Finally, monoculture is based on the principles of trade and comparative advantage. It’s supposed to work like this: Enormous areas specialize in growing, say, corn and soy; they then sell those crops and use the cash they get in return to buy a wide variety of foods. This works in the United States, but it doesn’t work well in the rest of the world, where trade barriers are often high, and selling crops for money and then exchanging that money for food is a complex and fraught process. Farmers growing cash crops in remote areas are often taken advantage of by middlemen, who take a cut of the profit and pay the growers much less than the market rate.
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How Locavores Could Save the World | Foreign Policy
‘Free Trade’ and agriculture-by-monoculture has converted the farming class of 3rd world countries into cheap labor for Agribusiness Multinationals at the expense of the health and economic security of the people.
