Isn't it weird ....?

America's ag subsidies for cotton, still grown in our South, makes for enslaving poverty in Africa?

America's cotton still gets us African slaves.

As food prices soar globally, this odd remnant from another age must go. No economic rationale will exist.

Comments

[larrydunbar]

Doesn't Globalization usually start out as slavery anyways? I mean if you start to trace its roots, didn't it at one time show up in the South of the USA as slavery?

Most recently I have heard reports that China, in no small way, has used slavery to pass on this globalization. While we can look ahead and see the benifits of globalization it does seem to at least start with some kind of slavery potential, so why should it be different in Africa as it makes its way there (again?)?

I agree slavery must go. Do you think Africa can bypass this in someways or is it already there? I suppose slave wages is different than slavery at least to the people who are living on less than a dollar a day.

[Tom Barnett]

Careful on that last point, Larry. That's how the South justified themselves against the evil North for a long time.

Original globalization was people, so trade in people (illegal from today's perspective, but not throughout most of history) is an early form of globalization (forced movement in Africa's history, both east under Arabs and west under Europeans).

That we see nasty forms of people moving/working in globalization today just shows we're in a period of rapid expansion from firm rule-set areas (West) to looser ones (East and South), so you see the return of bad practices we think were long gone but were just hidden, because people still traffic in people, and not just for sex.

That's what attracted me to Brownback from KS: his focus on this stuff was very--as the Economist said--Wilberforce-like.

[Larry Dunbar]

It sounds like you are saying that yes slavery will be a part of globalization in Africa and that slavery should be of first priority for America in its dealings with Africa. First of thousands?

Because globalization of Africa is probably well advanced that means slavery, or a form of it, is already present, probably has always been present in one form or the another.

The Africans have such a beautiful country, full of such extremes. That is probably why they have such a hard time governing. There is just too much potential there and so many people ready to take it from them.

[Mark in Texas]

Africans live in enslaving poverty because they are not connected to the part of the world that works, not because of anything the United States does with price supports for cotton. There is this smart guy named Tom Barnett who has written a few books on the subject.

If Africa sank into the ocean, very few people in the United States would notice although the Chinese might. Misery in Africa benefits absoulutely nobody in the Core except for people who run NGOs and travel agents who book adventure vacations.

As the price of gasoline encourages a shift to biofuels and a corresponding increase in demand for agricultural products, Africa is starting to have something that the rest of the world wants. With connection will come rule sets because mass starvation, massacres and coup d'etats disrupt important flows. The Core does not tolerate people like Slobodan Milosovich and he was no where near as destructive as Robert Mugabe.

[Andrew in Iraq]

I think its funny that you mention this, because I just wrote a paper about this for my International Political Economy class, (heavily citing your concepts of global connectivity, Core and Gap during the course of it), while discussing how, in addition to causing other problems, ag subsidies are partially responsible for US/Western security issues.