Originally published by Global Post on 01/02/2014 Employee Angel Rodriguez checks the beer during the bottling process in the Cervecería Calavera, on July 20, 2012, in Tlanepantla, Mexico State. Producers of handcrafted beer are making their way in Mexico following the emergence of new breweries in crowded neighborhoods of the capital and as large emporiums producing traditional brands like Corona stopped being Mexican-owned. Credit: Ronaldo Schemidt Mexico’s largest agribusiness association invited me to Aguascalientes to participate in its annual forum in October. The theme for this year’s gathering was “New Perspectives on the Challenge of Feeding the World.” But it was unclear why Mexico, which now imports 42 percent of its food, would be worried about feeding the world. It wasn’t doing so well feeding its own people. In part, you can thank the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) for that. Twenty years ago, on January 1, 1994, NAFTA took effect, and Mexico was the poster child for the wonders of free trade. The promises seemed endless. Mexico would enter the “First World” of developed countries on the crest of rising trade and foreign investment. Its dynamic manufacturing sector would create so many jobs it would not only end the US immigration problem but absorb millions of peasant farmers freed from their unproductive toil in the fields. Mexico could import cheap corn and export electronics. So much for promises. NAFTA produced a devastating one-two punch. For the first 10 years, the flood of US exports of corn, wheat, meat and other staples drove Mexican producer prices well below the costs of production. Mexico’s three million small-scale corn farmers saw prices for their crops fall 66 percent, largely because the United States increased corn exports by 400 percent, exporting at prices 19 percent below even US farmers’ costs of production. (See my earlier study .) Call it the Age of Agricultural Dumping. Soybeans, wheat, cotton and rice saw similar export surges under NAFTA, with similar drops in producer prices. Mexico’s agricultural exports to the United States increased as well, but it takes a lot of tomatoes and strawberries to make up for the surge in staple-food imports. By the mid-2000s, Mexico was importing 42 percent of its food, mostly from the United States. Corn import dependence had grown from 8 percent before NAFTA to 32 percent. Mexico was importing nearly 60 percent of its wheat where before it had imported less than 20 percent. Import dependence was more than 70 percent for soybeans, rice and cotton. Then came the sucker punch. In 2007, international prices for many staple crops doubled or tripled, and so did the cost of importing them. Countries like Mexico that had gotten hooked on cheap imports paid a heavy price. Call it the Age of Dependency. US policies had as much to do with these high and volatile prices as they had with the Age of Dumping. Now, instead of price-depressing surpluses caused by US agricultural policies, US subsidies and incentives were diverting 40 percent of US corn — 15 percent of the global supply — into ethanol production. This drove up the price of corn, but also prices for related crops, like soybeans and wheat, and the livestock products that had relied for so long on cheap feed. Compounding the price volatility, US deregulation of financial markets in the early 2000s had brought agricultural commodity markets into the global casino. Financial speculators, fleeing the collapsing US housing and stock markets in 2007, went “all in” on commodities, driving prices to disruptive highs, then lows, then highs again. This was devastating for countries dependent on imported food. The world’s Least Developed Countries, which had exported more than they imported in the early 1980s, saw their food import bills skyrocket to more than $25 billion, driving their collective agricultural trade deficit to more than $19 billion. (See my earlier report .) Mexico’s agricultural imports topped $20 billion following the price spikes, with its agricultural trade deficit jumping to more than $4 billion. Corn imports accounted for more than half the bill. And most telling: twenty years into NAFTA, 55 million Mexicans — about half the population — are estimated to be in poverty, many without secure access to food. The night before my talk in Aguascalientes, in which I would gently call attention to the high cost of Mexico’s failed cheap-food experiment under NAFTA, I ended up at a lush cocktail reception talking to the US Embassy’s agricultural attaché. I must have said something about Mexico’s agricultural trade deficit, and he immediately took offense. “This year,” he proclaimed, “Mexico may actually run a surplus.” I knew better; I’d seen this statistical sleight-of-hand many times. “Do you mean the ‘agri-food’ trade balance?” I asked. He nodded. “The one that has beer as one of Mexico’s biggest agricultural exports?” He nodded again, and not sheepishly. Beer has undoubtedly been a NAFTA success story for Mexico. “Beer is a product of agriculture,” he said, with conviction. I took a sip of my margarita. “Don’t you think including beer distorts how Mexican agriculture is really doing under NAFTA?” I asked. Not at all, he replied, the beer sector is a perfect example of the kind of integration NAFTA can achieve. “Look, Mexico’s even importing the barley malt from us to make its beer!” I said. I took another sip. “So Mexico’s agricultural contribution to its beer exports is … what?” I asked. Nervous laughter. Here is a case where NAFTA has gotten the United States to open its market to something of value that Mexico can export, and Mexico can’t even capture the value from it. The industry’s growth benefits US barley growers and US malt makers. Mexico can’t even import the barley and make the malt themselves. So the country is basically a maquiladora for beer bottling. I guess Mexico contributes the water. Which it doesn’t have enough of. This has been Mexico under NAFTA in a nutshell. Giving away everything of value, then deluding yourself that your farm sector is doing fine because your Corona beer, bottled from US ingredients, is a big hit in the States. Meanwhile, hungry corn farmers wait for their government to invest in producing more of its own food.

