SOCI 1F90 Chapter Notes - Chapter 41: Cash Crop, World Trade Organization
1 Mar 2016
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Discourse empowers some, generally at the expense of others, and determines who is granted the power to shape their own reality through the use of serious speech acts. Subsistence cultivators: targeted if they"re gone, cheap labour + food. Development discourse had constructed the problem of underdevelopment and the solution of economic growth, but it still had to suppress the resistance anticipated from the recipients of their largess. Forced cultivators of food for local consumption to switch to export cash crops. International markets were soon glutted, leaving the cultivator with not enough money from the cash crop to buy the imported food that was now selling at internationally determined prices. Unable to feed themselves, many local economies collapsed, requiring additional foreign investment. Under the wto, the liberal trade policies have gone on steroids, accelerating the massive transfer of wealth from the third world to the core industrial nations.
