From A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (Raj Patel & Jason W. Moore, 2018) p152-3
India’s pesticide consumption increased seventeenfold from 1955 to 2005, with a large share of that directed at the state of Punjab. Communities where the Green Revolution was practiced most intensively have, more recently, become cancer clusters, with some areas officially declared “cancer stricken villages.” But again, the Green Revolution wasn’t directed toward Indian villagers – just those workers in the urban cash nexus who might nurse ideas about defecting from capitalism. Through trade agreements, subsidies, and technology, governments have managed food prices, particularly for staples and processed food. Indeed, it is a global phenomenon that from 1990 to 2015, prices of processed food rose far less than those of fresh fruits and vegetables. To get their recommended daily five fresh fruits and vegetables, residents of low-income countries would need to spend at least half of their household income on just these five healthy items, with households in rural areas spending a greater percentage: 70 percent of rural residents in low-income countries can’t afford to buy three servings of the cheapest vegetables or two servings of fruit.
Since 1990, wage rates for workers in countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have been relatively static. This was a direct consequence, as we noted in chapter 3, of anti-labor policies that scholars aptly call “wage repression.” Given consistently low wages in the neoliberal era, it makes sense to look at cheap food as cheap not merely relative to wage costs but directly in terms of price. When we do, it emerges as no accident that a foodstuff whose price has fallen dramatically is chicken in Mexico – a direct consequence of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), technology, and the US soybean industry. NAFTA originally excluded agricultural goods, but they were included at the insistence of the Mexican government, which wanted to “modernize” its peasantry by moving them from agriculture into urban circuits of industry. The strategy worked: Mexico’s campesino agricultural economy buckled, as evinced by the 2003 El Campo No Aguanta Mas (The countryside can’t take it anymore) protests throughout the country. Circuits of migration and pools of labor for US agriculture were the result. But at least the chicken was cheap.
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