Globalization

I was going to post the article, but can't find the link...

It was about local farmers who sell onions now find that they can't, because of imported low price onions from China and Holland...


Now, a lot of Philippino industries go belly up from the low cost manufacturing in China, where wages are very very low...

But Holland?
The wages there are high, but fertilizer and fewer bugs result in less of the crop being lost...and more importantly, the EU subsidizes agriculture...and importation is cheap because of low oil prices.

Our chicken farm hasn't made a profit in years, thanks to cheap imported chickens from Thailand and Viet Nam. Our family ran it for ten years, but now has a tenant...who can't pay the rent...you can get by only by "cheating", i.e. supplementing the chicken feed from the contractor with your own rice etc. and by "stealing" and selling some of the chickens on the side. (the contractor expects ten percent of chickens to "die", and this being the Philippines, no one checks if they die from disease or "accidentally" and sold or given away).

Few people understand the one world/free trade...I barely got thru Robert Reich's book about it...but there will be winners and losers in his world (one loser was the American blue collar worker...but I never read any criticism when Clinton made Reich the Sect of LABOUR...hmmm)..

I tend to support subsidarity, and the ideas of Shumacher...stick to local industries when you can.
But yesterday I bought a Chinese TV...I would prefer a Korean, but it was on sale (Walmart, take note)...If there was a local Philippino factory run by Sharp or Sony, I would prefer that, but there is no big trend here to do such things...

However, there is a huge import tax on cars, so BMW makes cars here, with German parts and with Germans doing quality control...

With a good government, and with protectionist trade practices, you might be able to keep some of the million OFW here to work...

As I have said many times, I don't know much about economics.

But it will give you an idea why Korean farmers are protesing the WTO in HongKong...