roachboy

agricultural subsidies, structural adjustment, the cycle of extreme debt affecting many many countires in the southern hemisphere:
three phases of the same object, the same process--the maintenance of the american system by dumping the overproduction generated by centralized monocropping agricultural practices on the rest of the world.

structural adjustment provides incentives for transition into an american model agriculture but at the same time forces open markets--the immediate effect of which is to open those markets to this type of dumping, which arrives at prices well below what locally-oriented agricultural production could match as a simple function of economies of scale. so local agriculture organized along previous models gets destroyed and the possibility of transitioning into a newer type of local agriculture is permanently undercut--the country finds that thanks to structural adjustment it is even less able to feed itself than before, which in turn creates the conditions for the accumulation of yet more debt.

and this is an outline of only one phase of the structural adjustment process.

to echo a point made earlier: american agricultural subsidies do not operate in isolation.
their elimination is an important step in dismantling the neocolonial order.
which would, in turn, bump the american model, and american hegemony.
so i wonder whether they will be eliminated.

i was talking to a friend of mine last night about this--american eating habits are among the strangest out there simply because the food supply system enables people to get pretty much anything they want at any time of year----no seasons. the result is the curious hodgepdge that is american cooking styles--which is becoming a cuisine without seasons as well.

to maintain this permanent harvest requires an enormous supply pool scattered all over the planet--grapes from chile, alternating with grapes from california with grapes from israel--all interchangeable from the viewpoint of a consumer because all are simply parts of a continuous flow of available grapes...same would obtain for almost any food group--to maintain this requires a variant of old-school colonial-style agricultural organization---
this food supply system also plays into the scenario outlined above in that for paricipation in the supermarket supply pools pretty much requires a shift into monocropping--but of course the food produced is produced for american supermarkets--the revenues are often controlled by transnationals...so very little about this system benefits the areas of production in any meaningful way.

so the talk about africa needing capitalism is absurd: they already have it, and in a much more brutal form than you would see if your horizon for thinking about even a limited area of captialist production--agriculture--is framed by visits to your supermarkets and what you see on fox news. capitalism in its american-dominated variant--the type of capitalism that has metastized since world war 2--is the cause of this type of poverty that you see being both talked about and not talked about through the medium of the live 8 thing.

as for the connection between capitalism and democracy--to imagine that african nations do not know full well what a joke that is is patronizing almost to the point of obscenity. it assumes that african people are like children who have no way of understanding what has been happening to them for 40 years of neocolonial domination--or you assume that africa is what you see in national geographic, a kind of endless exotic zoo full of authentic natives doing authentic things blissfully unaware of the manly man world of Capitalism--which is idiotic.

the regimes in place are reactions to capitalism. they are capitalist regimes.

to argue that "africa needs capitalism" is to basically say that you havent the faintest idea what you are talking about.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite