Tokar, Brian (ed). Gene Traders: Biotechnology, World Trade, and the Globalization of Hunger. Burlington, VT: Toward Freedom, 2004. 124 pp.

This book, edited by Brian Tokar, includes seven scholarly contributions which demonstrate the current structure of global stratification, its historically and structurally embedded etiology, and associated emergent derivatives. It is also a book about the structurally articulated process of globalization and neocolonialism through the means of modern biotechnology, manipulating the food chains, and corporate Western multinational banking and aid organizations manipulating the local and international financial flow in the market system in the interests of the rich donor countries. Since the beginning of the last century most of the countries occupied by foreign colonial powers became officially free from their former colonial rulers. The concept of freedom can be seen only in the absence of old colonial rulers in the so-called free lands. However, their presence is extremely vivid with full functional apparatus in the form of trade, and technological and financial assistance affecting agricultural production, general economic system and virtually every sphere of lives benefiting the lives of the rich countries. The consequences are hunger, loss of political and economic efficiency, environmental degradation, marginalization, and total dependence at the recipient ends.

S'ra DeSantis argues in the initial chapter that Mexico is being used as a dumping ground for genetically engineered crops and that various international trade agreements, and food aid by the US-based agribusinesses, are contaminating indigenous corn crops. There are various known and unknown moves being made far removed from the knowledge of the common people posing risks to human health, destruction of the general environmental structures and family farms. It is becoming extremely difficult for local small and medium sized farmers to fight and compete with large multinational agro and techno-chemical conglomerates aligned with local and international private and government owned financial institutions, and to maintain natural seed preservation and traditional cultivation strategies that are conducive to healthy social and environmental systems. In the process, local farmers are losing many of their legal rights imposed by various foreign companies manipulating local political economy in the name...