Quote from an excellent book review in "The Nation" about how American/European policies have created the so-called border crises around the world. The example cited is probably quite typical.
This “pernicious and paradoxical concoction of both limitlessness and strict limits” can be clearly seen, Washington [the book's author] argues, in the “bizarre disruption of the tomato industries between Italy and Ghana.” Ghana is one of the world’s largest importers of tomato paste, with the imports increasing over 1,000 percent between 1996 and 2015. But prior to this stunning rise, Ghana was home to a large, stable tomato industry. So what happened? “Free trade” happened. The rapid destruction of Ghana’s tomato industry came “after the World Trade Organization (WTO) pushed Ghana…to dramatically lower import tariffs,” which opened “space for subsidized foreign vegetables to decimate the local industry.” The structural adjustment forced Ghanaian farmers to seek work elsewhere, many in Italy. These farmers who once grew tomatoes in Ghana now grew them in Italy, to be shipped back home to further erode the country’s domestic agricultural market. Many of these migrants, Washington notes, “live in segregated clusters of shacks outside of towns where they have limited or no access to running water, electricity, or health care.”
The gutting of the Ghanaian tomato industry not only resulted in the expansion of the Italian and Chinese markets (the two main exporters of canned tomatoes to Ghana) into new territory, but also, and equally as important, resulted in a fresh supply of cheap, hyper-exploitable labor in the form of dispossessed and unemployed Ghanaian farmers. This “modern form of peonage,” as Washington calls it, depends on the harsh enforcement of the border system for its functioning: Workers from the Global South who migrate to the Global North in search of opportunity, like the Ghanaian tomato farmers, are kept in check by the threat of deportation, “shackled to their work permits, which bosses can use as a form of blackmail.”
No comments:
Post a Comment