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21 " while the drug-related homicide rate fell in urban areas in the 1990s, it tripled in rural areas.31 In 2009 almost one in six people living in rural areas in the US fell below the poverty line. "
― Raj Patel , Stuffed And Starved: Markets, Power And The Hidden Battle For The World Food System
22 " In Mexico, there have also been changes in the foods people eat as a result of NAFTA, particularly in the increased availability and consumption of high-calorie food.62 This has led to a spike in levels of obesity with, as noted in the introduction, the observation that the closer a family lives to the border with United States, the more likely it is that its children are overweight. "
23 " Women carry its brunt. In one district in Southern India, for instance, a study found that the suicide rate for young men was 58 per 100,000. For young women it was 148 per 100,000.28 As a yardstick, the rate in the UK is less than 5 per 100,000. "
24 " Today, Mexicans drink more Coca-Cola than milk.65 The consequences are more than cosmetic. With over one in seven Mexicans living with diabetes66, the cost to the country is US$15 billion (GB£7.8 billion) a year. "
25 " Part of the telling of the fairy tale of ‘Shining India’ demands that the poor disappear. In India, this has been achieved through the waving of a magical, statistical wand. "
26 " California has a higher number of people in poverty than any other US state.96 Within agriculture, farm workers die on the job at rates five times higher than other comparable work. "
27 " in the decade after 1993, rural income fell by about 20 per cent while urban income increased by 40 per cent. "
28 " Today, the UFW still fights for the rights of farm workers – winning concessions like basic access to toilets and running water – in an economy in which farm workers remain exploited, if a little less than before. "
29 " From the fifteenth century, rural England was undergoing Enclosure, the process by which the community rights of the poor to the land of the rich were transformed into what we understand today by ‘private property’. The rural poor found themselves without access to common land, and had only their labour left to sell. It was an economic revolution, with profound social repercussions. For the landless, options were few. "
30 " free’ landless poor made their way to the cities to seek work. Those who remained on the land worked for a wage and only after-hours worked to feed themselves. On the other hand, for those who owned land, the shift from feudal to capitalist economics generated vast efficiencies, profits and hence the means to fund a growing national appetite to buy foreign food. "
31 " India has skipped past industrial development, to become a software giant, a knowledge economy in which one third of the population is illiterate. "
32 " To grow tea and sugar required industrial agriculture’s single most bloody innovation – the plantation. The agricultural technology of advanced and permanent monoculture came bundled with its own social technology, of soil tilled, cane hacked and leaves plucked by an endless supply of almost disposable people from the Global South. "
33 " Without an effective minimum price system in place, you’ve absolutely no guarantees at all. In other words, globalizing the market has effectively transferred control of farming away from the farmer, and into the hands of those who can shape that market. "
34 " In 1645 (at the beginning of the two-centuries-long era of slavery), records show the purchase of 1,000 slaves for Barbadian cane sugar production. A commentator noted that more slaves would soon be on their way, for so lucrative was the sugar industry, and so low the value of human life, that within eighteen months, slaves had recouped their strike-price for their masters. "
35 " The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist … McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas,’ observes New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. "
36 " Particularly in the Global South, poor people are under threat of direct physical harm, never more so than when they try to exercise their rights. In taking a stand against the illegal appropriation of their land, or even in merely raising their voices against the injustices they face, peasant groups across the world are targeted, often with impunity, by local and national forces, both public and private. "
37 " In the consumption of tea as a source of calories, exploited urban workers in London mirrored nothing so much as the slaves at the other end of the food system in the Caribbean, who chewed sugar cane for energy enough to get through the working day. "
38 " In order for the companies to supply tea and sugar, imperial power was necessary, in India and China principally for tea, and in the Caribbean for sugar. Britain had dominion over both regions. Religion also played a part, with the Temperance movement and the Protestant work ethic driving beer and gin out of the workplace.19 And, for the working poor, tea held an important advantage over a cold glass of beer: ‘Two ounces of tea a week … made many a cold supper seem like a hot meal. "
39 " In Brazil, the targeting of peasant leaders has been an ongoing government and private-sector project. Over the past two decades, and according only to official sources, at least 1,425 rural workers, leaders and activists have been assassinated there. And yet only 79 cases have ever been brought to trial. "
40 " The demise of beer’s place in everyday life does, however, show how traders in tea and sugar were able to ride, and further cause, changes in centuries-old tastes, reduce levels of nutrition and get a more caffeinated workforce for the ‘workshop of the world’ as a result. "