Feeding the MarketSouth American Farmers, Trade and Globalization
by Jon Hellin and Sophie Higman
Kumarian Press, 2003
Authors Jon Hellin and Sophie Higman traveled the backroads of South America for 12 months visiting smallholder farms and researching the access they have to national and global markets. Their journey, made primarly by bicycle, provided the grist for this detailed report on the effects of economic globalization on the average South American farmer.
As this book demonstrates, small-scale producers in Latin and South America want to participate in the global marketplace, but they face serious impediments: production and transportation costs, quality and quantity demands, cultural and economic restrictions.
To date, economic globalization has benefitted a few individuals and corporations in the world's most developed countries with little obvious return to the developing world. Finding ways to bring some of the benefits of globalization to rural South America and to help smallholder farmers derive a sustainable livelihood from their new-found access to world markets is the primary intent of this study.
"Only by working together with other farmers can smallholder farmers accumulate enough supply-power to fulfill the market demands for quantitiy and continuity of production," the authors point out.
In their survey of eight smallholder commodity areas -- bananas, coffee, potatoes, quinoa, coca, wine, sheep, forestry -- the most promising ventures discovered are cooperative efforts by groups of farmers. Fair trade programs, introduced by concerned consumer groups in the developed world, have had the biggest impact by offering farmers a just price for their produce in exchange for organic or sustainable practices.
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