Essays
Essays
The bloody side of the political economy: Corporations in Colombia
Written by Barb Sunday, 08 April 2007 00:29
A few months ago it came out that Chiquita Banana admitted to paying "protection money" to illegal armed groups in Colombia. It’s not the first time the company has found itself receiving negative publicity as a result of its involvement in the bloody side of the political economy of a Latin American country. The company used to be known as United Fruit until negative publicity around its exploitation of the “banana republics” of Central America forced it to change its name in the 1980s to the brand we know today.
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The Politics of Poverty and the New Freedom
Written by Barb Saturday, 08 April 2006 00:59
excerpt of an academic paper for a class at the University of Florida's Levin College of Law, Trade and Human Rights in the Americas (Spring 2006)
Does neoliberal economic globalization result in increased poverty? That is one of the central questions poverty advocates must ask in the era of globalization. People undertake the dangerous trek of immigrating to a country illegally, enduring life threatening conditions along the way and a range of abuse and exploitation in the destination country because of lack of economic opportunity in their homelands. Women and daughters sell themselves or are sold into the sex trade because few other options exist for them or the income from other forms of work are insufficient to a living wage. Less developed countries destroy their environments out of economic necessity, trying to convert tropical rainforests into capital. They build sweatshops and maquiladoras to entice multinational corporations to “invest” in their countries, offering low wages and poor working conditions. After centuries of colonialism –that form of regulated transfer of assets, resources and other wealth from the source country to the colonizing country– the misery of the people and the rape of the land in the Third (Majority) World is the only “comparative advantage” these countries have left.
In one way or another, poverty either causes and/or is caused by all of these various impacts (trafficking, immigration, sweatshops, environmental degradation etc.) of trade liberalization on human well-being. In fact, poverty is so interwoven into the neoliberalization debate that some critics have called it the “globalization of poverty” .
