OCTOBER 1996 · VOLUME 17 · NUMBER 10

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B O O K    N O T E S

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Unfortunately for many agricultural sectors of Central America, it is largely the dangers of agricultural revolutions, rather than their optimistic promises, that have been realized. In recent decades, corporate multinational food production programs, aided by U.S. and international agricultural assistance funds, have steadily driven down the production of locally consumed food staples, like beans, corn and other grains, while pushing up production of flowers, vegetables and fruits to be sold for export.

In the process, agricultural communities lose twice. The price of food -- which many agricultural workers must now buy -- goes up, while overproduction of perishable export crops results in meager payments that too often do not even cover costs. Many of the smallest farmers actually lose three times, since many borrow more than they can afford to pay for new pesticides and equipment involved in the new, often unprofitable production.

But it is not the farmers who deserve the blame. Foreign and local government officials push the new crops and production techniques like an opiate. Banks have been far more willing to offer loans for cultivation of new export products. And exporters have offered visions of wealth far beyond what they actually paid when the requested products arrived at market.

In A Cautionary Tale, a trio of experts on agricultural production in Central America provide a reasoned analysis of recent rural developments in five countries from the region: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. The three authors, respectively academic experts in economics and sociology and the head of the Oakland-based Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First), provide some positive examples of export success, but they generally offer a highly critical look at the internationalization of agriculture in the region.

Besides analyzing export statistics and the growth of agricultural sector debt in these nations, this comprehensive book considers the health and safety risks of increased pesticide use as well as the less tangible, but real, costs in lost national sovereignty associated with dependence on powerful corporate and transnational production bureaucracies.

A Cautionary Tale is not a dull academic treatise. Throughout the work, the authors give voice to individual farmers who tell stories of how their crops are rejected at market, how they struggle with bank loans brought on by shifting to production of new export crops and how they suffer from pesticide-related health problems. The authors also shed light on the plight of many small farmers, who find it particularly difficult to switch to new products or produce on a mass scale given their small holdings.

The solution, the authors suggest, is found in looking to organic agricultural production. The idea seems to address many of the problems found with current exports: organically raised food generates higher profit margins, organic production favors smaller farmers (who can farm more intensively than larger operations), organic food is a growth industry and does not require huge capital outlays and heavy pesticide use. The authors are forthright in acknowledging the problems of this approach -- in particular the fact that some organically grown products may be quite perishable -- but on balance their suggestions seem viable.

This book, with its broad perspective and sensible solutions, offers a compelling approach for reducing the traumatic consequences of sudden agricultural adjustments. A Cautionary Tale presents a viable alternative to Central American farmers' dismal Grapes of Wrath experience over the past decade.

-- Steve Farnsworth

Catering to poor clients excluded from the mainstream economy, finance companies, pawn shops, check cashing outlets, home mortgage companies, slum lords, scam trade-school operators and shady insurance operations exploit the poor through supercharges on products and interest rates.

The poor pay more for two reasons, Merchants of Misery shows. First, mainstream economic institutions, especially banks, refuse to serve them. Banks redline poor and community neighborhoods, refusing to make loans irrespective of the actual level of risk they face. Banks also discriminate against the poor in providing consumer services, with charges skyrocketing for those unable to maintain high minimum balances.

Refused service by the mainstream, the poor are forced to turn to a shadow economy. Surprisingly, the contributors to Merchants of Misery demonstrate, the shadow economy is no longer made up only of sleezy hucksters. Ripping off the poor has become a big business, with major companies including Ford, American Express and NationsBank among the major players in a market estimated to be worth $200 billion to $300 billion a year. -- Robert Weissman

In developing this analysis, Profit Fever focuses on problems faced even by insured workers employed at some of the nation's largest and most profitable companies.

As health maintenance organizations try to squeeze more productivity out of doctors, patient visits are cut short, sometimes to no more than seven minutes per ill worker. Some workers cannot even get those seven minutes; some employees at General Electric, for example, cannot make a doctor's appointment without company approval, Andrews writes.

At Coors, employees receive slightly lower health insurance bills if they fill out an extensive family health history form. But the company can then use the information to avoid paying subsequent health claims.

But this book is more than a study of how leaving control of health insurance to private industry is not working. The book also demonstrates how the political system is not working either when it comes to public health.

Andrews is no fan of the Clinton health care plan, which died amid Capitol Hill wrangling two years ago. He advocates a single-payer system of government-funded health insurance, in which access to health care is a right, and not limited only to those with either the means or the insurance.

Andrews traces corporate strategies, including media campaigns and contributions to key legislators, that helped defeat the Clinton plan and helped keep single-payer -- which had the support of more than 90 members of Congress -- off the political agenda.

Andrews also discusses the defeat of California Proposition 186, a health care reform referendum, in November 1994. Even though the measure received only 27 percent of the state vote, Andrews argues that the failed campaign contains the seeds of future health care victories.

Andrews, who worked on the losing campaign, argues that health care victories can be won if citizens organize locally for improved health care and if future campaigns are more aggressive in bringing minorities and women into the movement at all levels.

Even people familiar with the health care debate will find this an important book. It contains important advice for building support for single-payer health care at the state and local levels, as well as a convincing array of information about how broken the U.S. health care system really is. Most telling is the fact that the United States spends far more per person on health care than other industrialized nations, yet these other countries do not leave tens of millions of people uninsured or underinsured.

-- Steve Farnsworth

The book moves quickly across a lot of ground: the double-crosses peasant leaders received after supporting the Mexican revolution, the brutal denial of worker rights, elite unwillingness to share the wealth of the oil boom, the 1968 massacre of demonstrators in Mexico City and the cavalier theft of the 1988 presidential election.

La Botz wants readers to see the Chiapas uprising in context, as an effort by the people of a tormented and repressed nation to challenge a corrupt elite that steals money, political office and human dignity from their fellow citizens. He considers the revolt the most important threat to the status quo in decades.

La Botz recounts the means by which the PRI -- the Orwellian-named Institutional Revolutionary Party -- keeps its fraudulent hold on power through tricks that would make U.S. party machine hacks envious. He also conveys the rebels' motivation, and explains how they try to function, despite military repression, as democrats through meetings and rallies designed to win public acceptance and support in rural areas. If the rebels have flaws, little is said about them in this book.

La Botz is well-versed in Mexico and in political theory. His theoretical observations about the efforts of Mexicans to build a "civil society" in the wake of the devastating 1985 earthquake is unexpected but particularly compelling.

Yet the book is not without its shortcomings, particularly the relatively minimal treatment given the conservative National Action Party, known as the PAN. While La Botz clearly has little sympathy for the PAN's ideological orientation, the fact remains that the rightist party has been playing -- and is likely to continue to play -- a key role in the breakdown of the longstanding PRI dominance of nearly all Mexican elections. Readers need to know more about the PAN, whose presidential candidate finished second in 1994 with more than a quarter of the vote, than is provided here.

Recent Mexican history, like the country's experience during the entire century, has been marked in equal parts by the tragic and the bizarre. La Botz covers events of both sorts with sympathy and careful research.

-- Steve Farnsworth