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61 " The frontier works only through connection, fixing its failures by siphoning life from elsewhere. A frontier is a site where crises encourage new strategies for profit. Frontiers are frontiers because they are the encounter zones between capital and all kinds of nature - humans included. They are always then, about reducing the costs of doing business. Capitalism not only has frontiers; it exists only through frontiers, expanding from one place to the next, transforming socioecological relations, producing more and more kinds of goods and services that circulate through an expanding series of exchanges. But more important, frontiers are sites where power is exercised - and not just economic power. Through frontiers, states and empires use violence, culture, and knowledge to mobilize nature's low cost. It's this cheapening that makes possible capitalism's expansive markets. "
― Raj Patel , A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet
62 " Further away from the border, and further away from wealth, small farms, which make up 85 percent of farmers in Mexico,6 have been faring badly.7 Indeed, for the majority of poor farmers, NAFTA hit hard. And that’s because the crop they grew was treated with a mixture of contempt, ignorance and incompetence during the negotiations. Responsible for 60 per cent of the land cultivated in Mexico at the time the treaty was concluded, a source of livelihood for three million producers, and 8 per cent of the population, that crop was corn. "
― Raj Patel , Stuffed And Starved: Markets, Power And The Hidden Battle For The World Food System
63 " In 2002, for instance, US corn cost US$1.74 per bushel to buy but US$2.66 for US farmers to produce.8 This, because the United States had long supported its farmers and had made a range of subsidies available to them for machinery, fertilizer, credit and transport "
64 " In his path-breaking research, economist Amartya Sen observed that modern famines weren’t related so much to the absence of food as the inability to buy it. "
65 " In Mexico, when the price of corn fell, the message many farmers received was that they were on their own, that the government was shuffling off its commitment to them, and that farmers had better think of some other way of feeding themselves and their families. The method farmers chose to face the falling price of corn was to grow more of it, to generate an income to meet the rising prices of all the things they couldn’t provide for themselves. "
66 " The power of this model comes from assuming that the market looks like a pyramid, with a few on top scalping the many at the bottom. The trouble is that agriculture doesn’t look like this. In agriculture, there are many at the top, and they are often substantially poorer than their customers. "
67 " Particularly in the Global South, trade liberalization has rarely been accompanied by working mechanisms to redistribute its gains to the poor, or to provide meaningful work or retraining for those left unemployed by the consequences of market shifts.20 This is because liberalization is part of a bigger political philosophy – one in which government intervention (even to provide a basic protection for rights) is considered meddlesome and inefficient. This is why, with few exceptions, the era of trade agreements has also been the era of increasing inequality. "
68 " egoism would lead to the best of all possible worlds, and that any form of restraint would result in disaster. "
― Raj Patel , The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy
