Helping the hungry

Press, 13 April 1984, Page 20

Helping the hungry

Sir, — Corso and World Vision work well in emergencies, droughts and famines; but millions in the Third World suffer and starve because the multinational food industry destroys their subsistence. Powerful men take land, on which peasants lived adequately, for export crops: tea, sugar, coffee, sisal, flowers, tropical fruits, and nuts. Others exploit peasants who must mortgage their future crops to buy seeds, tools and fertilisers. Multinational companies coerce powerful families to serve their interests by capitalism’s rewards. Through these families they control whole governments, armies and paramilitary police. They provide the weapons, transport and torture equipment their minions use. To facilitate this control, their governments pfeave developed the whole machinery of

capitalist propaganda, world-wide surveillance systems and more than half the world’s nuclear arsenal. One such multinational is the gigantic United Fruit. Company, owned by Foster Dulles’s family. Multinational control of food must be ended. — Yours, etc., SUSAN TAYLOR. April 9, 1984.