Okay, I didn’t wear a hidden mic. (Did they have those in ‘67?) I didn’t don gloves to mask my fingerprints that hot summer in Philly. But, I was truly an infiltrator, a provocateur-for-progress in t he War on Poverty declared 50 years ago this month. Photo: President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Poverty Bill, August 20, 1964 Here’s how it happened and what I learned. After a stint in a Quaker-run organizing school in Chester, PA, where training included speaking against the Vietnam War on (literally) soap boxes in Rittenhouse Square and watching FBI agents snap our photos, it was increasingly clear to me: Ending the war was not enough, something was deeply wrong here at home. Tom Hayden, Students for a Democratic Society , the Port Huron statement — they all made perfect sense to me. We knew what we had to do, and I was ready: Go door-to-door and empower ourselves and our neighbors, especially those hurting most in our destructive system. Paying my rent by temping as a “Kelly Girl,” I set out to try to enlist in this war for a better America. But how? And with whom? I’d heard of a brand new front in the War on Poverty, the Neighborhood Renewal Program run by the Philadelphia Housing Authority. Its goal was tackling the deplorable housing conditions in Philly’s poor communities. Housing inspectors were instructed to get tough on negligent landlords, and aid was offered to help renters buy their row houses in the rundown section of Germantown where I lived. But there was more to the strategy. Some in the Housing Authority shared wholeheartedly the Great Society credo of “maximum feasible participation,” in which dignity and self-assertion were as important as any brick and mortar undertaking. And that’s the door that opened. It turned out that in addition to hiring actual housing inspectors, some gutsy folks launching the Neighborhood Renewal Program also began hiring organizers. They were hush-hush about it, but my bosses made clear: Pass the test to get on the payroll as an inspector but hit the streets as an organizer. In ending poverty, it’s not enough to have dwellings in better repair if their inhabitants feel defeated. So just as critical as holding landlords to account was, in their view, going door-to-door to help spark what we’d now call self-organized initiatives. Coming together, poor people will find their voices and push for their rights, thereby helping, much more broadly, to right our broken system. So, to pass my housing inspector test, I got coached: “When a landlord offers you a pen, do you accept it?” Correct answer: “No.” I accept nothing, ever, from a landlord. Okay, got that. The rest I pretty much had to figure out on my own. I’d heard about the Welfare Rights Organization that took off nationally the year before. My direct supervisors encouraged me to start knocking on doors in the depressed, almost-all-Black area in the heart of Germantown. I’d tell the women I met about this organization and their rights as tenants and, in most cases, welfare recipients. I’d make the case that together they could at least get the help Americans are entitled to under the law. I was 23 and white — with a southern accent, even. I was nervous. But I soon found that door after door opened, and I was welcomed in. Friendships blossomed. In the heart of Germantown, my new allies and I met in a community center and learned about welfare law and our rights — and we planned our actions. A main tactic was to demand a “Fair Hearing” before welfare department officials at which a welfare recipient could make her case. We also organized an action against the Salvation Army. The women I worked alongside were deeply offended that, because their welfare checks were too meager even to clothe their kids, they had to turn to the Salvation Army; before any help was forthcoming, they had to sit through intrusive grilling on their moral rectitude. That had to stop, we demanded. Ours was a rally for dignity. Back in the office I shared with real inspectors, I was always ill at ease. I assumed they whispered about me: “Just what does that girl do?” I even wondered if after hours they rifled through my trash. Soon enough, women were interested, and we created a real welfare rights chapter: the Northwest Philadelphia Welfare Rights Organization. In my City of Philadelphia car, I transported our members to and from city-wide meetings of the organization. I felt connected to the dozen or so of us who met regularly to share our job search and childcare struggles and to strategize together. But I did have my favorite — Lilly. Her spunky spirit really lit me up. I knew she struggled so hard to keep her kids fed, clothed and warm. Paying coal bills was especially tough. Lilly was in her 40s. Then one day I got the call. Lilly had just died of a heart attack. “Would you and Marc [Lappé] come to the funeral and wake?” “Of course,” I said. I couldn’t believe we’d lost Lilly. Part of a funeral in a Black community for the first time, I was so relieved to find I could cry openly, and at the wake I could hug and be hugged all I needed. But Lilly’s death hit me hard. I knew in my heart that Lilly had not died of a heart attack. She had died of the stress of poverty. That truth stayed with me, and the following year I began graduate school in Community Organizing at UC Berkeley (in a program that no longer exists). Then came the moment — the “Lilly’s truth moment.” Working on “fair housing” in racially segregated Oakland as part of my grad program, one morning I woke up with this thought: I can’t do this anymore. I can’t do anything to “save the world” until I understand how it contributes to uprooting the causes of Lilly’s needless death. So, starting with Diet for a Small Planet , I’ve spent decades pursuing that root-cause question, and, thank God, I have come to grasp how, within a systemic vision, bottom-up organizing is truly central to transformative democratic change. What’s heart breaking to admit, though, especially