Trump's Death Trap for the Third World

 How are poor countries these days supposed to feed themselves? 

In the old days, most nations of the world produced their own food through subsistence agriculture. It wasn't a high or glamorous style of living—and we shouldn't wax nostalgic about it. But it generally enabled people to survive. 

But the U.S. pressured many countries around the world in the late twentieth century to lower the trade barriers that protected local farmers. As a result, many of their subsistence agriculture sectors were overwhelmed and displaced by cheap, subsidized U.S. crops.

Why did countries accept these U.S. products? In some cases, they were practically forced to—at gun-point (viz. Haiti). In others, they accepted cheap U.S. crops because there was an implied trade-off: the U.S. would assist these countries in developing along industrial lines. 

In other words, the displaced local peasants—who could not compete with cheap U.S. imports—would be able to feed themselves by taking jobs in new sweatshops and mines that U.S. development assistance would help to build. 

In some cases (like in the Cobalt mines that undergird the modern smartphone and electric car industries), conditions in the new industrial sectors amounted to near-slavery. Slavery by another name. But they did at least allow otherwise displaced peasants to obtain the barest essentials of life. 

In short, modern globalization on the late twentieth century model worked much the way nineteenth century European colonialism did. As Wilfrid Scawen Blunt once portrayed the latter in a poem—imagining a dialogue between colonizer and colonized on the subject: 

 "Sirs, but the crop is gone."--"There is your land in lots."

 "The land? It was our fathers'."--"Curse ye for idle sots,

 "A rascal lazing pack. Have ye no hands to work?

 "Off to the mines and dig, and see it how ye shirk."--

 "As slaves?" "No, not as _slaves_. Our principles forbid.

 "_Free labourers_, if you will. We use that word instead.

But now, Trump is trying to cut off even the miserable escape hatch of work in the mines or sweatshops. He is livid with all the impoverished countries in the Global South for doing precisely what we asked them to do: namely, to produce cheap things in factories for U.S. consumption. 

Of all Trump's recently-announced tariffs, the most onerous penalties largely fell on poor countries. Some of them, like Lesotho, had reoriented their entire economies around the export market to U.S. consumers. With Trump now torpedoing it—what are they supposed to do to survive? 

Can they go back to the pre-globalization world of subsistence agriculture? I doubt Trump would look any more favorably on that. It would mean putting up their own trade barriers to exclude cheap U.S. imported crops. Trump has a large agribusiness constituency who would not tolerate that for long. 

(Trump was just pressuring China in trade talks to buy more U.S. soybeans, e.g., in order to appease that same constituency. Do we really think he would let much poorer and less powerful countries exclude those same U.S. crops?)

So the countries of the Global South are to be permitted neither to feed themselves domestically with their own local produce nor to industrialize. How, then, are they supposed to survive? 

A third, most miserable option, would be to simply live off of U.S. largesse—to survive through food aid handouts from the Global North, even as the latter was responsible for forcing them into this condition of dependency in the first place. 

But Trump has cut off that option as well. He has all-but eliminated U.S. food aid to Africa. The Wall Street Journal reports this morning: refugees displaced by the continent's conflicts are literally fighting each other to the death for the scraps that remain. 

Is there any other escape hatch? If not local subsistence agriculture; if not industrialization and "modernization" (a euphemism that covers a multitude of horrors, but a means of survival nonetheless); if not food aid from the same countries that displaced them—then what? 

There is a fourth option—as a friend recently pointed out to me, in talking about this. It's the same option that the displaced peasantry took in the 18th century, in the early days of capitalism (as chronicled in Oliver Goldsmith's "The Deserted Village," e.g.)—namely, that of emigrating. 

But—my friend Seanan observed—Trump is quite obviously doing all in his power to cut off this escape route as well. He has blocked every migration pathway he is aware of—particularly for the Global South—which he once crudely called a bloc of "s—hole countries."

"So," my friend asked, "what exactly are they supposed to do? What does Trump want them to do?" 

"I literally think"—I said—"that Trump's answer to them is: 'go die.' I think his answer is: 'who cares?' I think his answer is: 'Not my problem.'"

And it is by such signs as this, as Dante Gabriel Rossetti once put it—in his relevantly-titled poem, "On the Refusal of Aid Between Nations"—that "we know/ Our earth falls asunder, being old."