Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

Free World Vignettes
8. The Miseries of Traditional Life: A Further Note
T
his review, which barely samples what the US has helped to
institute and maintain in Central America, is seriously misleading
in one crucial respect: it overlooks the silent suffering of normal
life, the “violence to the spirit” and to the flesh described by the lay
minister quoted earlier (chapter 1, section 1). In Honduras, for example,
one in eight infants dies before age two and of those who survive to age
five, ¾ are undernourished. The problem is not that food production is
insufficient; in 1980, Oxfam reports, “the harvest of bananas was three
times greater than the harvest of corn, rice, sorghum and beans
combined” while Honduras has become a net importer of all of these
staple foods. Coffee, beef, cotton, fruit and palm oil are major export
crops, enriching US agribusiness and the tiny elite of Hondurans who
are “junior partners with US-based agribusiness companies.” Beef
production more than doubled since 1960 while per capita consumption
of beef declined and exports increased over 500% for hamburgers, hot
dogs and pet foods in the US. Forests are being destroyed for cattle
ranching, with the assistance of USAID grants funding the expansion of
beef production for export. In one typical region, 68% of loans from US
government and private sources went to cattle ranchers, 22% to cotton
growers, 5% to corn farmers. Peasants are compelled to clear land
which they farm for two or three years, after which they are forced to
move on to repeat the process while the land loses its fertility and
becomes “a weeded, dusty wasteland” from over-grazing. While Central
America was expanding beef production rapidly under the Alliance for
Progress, beef consumption dropped 41% in Costa Rica, 38% in El
Salvador, and 13% in Guatemala and Nicaragua from 1960 to the mid-
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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