The Ravaging Effects of Capitalism on My Hometowns

By Mark Klempner, AlterNet. Posted March 31, 2008.

What will become of Costa Rica? That's the question on my mind, now that my adopted country has narrowly accepted CAFTA. Our national slogan is "Pura vida!" meaning "pure life," and it's commonly used as an affirmation that life is good. It's easy to understand how such an expression could catch on here: Costa Rica has virtually no enemies, a temperate climate, and a hell of a lot of good beaches. However, as an expatriate whose previous hometowns have been despoiled by global capitalism, I find it difficult to imagine that life will be as pure or as good once the effects of CAFTA begin to kick in. At the very least, the treaty will accelerate trends already evident in Costa Rica, such as more corporations like Intel and Procter & Gamble setting up operations. Indeed, CAFTA promises an improved "business climate" and "regulatory environment" for foreign firms and investors, but I wonder what that will mean for Costa Rica's actual landscape, and the people who inhabit it.

I first witnessed the negative effects of global capitalism from the North American side, being from Schenectady, N.Y., the original "home of General Electric," a phrase that resounded through my childhood. Known also as "the city that lights and hauls the world" in its heyday, Schenectady and General Electric grew together during the first half of the 20th century. They remained interdependent, both economically and socially, and when I was growing up in the early 1970s, G.E. was still the biggest employer in town, with about 27,000 workers. It was also the biggest polluter: the more than 1 million pounds of toxic PCBs that it dumped into the Hudson River caused various health problems for local residents, ranging from skin diseases to birth defects -- and probably cancer. In the 1980s, G.E.'s famed CEO Jack Welch initiated an aggressive strategy of eliminating and outsourcing jobs with the result that the company now employs fewer than 4,000 workers in Schenectady.

And where did the outsourced jobs go? Mexico, Malaysia, China, India, you name it. It might appear that Costa Rica will gain only from being among the nations that are insourced, but it has yet to have an industrial force that big move in and seriously befoul its environment. Nor has Costa Rica had the experience of being abandoned by such a transnational when it moves its operations to yet another country that can offer still greater savings.

For more than a decade now, tourism has been Costa Rica's main source of income, currently accounting for 60.4 percent of its GDP. One would think that Costa Rica's president Óscar Arias would do all he can to safeguard the beautiful environment that generates Costa Rica's wealth, but, considering that his administration recently rescinded the moratorium on offshore oil drilling, that does not seem to be the case. Though Costa Rica has protected about 25 percent of its nature areas, and plenty of environmental laws are in place, many of them are either partially enforced or not enforced at all. Furthermore, some of these laws can potentially be challenged under CAFTA, one reason that environmentalists have been united in their opposition to the treaty.

But equally pernicious is the possibility that CAFTA will bring about the demise of the small farms that grow some of our best coffee and produce. That this will be an incalculable cultural loss might be hard for outsiders to understand unless you are one of those tourists who came to Costa Rica for its pristine forests or beaches and fell in love with the people here. I believe that their boundless hospitality has its roots in the strong agricultural tradition whereby, as in bygone years in the United States, neighbors would help each other to bring in the harvest or to raise a barn.

My wife and I live in a coffee-growing region where our town monument depicts a farmer with two oxen pulling a cart full of coffee beans to market. Nearly every day someone does something to reflect this campesino spirit, like yesterday when the grandmother of my son's playmate sent him home with a bag of oranges from the tree in their backyard. A less trifling example is the playground cleanup and repair project initiated by one of our neighbors in which nearly everyone on our block participated. That scene of the adults working together to make things better for the children, while the children frolicked in the grass, helping where they could, is one I'll never forget. The point is that this tight-knit, highly cooperative community will not remain that way for long if it loses its agricultural base.

At present you can buy a mango in Costa Rica for about 50 cents. An apple from the United States, however, costs about 75 cents. The reason is that a tariff equal to the price of the imported fruit is applied, so that it sells here for twice as much as in the United States. CAFTA will eliminate such tariffs and thus cut the prices for imported grains and produce in half. It's unlikely that Costa Rican farmers will be able to compete with U.S. agribusiness, which has not only the advantage of economies of scale, but of massive government subsidies as well.

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Mark Klempner is a folklorist, historian, and author of The Heart Has Reasons: Holocaust Rescuers and Their Stories of Courage. His email is mtk2@cornell.edu. He would like to thank the following people for commenting on, assisting with, or allowing themselves to be interviewed for this article: Judith Blau, Maxwell A. Cameron, Mark Engler, Gillian Gillers, Paul Glover, Ari Hershowitz, Dan Hoffman, Chris Hunter, Andrew Gow, Paul Rogat Loeb, James McConkey, Thomas F. O'Boyle, Kathryn Olney, Kathy Ozer, Dave Sherwood, Margrete Strand, Alice Truax, Joe Wetmore, and the GE Corporate Feedback Team.