Elmat,
Would you believe that I have planted cassava (camote ng kahoy in Bisaya) and harvested too. Planting is not the rough job, the harvest is, depending on the hardness of the soil. Years ago I lived with my wife and kids for a year in a real shack in the middle of a maize field in rural Mindanao, in the edge of rebel territory. We grew maize under the coconuts around the shack and also grew rice on a little tiny irrigated plot nearby. And me a wealthy guy, even by US standards, isn't that crazy? <grin> We still own the place and a house in town also and went back for a visit last year. I still have a vehicle there, a small Toyota truck called a "Tamaraw" which is the Tagalog word for "water buffalo". And I have plowed with the four-legged Tamaraw too.
"Suffering of the poor" my butt. Who are you trying to fool? The third world rural tropics is a paradise. Nobody works hard, for one thing it is too hot. The pace of life is slow, easy, and the quality for very many folks is extremely high. Folks there are surrounded by their very large exteneded family and are thereby protected and comforted as they go through life. And life there is good. Of course there is not much money and a serious illness could be a death sentence as the common folks are unable to afford chemotherapy or heart bypass surgery. But the girl who leaves the farm and works in the foreign owned factory can't afford these things either.
It seems to me that you have adopted the very arguments that have always belonged to the the Marxists such as "suffering of the poor" and "oppression" and the rest to promote a doctrine that is every bit as destructive as communism, the doctrine of "globalism". Maybe there is a linkage there, as the very first principle of Marxism is that it must by definition be "international" or "global". In other words, if Marxism fails in one place, it will fail everywhere in time if the local failure is not corrected. And like Marxism, globalism is really a life's philosophy or "belief system", almost a religion. Accept its tenets or else!
It is just a LIE that the common folks in these places have benefitted by globalism. Only a VERY TINY FRACTION of the people work in the new "sweat shops" (not so sweaty though, as many of them are air conditioned). The vast mass of the people are still out on the farm, chickens, flies and all and that is where they will stay. OTOH the new sweat shops are not terrible places either, I have been in a bunch of them and have relatives working there. You have to give the trans-nationals credit for one thing, they have figured out how to make life for the workers there fairly tolerable, even for the farm girl hundreds of miles from home and living in a dormitory with her co-workers.
But globalism is toast, it is just a matter of time, maybe not that much time.
Slagle
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