4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST venture as "development/5 Marschall got the Senegalese government, the German foreign aid agency and McNamara's World B^nk to put up most of the capital. The Senegalese government helpfully supplied police to clear away villagers who had always presumed the land was theirs for growing' millet-for themselves and the local market. The Peace Corps contributed fou»' volunteers. Today, over 60 armed security officers not only guard the fields but each day search the poorly paid fieldhands, mostly women, to be sure they don't sneak vegetables home to their families. FROM GLOBAL FARM TO THE GLOBAL SUPERMARKET Under the banner oPTood interdependence'^, multinational agribusiness companies like Bud Senegal are now busily creating a global farm to supply a global supermarket. Big food wholesalers, processors and retail chains have been quick and delighted to find out that land and labour costs in the Third World are often as little as ten per cent of those in the US. Countries most people think of as agricultural basket-cases, multinational agribusiness sees as future breadbaskets, future Californias. With the emergence of one global supermarket, the world's hungry are being thrown into ever more direct competition with the well-fed and the over-fed. The fact that a food is grown in abundance right where they live, that their country subsidizes its production, and even that they themselves labour to produce it, means little. Like the women field hands on Bud Senegal's vegetable plantations, they may never eat one bit of it. Rather, the food will be destined for some branch of the global supermarket where everyone in the world, poor or rich, must reach for it on the same shelf. None without money will be able to move through the checkout line. For every item has a price and, true to the market system, that price is determined by what the global supermarket's better-off customers are willing to pay. The sad reality is that even the poor in a country like the United States can outbid the world's hungry. Del Monte is another example of agribusiness creating a global farm to service a global supermarket. Though originally based entirely in the US, Del Monte today operates farms, fisheries and processing plants in more than two dozen countries. Board Chairman Alfred Eames.Jr., wrote glowingly in a recent annual report: ^Our business isn't just canning, it's feeding people." But which people? Del Monte is bullying self-provisioning Filipino farmers off their land to set up plantations to grow bananas for Japan; Del Monte is contracting rich, fertile land in Mexico that previously had grown a dozen local food crops in order to feed asparagus-cravers in France, Germany, Denmark and Switzerland (whom the company had once supplied from California); and Del Monte has opened a new plantation in Kenya so that