Recommended reading: Corporate Globalization: Standing at the End of the Road

From Common Dreams:

Corporate globalization, savagely embodied by NAFTA, is not just a threat to Mexican farmers and rural villagers. The economic, health, and social damage created by industrial agriculture, corporate globalization, and the patenting and gene-splicing of transgenic plants and animals, are inexorably leading to universal “bioserfdom” for farmers, deteriorating health for consumers, a destabilized climate (energy intensive industrial agriculture and long-distance food transportation and processing account, directly or indirectly, for 40% of all climate-disrupting greenhouse gases), tropical deforestation, and a rapid depletion of oil supplies. Lest we forget, forty percent of the world’s population are still small farmers and rural villagers. If we allow corporate agribusiness and so-called “free traders” to continue to drive these last two billion peasants from the land, replacing them with chemical and energy-intensive, climate disrupting industrial farms, cattle ranches, and agrofuels plantations, we are doomed.