"The marginalization of the (poor) majority leads to narrow and shallow domestic markets... So landowning elites orient their production to export markets where consumers do have purchasing power... By doing so, elites have ever less interest in the well-being or purchasing power of the poor at home, as the poor are not a market for them, but rather a cost in terms of wages to be kept as low as possible... By keeping wages and living standards low, elites guarantee that healthy domestic markets will never emerge, reinforcing export orientation... The result is a downward spiral into deeper poverty and marginalization, even as national exports become more “competitive” in the global economy. One irony of our world, then, is that food and other farm products flow from areas of hunger and need to areas were money is concentrated, in Northern countries." - Peter Rosset, “Genetic Engineering of Food Crops for the Third World: An Appropriate Response to Poverty, Hunger and Lagging Productivity?” ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Dr Judith MacKay, Director of the Asian Consultancy on Tobacco Control in Hong Kong, claims that tobacco’s “minor” use of land denies 10 to 20 million people of food. “Where food has to be imported because rich farmland is being diverted to tobacco production, the government will have to bear the cost of food imports,” she points out. … The bottom line for governments of developing countries is that the net economic costs of tobacco are profoundly negative — the cost of treatment, disability and death exceeds the economic benefits to producers by at least US$200 billion annually “with one third of this loss being incurred by developing countries”. — John Madeley, Big Business Poor Peoples; The Impact of Transnational Corporations on the World’s Poor, (Zed Books, 1999) pp. 53, 57

Competition between companies involved in manufacturing in developing countries is often ruthless. We are seeing what Korten described as “a race to the bottom. With each passing day it becomes more difficult to obtain contracts from one of the mega-retailers without hiring child labor, cheating workers on overtime pay, imposing merciless quotas, and operating unsafe practices.”