others—for example, the oldest son being the only one to inherit the land. But often that son hires his siblings to work the farm, and they and their children must live off the proceeds. It is a slightly different scenario but with a similar outcome.

168
multinational interests into play:
See, for example, Henry Bernstein’s superb analysis: “Who Are the ‘People of the Land?’ Some Provocative Thoughts on Globalization and Development, with Reference to Sub-Saharan Africa,” delivered at the conference
Environments Undone: The Political Ecology of Globalization and Development,
University of North Carolina, February 29 to March 1, 2008.

169
high-value foods such as meat and dairy products:
Philip C. Abbot, Christopher Hurt, and Wallace E. Tyner, “What’s Driving World Food Prices,”
Farm Foundation Issue Report
, Oak Brook, Illinois. Available at
http://www.farmfoundation.org/news/articlefiles/404-FINAL%20WDFP%20REPORT%207-28-08.pdf
.

169
a staple for more than half the world’s population
: Keith Bradsher, “High Rice Cost Creating Fears of Asia Unrest,”
New York Times,
March 28, 2008.

169
20.6 million metric tons it bought the year previous:
Ibid.

170
Suddenly, rice was unaffordable:
C. Peter Timmer, “Causes of High Food Prices,”
ADB Economics Working Paper 128
, Asia Development Bank, October 2008.

170
The price of meat, milk, wheat, and corn skyrocketed:
Walden Bello, “Manufacturing a Food Crisis,”
The Nation
, May 15, 2008.

170
average prices throughout the 1960s
: Milan Brahmbhatt, “The Run on Rice,”
World Policy Journal
, Summer 2008.

170
stuttering decline for nearly a century:
The downward slope of cereal prices was disrupted by brief spurts followed by steep declines during the two world wars and during the oil crises of 1974. The 1974 event prompted the formation of the International Fund for Agricultural Development and the Committee on World Food Security to address food issues on a global scale.

170
“productivity growth and poverty reduction”
: Personal email correspondence, October 13-15, 2008. Dr. Timmer also shared with me a draft of a paper he presented at the Asian Agricultural Economics Association meeting in Manila in September 2008. I was also privileged to learn a good deal about the international rice market in Professor Timmer’s course in agricultural economics at Harvard.

170
supporting farmers, but reducing surpluses
: Kenneth Baltzer, Henrik Hanzen, and Kim Martin Lind, “A Note on the Causes and Consequences of the Rapidly Increasing International Food Prices
,” Institute of Food and Resource Economics
, University of Copenhagen, May 2008.

171
just-in-time approach to getting food to markets:
Ronald Trostle, “Global Agricultural Supply and Demand: Factors Contributing to the Recent Increase in Food Commodity Prices,” United States Department of Agriculture, May 2008.

172
“The other was Wal-Mart”:
Andrew Martin, “At McDonald’s, the Happiest Meal Is Hot Profits,”
New York Times
, January 10, 2009.

172
or fruit salad or even orange juice
: Melanie Warner, “U.S. Restaurant Chains Find There Is No Too Much,”
New York Times
, July 28, 2006.

173
“
shrimp products” distributed to hospitals and schools
: “The True Cost of Shrimp,” January 2008. A comprehensive report prepared by the Washington-based Solidarity Center, with funding from United States Agency for International Development and the National Endowment for Democracy. Available online at
http://www.solidaritycenter.org/files/pubs__True__Cost__of__Shrimp.pdf
.

173
than canned tuna fish:
See press release from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: “Shrimp Overtakes Canned Tuna as Top U.S. Seafood; Overall Seafood Consumption Decreases in 2001,” August 2, 2002.
http://www.publicaffairs.noaa.gov/releases2002/aug02/noaa02113.html
.

173
the world’s largest full-service restaurant company
: See the Darden Web site at
http://www.darden.com
.

174
on the unofficial Red Lobster blog:
http://rlserver.blogspot.com/search/label/Food%20Service
.

174
chicken, pasta, and farm-raised shrimp:
Peter Keegan, “Red Lobster Casts $9.95 Value Menu,”
Nation’s Restaurant News
, May 27, 1991.

174
and 80 percent of that was shrimp:
See the report “Shrimp Stockpile: America’s Favorite Imported Seafood,” Public Citizen’s Food Program, available online at
http://www.citizen.org/cmep/foodsafety/shrimp/articles.cfm?ID=12798
.

175
89,000 pounds per acre
: Fisheries Statistics and Economics Division, National Marine Fisheries Service,
www.st.nmfs.gov/st1/index.html
.

175
from 33,000 metric tons in 1987:
John Hambrey and C. Kwei Lin, “Shrimp Culture in Thailand.” Paper presented to the Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok, Thailand, 1996.

175
to an astonishing 240,000 metric tons in 1995:
“Thai Shrimp Exporters to Seek Reduced U.S. Tariffs,”
SeafoodSource.com
, July 22, 2008.

176
waste from the shrimp itself:
Thamrong Mekhora, “Rice Versus Shrimp Production in Thailand: Is There Really a Conflict?”
Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics,
April 2003.

176
stirred by the winds and tides:
See, for example, F. J. Slim et al., “Tidal Exchange of Macrolitter Between a Mangrove Forest and Adjacent Seagrass Beds,”
Aquatic Ecology
30, nos. 2-3 (October 1996) and I. Nagelkerken et al., “Importance of Mangroves, Seagrass Beds and the Shallow Coral Reef as a Nursery for Important Coral Reef Fishes, Using a Visual Census Technique,”
Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science
51, no. 1 (July 2000): 31-44.

176
leaving millions of others homeless:
Eric Chivian and Aaron Bernstein, eds.,
Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 91. Thanks also to Drs. Chivian and Bernstein for a stimulating discussion of the importance of mangroves during an evening seminar at the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.

176
contributed significantly to this tragic outcome:
“In the front line: shoreline protection and other ecosystem services from mangroves and coral reefs.” United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre, Cambridge, England, 2006.

177
resulting in 5,000 deaths:
The Centers for Disease Control maintains a database on foodborne disease, which can be accessed online at
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dbmd/diseaseinfo/foodborneinfections__g.htm#howmanycases
.

177
are likely to be as yet unknown:
Paul S. Mead et al., “Food-Related Illness and Deaths in the United States,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia. Available online at
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/Vol5no5/mead
. htm.