“The issue here really is not whether international trade shall be free but whether or not it makes any sense for a country — or, for that matter, a region — to destroy its own capacity to produce its own food.”
"A Bad Big Idea".
Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community (1993)
Context: The issue here really is not whether international trade shall be free but whether or not it makes any sense for a country — or, for that matter, a region — to destroy its own capacity to produce its own food. How can a government, entrusted with the safety and health of its people, conscientiously barter away in the name of an economic idea that people’s ability to feed itself? And if people lose their ability to feed themselves, how can they be said to be free?
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Wendell Berry 189
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Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 40.
Source: Building Entopia - 1975, Chapter 11, The polis, p. 154
In one important case, Washington has employed such threats with great effectiveness (and GATT approval) to force open Asian markets for U.S. tobacco exports and advertising, aimed primarily at the growing markets of women and children. The U.S. Agriculture Department has provided grants to tobacco firms to promote smoking overseas. Asian countries have attempted to conduct educational anti-smoking campaigns, but they are overwhelmed by the miracles of the market, reinforced by U.S. state power through the sanctions threat. Philip Morris, with an advertising and promotion budget of close to $9 billion in 1992, became China's largest advertiser. The effect of Reaganite sanction threats was to increase advertising and promotion of cigarette smoking (particularly U.S. brands) quite sharply in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, along with the use of these lethal substances. In South Korea, for example, the rate of growth in smoking more than tripled when markets for U.S. lethal drugs were opened in 1988. The Bush Administration extended the threats to Thailand, at exactly the same time that the "war on drugs" was declared; the media were kind enough to overlook the coincidence, even suppressing the outraged denunciations by the very conservative Surgeon-General. Oxford University epidemiologist Richard Peto estimates that among Chinese children under 20 today, 50 million will die of cigarette-related diseases, an achievement that ranks high even by 20th century standards.
In Tony Evans (ed.), Human Rights Fifty Years on: A Reappraisal, 1997 https://chomsky.info/199811__/
Quotes 1990s, 1995–1999
Fourteen Points https://www.marxists.org/archive/mcmanus/articles/points.htm, Halifax Division of the Socialist Labour Party, (1918)
"What should trade negotiators negotiate about?" Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Mar., 1997)
Election address (25 October 1931), quoted in The Times (26 October 1931), p. 14
Later life
Quoted in Money and Men by Robert McCann Rice (1941) but no prior source is extant.
Misattributed
TV Guide interview http://tvguide.com/News/Insider/default.htm?cmsGuid={B2730BE5-2FEA-41E5-9D93-7915905AAAA4}