The Carrot, the Stick, and the Seeds: U.S. development policy faces resistance in El Salvador
The Carrot, the Stick, and the Seeds: U.S. development policy faces resistance in El Salvador
By Martha Pskowski | 15 / August / 2014
When I visited the Bajo Lempa region of eastern El Salvador this year, my new acquaintances taught me a joke.
“Why aren’t there coupes de états in the United States?” they asked me. “I don’t know, why?” “Because there isn’t a U.S. Embassy.”
We laughed over it together, and I was reminded that in El Salvador, memories of U.S. intervention leading up to and during the Civil War are still fresh. Today interventionism rears its head in new forms, and in turn, resistance is also changing.
In May of this year, the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador pressured the Salvadoran government to change its procurement process to distribute seeds to family farmers. The government was buying almost exclusively from Salvadoran seed cooperatives. The Embassy complained that favoring local seed, leaving out transnationals, was not “fair or transparent.” Multinational agrobusinesses like Monsanto previously dominated the industry, and the U.S. found the new conditions disagreeable enough to withhold the $277 Millennium Challenge aid package to El Salvador.
The irony of the moment hit home both in the United States and El Salvador, as an unprecedented number of child and adolescent migrants fleeing Central America were arriving at the U.S. border. The Millennium funds, slated to encourage development in El Salvador, hardly seemed like the appropriate way to push the seeds issue.
Salvadoran farmer organizations, unions, and environmental groups and groups in the U.S. protested placing a “Monsanto clause” in the basic needs aids package. On July 3, the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador confirmed the dispute had been “resolved” and they would not withhold the $277 Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) funds.
More:
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/12762
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