Sunday readings: 29-June-2008

Are price controls on food products even healthy?  Diego Cevallos (InterPress News) finds many Mexicans wondering about that:

The products whose prices will remain unchanged through December are all processed foods that are not staples in the local diet. Furthermore, as business leaders have acknowledged, an announcement that the products would not experience price hikes this year had already been planned.

The list is headed by a number of brands of canned foods high in sodium; mayonnaise; marmalade; tea; powdered soups; and brands of juice and jello with a high sugar content.

The only high-demand, staple product included in the group is cooking oil, but its price will only be frozen until the end of August.

John Ross writes in “Killing Farmers With Killer Seed” (Counterpunch, 23-June-2008 ) that the push for GM seeds is more than just an economic issue:

Last October, Armando Villareal, a farm leader in the Mexican border state of Chihuahua, was gunned down after a farmers’ meeting in Nuevo Casas Grandes.  Villareal had been denouncing the illegal planting of GMO corn in the Mennonite-dominated municipalities of Cuauhtemoc and Naniquipa.

How do you say Justice in Mixteco?:  David Bacon writes in Truthout about Fresno (California) farmworkers displaced by those “killer seeds”:

Erasto Vasquez was surprised to see a forklift appear one morning outside his trailer near the corner of East and Springfield, two small rural roads deep in the grapevines, ten miles southwest of Fresno. He and his neighbors pleaded with the driver, but to no avail. The machine uprooted the fence Vasquez had built around his home and left it smashed in the dirt. Then. the forklift’s metal tines lifted the side of one trailer high into the air. It groaned and tipped over, with a family’s possessions still inside. “We were scared,” Vasquez remembers. “I felt it shouldn’t be happening, that it showed a complete lack of respect. But who was there to speak for us?” …

…Vasquez had lived in his trailer for 17 years. His youngest daughter, Edith, was born while the family lived there. By the time the forklift appeared, she had started middle school, while her brother Jaime was in high school and her sister Soila had graduated. “Señora Bowen was a nice lady, and even though we had to make whatever repairs the trailers needed ourselves, sometimes she’d wait three or four months for the rent, if we hadn’t been working,” Vasquez says. The families had labored in her vines for years.

And betcha didn’t know where the largest community of ethnic Japanese outside Japan is… Maria Osava on the celebrations commemorating the 100th anniversary of the first Japanese immigrantion to Brazil… and a video from Al-Jazeera’s Gabriel Elizando.

…the development of agriculture was the main contribution of Japanese immigrants to Brazil, in his view. Today, the Nikkei stand out in different areas, with the exception of those that require “the gift of gab,” which they don’t generally have, he said.

That is the explanation, he said, for the scant Nikkei presence in politics, in contrast with the leadership positions they hold in the technological, business, professional and academic spheres.

In Peru, which has a much smaller Japanese community, a son of Japanese immigrants, Alberto Fujimori, served as president from 1990 to 2000.

In Brazil, there have been few ministers and legislators of Japanese descent. But in the United States, their participation in politics has been even more limited, according to Jeffrey Lesser, a history professor at Emory University in the southeastern U.S. state of Georgia.