By Wylie Harris
Text of Radio Piece
Aired on Touchstone Radio, KEOS 89.1
Listen online at http://www.rtis.com/touchstone/tsradio/static/cd42-07.html
The obesity crisis, and its roots in federal farm subsidies, are getting to be a pretty familiar story. Every year, Congress forks over $ 5 billion to corn growers. Far from being a lifeline for family farms, this cash goes mainly to the large corporate farms, with the top 10 % of producers raking in two thirds of the loot. A heaping helping of U.S. corn production about 60 % fattens livestock, and another 5 %, in the form of high-fructose corn syrup, fattens people. McDonalds, the world's leading seller of Coke, puts 3.3 cents worth of corn syrup and 2.4 cents of advertising into a drink it sells you for $1.29, and after you, as an average American, guzzle your yearly 53 gallons, you shouldn't be surprised if the extra 500 calories you've added to your diet since 1970 throw you into the ranks of the clinically obese, which have doubled in numbers since then.
It's bad enough that the food industry's propaganda and political leverage are fattening us to death at home, but they're also exporting the same syndrome. Processed foods' share of both world food trade and U.S. agricultural exports has doubled since 1980. No coincidence, then, that the amount of processed sweeteners in diets has increased in countries all over the world, with the sharpest change in the poorest countries. U.S. exports of high-fructose corn syrup to Mexico exploded between the implementation of NAFTA in 1994 and the imposition of anti-dumping tariffs by the Mexican government four years later. Today, Mexico ranks second worldwide in obesity rates after the U.S.
This syrupy flood of ill health wasn't the only plague NAFTA good-neighbored onto Mexico. Ten years on, it takes the likes of Texas' own Senator John Cornyn, who sits on the President's Export Council, to find positive outcomes of the treaty mainly, increased trade. Never mind that the bulk of the profit from that trade increase has gone to the usual U.S.-based supermarket-to-the-world suspects, whose post-NAFTA profits like the number of U.S. farmers going out of business tripled. In the looking-glass world across the Rํo, the picture is much the same. Mexico's farm subsidies, though thirty times smaller than the U.S.'s, emulate them by gravitating toward the large, industrial operators. Much of the twentyfold increase in U.S. corn exports to Mexico feeds chickens and hogs in Mexico's foreign-financed and booming confined feeding sector whose devastating effects on rural quality of life and environment are all too familiar in the U.S. Not surprisingly, then, while Mexico's employment growth has declined across the board since NAFTA, it's gone negative in agriculture, as small farmers lose out to cheap, massively subsidized corn from both sides of the border. Too poor to stomach the rising price of tortillas, these newly dispossessed find their way to the cities, to the borderland maquiladoras, or into the rising tide of immigration to the U.S. To claims that the rising tide of trade liberalization lifts all boats, heres the timeworn Texas playground reply: Bull corn.