Farming Cooperatives & Globalization

Question 1

What are agricultural cooperatives and what do they do?

Answer 1

• A cooperative is a special type of enterprise.
• It is a social enterprise that balances two main goals:
1. satisfying its members’ needs, and
2. Pursuing profit and sustainability.
• In other words, a cooperative is an association of women and men who come together to form a jointly owned, democratically controlled enterprise where generating a profit is only part of the story. Cooperatives put people before profit. They also help their members achieve their shared social, cultural and economic aspirations. A cooperative is a social enterprise that promotes peace and democracy.

Question 2

Cooperative principles

Answer 2

• Democratic principles: voting, contributions to funding
• Provide alternatives and more democratic forms for workers.
• Still within global agribusiness-dominated networks & laws of supply and demand.
• Do you grow food that benefits the people in a nation or weigh market needs? Balancing internal and external.
• Issue of remaining true to coop principles or maximizing profit and sustaining financial viability.
• Case of coffee: large umbrella group International Coffee Organization (ICO). Represents 97% of world coffee production and over 80% of world consumption: both developing countries and developed.

Question 3

What is globalization?

Answer 3

• It is not homogenization nor Americanization/McDonaldization
• Intensification of economic interconnectedness and competition
• Complex transnational circuits of economic, political and cultural interconnectedness and competition
• Increasing cultural interaction
• Time speeded and space compressed or reordered

Question 4

Acceleration in the flow of capital, goods, images and ideasGlobal food fight – main argument of Paarlsberg—myths of organic and priorities of food aid.

Answer 4

• Not an issue of international prices.
• In April 2008, the cost of rice for export had tripled in just six months and wheat reached its highest price in 28 years. Called a World Food Crisis. World Bank President Robert Zoellick warned that high food prices would be particularly damaging in poor countries, where “there is no margin for survival.”
• Global Recession not food prices.
 When international rice prices decreased in 2010, 40 percent from their peak and wheat prices fell by more than half, we too quickly conclude that the crisis is over.
 Yet 850 million people in poor countries were chronically undernourished before the 2008 price spike, and the number is even larger due to the global recession. Paarlberg says this is the real food crisis we face.
 Food prices on the world market tell us very little about global hunger.
 The majority of truly undernourished people – 62 percent, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization – live in either Africa or South Asia, and most are small farmers or rural landless laborers living in the countryside of Africa and South Asia.
 The global poor are significantly shielded from global price fluctuations both by the trade policies of their own governments and by poor roads and infrastructure. In Africa, more than 70 percent of rural households are cut off from the closest urban markets.
 Poverty: caused by the low income productivity of farmers’ labor is the primary source of hunger in Africa. The number of “food insecure” people in Africa (those consuming less than 2,100 calories a day) will increase 30 percent over the next decade without significant reforms, to 645 million, the U.S. Agriculture Department projects.
 How to fix the problem?
• Access to improved roads, modern seeds, less expensive fertilizer, electrical power, and better schools and clinics
• Undercut by deeply misguided (if sometimes well-meaning) advocacy against agricultural modernization and foreign aid. Oppose improved seeds and fertilizers.
• We need to de-romanticize our view of preindustrial food and farming. And that means learning to appreciate the modern, science-intensive, and highly capitalized agricultural system we’ve developed in the West. Without it, our food would be more expensive and less safe.
• Myths of the Green Revolution
o Green Revolution brought advances.
o When powerful new farming technologies are introduced into deeply unjust rural social systems, the poor tend to lose out. In Latin America, where access to good agricultural land and credit has been narrowly controlled by traditional elites, the improved seeds made available by the Green Revolution increased income gaps.
• Many of the displaced rural poor became urban slum dwellers.
• Traditional food systems lacking in reliable refrigeration and sanitary packaging are dangerous vectors for diseases.
• Problem is Aid Priorities
o The dollar value of U.S. food aid to Africa has reached 20 times the dollar value of agricultural development assistance.
o Do we support a steady new infusion of financial and technical assistance to help local governments and farmers become more productive?
o Or do we take a “worry later” approach and be forced to address hunger problems with increasingly expensive shipments of food aid?