Banquet or banditry? (North America).

US -- Free-trade policies, with their focus on shareholder profits, are promoting the spread of poverty-wage jobs, increasing the rich-poor gap and destroying the ability of developing nations to feed themselves. The Global Banquet, a two-part documentary produced by Maryknoll World Productions [www.maryknoll.org] drives this message home by showing how "a handful of multinational corporations have come to dominate our food system, driving small family farmers ... out of existence." In 1996, the UN World Food Summit proclaimed that it was "intolerable that more than 800 million people ... do not have enough food to meet their basic nutritional needs." The summit announced plans to cut the number of hungry in haft by 2015 by promoting "trade liberalization." By January 2001, the UN's World Food Program reported, the number of people plagued by hunger had grown to 830 million. "Markets are not the first nor the last word in human development," Food First Co-director Anuradha Mittal explains in the film. "Many essentials for human development are provided outside the market, but these are being destroyed and squeezed by the pressures of global competition. When the market dominates social and political outcomes, the rewards of globalization spread unequally." [Food First, 390 60th St., Oakland, CA 94618, [phone], www.foodfirst.org]