The Plowboy Interview: Frances Moore Lappe

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But once again, it's essential that we not oversimplify . . . because not all food exports are bad. In Nicaragua—which is genuinely attempting to redistribute land and wealth—coffee export income is used for basic development. So when coffee prices crashed recently, after that nation's government had heavily invested in the crop, it hurt the society as a whole.

PLOWBOY: The problem, then, isn't that rich countries exploit poor ones . . . but rather that there's a class of people, in both types of nations, whose interests and food tastes have been set in opposition to the basic needs of poorer citizens.

LAPPE: And that situation is getting steadily worse. As impoverishment grows in the underdeveloped countries, there's more and more export . . . in effect, we're now seeing the establishment of a global supermarket. It's no longer a case of only the traditional tropical crops—such as bananas, pineapples, and coffee—being shipped out of Third World nations. Now, America gets one-half to two-thirds of its winter vegetables from Mexico. And cassava, a basic, high-calorie root crop that poor people have survived on for decades, is now shipped from Thailand to Europe, where it's used as livestock feed. The U.S. even imports beef from underdeveloped countries!

And although not many people know it, much of the food we're buying from Third World nations is contaminated with dangerous pesticides like DDT.

PLOWBOY: But DDT was outlawed years ago!

LAPPE: In America . . . but some of the U.S. corporations that made such dangerous pesticides are now producing the same hazardous chemicals, often under different names, either for export or in Third World plants. That's bad enough, but in poor countries—where people often get their drinking water from canals that contain pesticide runoff, where uneducated individuals can buy liquid insecticides in cola bottles, and where farm workers are sometimes sprayed from overhead planes by plantation owners who are breaking up union meetings—the poisons cause immeasurably more severe damage than they ever did here.

And, of course, the export crops grown for sale to wealthy countries like ours tend to receive the largest doses of these pesticides, because consumers in industrial nations have come to expect blemish-free food.

PLOWBOY: Does the U.S. produce goods for the global supermarket as well as buy from it?

LAPPE: Certainly. The biggest American food-processing firms—having reached a point at which they can't expect to keep increasing their food sales to this nation's public—are now finding a whole new market for their wares abroad. The urban elite in the Third World equate processed foods with modernization and westernization. Consequently, many of the items exported from the U.S. are the least nutritious foods we produce . . . such as crackers, sugary flavored gelatins, artificial whipped toppings, and especially soft drinks. And, of course, the whole scandalous story of American firms pushing infant baby formula to poor people in the Third World—which has led to the malnourishment and death of millions of infants—is another example of our emphasis on processed food exports.

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