in this anniversary year, is that as a society we lost our way. The War on Poverty helped cut the poverty rate from about 21 percent to just over 11 percent between the early ‘60s and early ‘70s. But today, we’re back to roughly the rate of the early years of the War on Poverty. Imagine if over the last half century we’d kept going... if we’d raised the minimum wage instead of letting its value sink, if we’d protected labor rights, if we’d made taxes fair as we prioritized full employment, stellar public schools and affordable higher education — and if in the process we’d cleansed our politics of corporate dominance. Imagine. In this moment, though, I just hope that in reliving how Lilly’s needless death forced me to dig deeper I’ll rekindle my own belief in possibility: the possibility that today’s staggering inequality - with 95 percent of all income gains since 2009 going to the top one percent — could trigger a rebirth in America of a sustained quest for root-cause solutions with everyday citizens in center stage, a possibility just as unimaginable by most people today as was the War on Poverty before January, 1964. Originally published by the Huffington Post on January 14, 2014

Originally published by Global Post on 10/23/2013 Images of advanced seed chipping machines inside Monsanto agribusiness headquarters in St Louis, Missouri. These machines are designed and built in-house and they allow the technicians to chip off tiny portions of seeds, which are scanned instantly for the perfect DNA of an elite corn seed. Credit: Brent Stirton DES MOINES, Iowa — This year’s World Food Prize went to three biotech engineers, all of whom have been instrumental in bringing genetically modified foods to your table. Inside the Marriott Hotel in downtown Des Moines, Iowa, where the prize’s four-day program took place October 15-18, the message was clear: Technology is the answer to the world’s looming food shortages, and anyone who gets in the way isn’t putting farmers and the hungry first. And you have to admire the laureates for their candor. In their prepared press statements, they couldn’t have been clearer about what the prize means to them. “The committee’s decision to award the World Food Prize to biotechnology researchers,” said Mary-Dell Chilton of Syngenta in a press release, “will help convey to consumers the value, utility and safety of genetically modified crops.” The other winners, Marc Van Montagu — one of the pioneers of genetically modified (GM) technology — and Robert Fraley —Monsanto’s chief technology officer — offered similar statements. “I hope that this recognition will pave the way for Europe to embrace the benefits of this technology, an essential condition for global acceptance of transgenic plants,” said Montagu. Fraley was less direct but equally unambiguous. “The World Food Prize provides us an important platform to engage in a new global dialogue,” he said. The other side of the dialogue came not from the World Food Prize conference, but from the street. Down the road from the Marriott, in front of the World Food Prize building, former Texas agriculture commissioner Jim Hightower held an open-air press conference to denounce Big Ag’s influence over our food and our government. The organizers called the protest Occupy the World Food Prize. Hightower called it the “upchuck rebellion” by the “good food” movement against corporate agriculture. On questions of public health and the environment, the debate is still open. But evidence is mounting, both of public health concerns (see the recent open letter from scientists) and environmental impacts, such as the rise of “super weeds” resistant to herbicides. So too on the persistent failure of GM crops to increase yields. Jim Hightower struck a chord with his call to resist monopoly control of agriculture. The World Food Prize committee received a citizen petition of more than 340,000 people protesting the biotech awards. At the prize ceremony, an elaborate invitation-only affair in the Iowa Capitol building, Fraley accepted the prize “on behalf of all his colleagues at Monsanto,” a company that underwrites the World Food Prize Foundation. He said GM crops were needed as we face the challenge “to double food production” to feed a growing population. As my recent report shows, such alarmist calls have no empirical basis. The UN Food and Agricultural Organization projects a manageable demand increase of 60 percent by 2050. And we can start by cutting the loss and waste of food from its current level of 30 percent, and the 13 percent of cereals projected to go toward producing biofuels instead of food. But the warnings sure boost sales, and feed the panic that biotech companies hope will spur us to embrace their controversial technologies. Outside of the Iowa Capitol building, a small group of protesters denounced the selection of biotech scientists for the food prize. Among them were three farmers, two from Haiti and one from Brazil. Two days earlier, they had been in New York to receive the Food Sovereignty Prize, a grassroots alternative to the increasingly corporate World Food Prize, created by the US Food Sovereignty Alliance in 2009. In Haiti, the protests are larger and the stakes are higher. After the catastrophic Port au Prince earthquake in 2010, 10,000 Haitian farmers marched to reject a $4 million donation of seeds from Monsanto, arguing that the company was trying to hook peasants on seeds they couldn’t share or replant. In a dramatic show of defiance in the face of widespread hunger, the farmers publicly burned the seeds. They argued that people have the right to food and the right to choose where their food comes from and what’s in it. This call to “democratize the food system” got no hearing at the World Food Prize. “We need to make sure everyone benefits from this technology,” said a closing speaker, “the companies, the scientists, the poor who are hungry….” Who came first on that list, and who came last, was lost on most of the crowd.