One of the contemplative practices we conducted was with chocolate. We were given both a piece of chocolate as it would be bought in western world, rich, creamy, and very sweet. Then we were given a piece of raw cocoa, it was bitter, earthy, and coarse. When I ate the piece of cocoa although I enjoyed this new unique flavor, I longed for the rich creaminess and melt in the mouth texture I expect from a piece of chocolate. As professor mentioned, food like chocolate requires milk, sugar, butter and other ingredients that can only be made possible through international trade. However, interconnectedness of international trade and food subsidies is also linked to global inequities and poverty in developing nations. Wealthy countries like the United States and those that reside within the EU are able to dominate the agricultural market because they are able to provide food subsidies for their domestic farmers. On the other hand, developing countries simply do not have the means to provide the some $380 billion spent on subsidies. What this means for the international food economy is that wealthy countries can dominate the market because their agricultural industries will not suffer nearly as much as farmers in other developing countries if there is a failed harvest. However, this has further implications because as professor mentioned in class, a countries GDP is typically more dependent on agriculture if they are a developing country. Although the US is a huge exporter of agriculture, we get less than 20% of our GDP from agriculture whereas low income countries get most of their GDP from agriculture. This pattern most likely has to do with state development because as countries modernize they tend to move away from agrarian societies into more industrialized economies. Ultimately this structure keeps poor nations poor and makes wealthy nations even wealthier. Major food producers like Nestle, Kellogg’s, General Mills, and Cadbury belong to wealthy nations like the US and Europe, and since they hold so much wealth and power, if a smaller farmer from let’s say Sierra Leone wished to establish their own chocolate factory it would never be successful because cocoa farmers would be paid far more money selling to Nestle than they would to their own domestic producer. Essentially this means that even if a nation wanted to modernize and enter the international market it would repeatedly be outcompeted. Which begs the question, is the international market perpetuating poverty?
