Recently, I rushed to the grocery store to buy marinated artichokes for a holiday salad. As an advocate for buying local (anywhere within the fifty United States), I always make it a point to read labels and make sure what I’m buying is produced here. There are a couple of barriers to my simple morality. First, there is no labeling law governing the origin of food products in the United States. Second, if you do find a label, it rarely tells the truth. But there are times when you can find fairly accurate labels, particularly on some canned products.

I could not find one jar of domestic artichokes. It wasn’t that the store was sold out of domestic product – it was that the domestic product had ceased to exist. In its place were artichokes labeled "product of Spain" and an obscure, even cheaper brand labeled "product of Indonesia." Needless to say, my potluck salad recipe was quickly abandoned for a fast raw salad right off the produce counter. I passed by the onions which were sitting above a half emptied box a store clerk hadn’t thrown away yet that had Mexican export stamps all over it, dropped a green pepper with as small "product of Mexico" tag on it, and finally dove for a bag of dried apricots, thinking there had to be some kind of salad I could make out of them. I triumphantly brought them home flopped them on the counter, and staring right up at me, you guessed it, was a bold label proclaiming, "product of Turkey." I had a discomforting thought that I might starve to death on my "eat local" morality.

This grocery store crusade of mine might be somewhat amusing if the consequences weren’t so grave. I’ve spent enough years as a United States representative to the International Federation of Agricultural Producers (IFAP) to know how dangerous the impact of unregulated global commodity trade is to the fabric of culture and community. Srveral years ago, while at an IFAP meeting in Turkey, I was backed into a corner of a cocktail reception hall by a number of elite Turkish farmers. They had discovered that I was an American and they were going to vent all their pent-up anger on me. And vent they did, though a woman from the World Bank who offered to act as an interpreter. The crux of their frustrations was that they had eagerly tried to participate in learning about new agricultural technologies, they had purchased inputs on the support and advice of their government, they had brought in experts from Germany to help them get into the production flow of the most current trends, and the advice had backfired. Their production was plummeting, they had no market for the exotic product that had been introduced – other than the global market that they found to be extremely sensitive, and they were all on the verge of losing their farms. The leader of the group was quivering with rage when he said, "We have trusted in your government and it failed us. We have trusted in your universities and they failed us. The only one left for us to trust in is Allah, and we have failed him."

I came out of Turkey three weeks later after extensive contact with farmers from throughout the Middle East, feeling strongly that the foundation of violent uprisings, often simplified with and easy brush-off as religious fanaticism, is based more on the upheaval of centuries-old, land-based cultures being wrenched into an over-hyped, global commodity market. There are men and women, once with dignity and pride, who supported themselves, their families and their communities, who today litter the streets of Istanbul begging for food and jobs, neither of which exist for them. Their farms that once produced an abundance and great variety of food, no produce apricots that are dried and shipped to the United States that hammer our own markets below the cost of production, driving our own farmers out of business.

The greatest myth of American agriculture is based back in the 1950s and arouse from what was a noble morality – that we could and should feed the world. It is what is driving the insanity of the global market today. We ignored the centuries old warnings of Thomas Malthus, that "population will grow faster than food production," and while college professors and think-tank zealots bloody themselves with trivial details about whether or not the Malthusian theory has been proven, the simple statistical reality exists – in the year 2001, we will starve to death more people than lived in the world at the time Malthus wrote his treatise.

If our plans for feeding the world had gone in a simple, linear fashion, and if our plans for giving the world the same kind of production technology had followed the same narrow track as our simplistic vision, perhaps our noble morality would be intact and John Lennon’s imaginary world would be real today.

But in a very simplified condensation of facts, here is the one core problem with the global market. People do not buy food. Dollars buy food.

It means that the world’s food production, as it is globalized, shifts from domestic use and flows to where the greatest monetary base exists and not where the greatest need exists. The G-7 nations are the primary target market for commodities, from the cash-poor nations who are struggling to develop and mostly repay debt. Their fastest development potential is usually in agricultural commodities, fueled by foreign investors. The small cadre of wealthy in developing nations tend to horde what wealth they accumulate, often with generations of an entrenched mentality that see people with a monetary and social value far less than the commodity they produce. I’ll never forget sitting at a table with a group of wealthy ranchers from a developing nation in a hotel in Manila in the Phillippines two years ago at another IFAP meeting. I listened to them joke about their labor. One of them teased me, "You actually have to pay your labor? We just take ours from the jungle when we need it. Got a problem with them? Shoot them. Compete with that!" He chortled when he said it. But he meant it.

The best-fed nation on Earth, capable of feeding itself and others, is importing food from nations that cannot and are not feeding its own. It is our greatest immorality. More than 40% of the food on the U.S. consumer’s plate today is imported and not just products that are exotic and cannot be grown here, but those that are common and in oversupply, including wheat, corn, pork, beef, and produce like onions, peppers and tomatoes.

Tom Geissel, a wheat farmer from Kansas, recently commented to me, "it isn’t just the food we’re importing, it’s their damn dignity."

Often, these products come in at below their cost of production. The name of the game on the global market is "market share." It is a common practice to dump a product below the cost of production in mass to try to destroy a competitor. New Zealand and Australia did it to sheep producers in the U.S. and China is currently hammering the domestic market with honey and almonds. Canada and Mexico have done it with beef and cattle and we expect to see it happen soon with Brazil and Argentina as they struggle to entrench themselves in our domestic market. Argentina has recently helped destroy the U.S. honey market, driving hundreds of honey producers out of business – a key environmental problem ignored by everyone but the honey producers themselves. Simply put, without bees, we don’t pollinate crops.

I wish the solution were as simple as boycotting imports. But it isn’t a solution. It’s an irritant. Boycotts only work as long as you have an alternative to use and everyone uses it.

The solution lies in careful construction of trade agreements. First, we must value sovereign nation status and domestic law. Second, we must improve crucial laws which help us aver the gobbling up of the market share through predatory practices. Those laws are called "anti-dumping" and are important in helping us shut off aggressive take-vers. They are among the most aggressively attacked laws on the books today, with many major commodity groups calling for their elimination. Third, we must re-invigorate our tariffs and quotas and establish new tariffs and quotas, which are also under aggressive attack by agribusiness giants through NAFTA and the WTO. As a domestic cattle producer, I pay all kinds of taxes to ensure my system of government has the resources to provide programs to help ensure safe food, a safe environment – at work, at home and at play, a foundation for a decent standard of living for all people, and reasonable checks and balances that help people do what they cannot do for themselves.

We built a thriving free market system and paid dearly to keep it functioning for the benefit of producers and consumers. Others who wish to participate in the same market should pay-to-play with quotas to ensure their product won’t unfairly damage domestic industry, with tariffs to help contribute to the stability and function of our government, and they should have to live up to the same environmental and labor standards we see as important to our own quality of life here. To throw open the doors to "cheap" products manufactured and produced below the cost of production, we just cheapen ourselves.

This isn’t about shutting down global trade. It’s about setting higher standards. It is about placing a higher value, both in moral and real terms, on what we produce, and a higher value on those who produce and use it. It’s about putting a label on ourselves that says we’re worth more – as a nation, as a community, as a family, as a person.

Kathleen Sullivan Kelley is a fourth generation Coloradoan. She and her husband Reed produce cattle and horses on the family ranch in northwestern Colorado. Kathleen currently serves as the Vice President of the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund (R-CALF).

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