Milk and the 'price' of a human life

$29,000 is the value of a migrant worker's life in China

Shoreline, Wa. Last year, the dangers posed to food safety by the globalization of the food system came to a heated climax around September. There were reports of thousands of deaths and illnesses in China, the United States, Canada, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, and other countries caused by contamination of a variety of Chinese industrial products ranging from dog food and toothpaste to milk and medicine.

Melamine, a poisonous ingredient that was added to provide false enhanced readings of the protein content of milk, dog food, and other foodstuffs, was one of the contaminants found in China's food supply chain. Hundreds of persons and pets died and thousands were taken ill or left with impaired liver functions and other chronic health problems.

Apparently, in China, like the USA, this type of structural violence must be given a "price" so the "free" market can reckon its "value."

Overlooked in most recent accounts of the further decline of food safety as a result of globalization is a settlement reached in a case in China's Gansu province. The case involved a settlement with the family of a six-month old infant who died in September 2008. The death was directly traced to one of the incidents of Melamine contamination of milk formulas.

Left unsaid in mainstream media accounts is the notion that these deaths are the "cost" that China seems willing to pay in pursuit of its strategy of becoming the world's principal industrial capitalist mass producer. China is poised as the world's largest manufacturer of absolutely everything from toys and computers to cars and tractor parts as well as the ingredients for mass produced food, medicine, and animal feed products.

The death of the young infant is eloquently reported by Edward Wong in the New York Times of Saturday 17 January 2009. Wong reports that the milk producer, Sanlu Group, just settled the death for $29,200.

Neoliberal death in China?

What does it mean for the communist [sic] one-party corporatist state in China to allow the unregulated law of the anarchic market to determine the money-value of a human life?

The area is "poor," we are told. The money is more than the family has ever imagined possible. Indeed, the family did not expect to win the case. Everything works out and everyone gets to go back to their lot in life and death.

The female plant manager faces serious criminal charges and must deal directly with the possibility of a death penalty punishment. It makes me wonder how many times American capitalists and managers have gotten away with similar acts of murder through industrial fraud and neglect with nothing but a limited liability penalty to pay for it?

Is "monetary" compensation really equal to the "value" of a lost life?

The Chinese courts have agreed in this case that the value of the "extirpated life" of the migrant family's infant son is $29,200. This, of course, assumes that his life would have remained subordinated to the regime of abstract labor; that the infant's life would have inevitably involved the subordination of his body to the endless regime of exploitable units of labor time, ultimately valued as such solely because they were "lost" to capitalist accumulation and reproduction.

How absurd though. Is it really possible or ethical to quantify a life this way? Too many rural Chinese exceed the expectations and norms of a corporatist regime to presume any family would welcome a $29,200 price tag as an adequate replacement for the lost memories of life and shared experiences with a child who is now a future ghostly ancestor.

This death reminds me of another one long ago reported by Angus Wright in his classic book, The death of Ramon Gonzalez: A modern agricultural dilemma. Ramon Gonzalez died from pesticide poisoning. He suffered a slow but agonizing death from multiple exposures over decades of field work in the export-monocrop plantations of the Culiacan Valley.

In both cases, death is the result of the transformation of a local food system. Instead of place-based agroecosystems producing heirloom crops for local consumption and trade, the landscape is transformed into poisonous industrial monocultures, synthetic cogs in the machine of global commodity chains that sell poisons as nutrients.

Meanwhile, the outgoing Bush administration has had a lot to say about the "price" of a human life in 2008: In one context, Bush declared that "every life is precious" and all life should be protected, an obvious reference to his anti-abortion views. In another context, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) "knocked $900,000 off the value of a human life."

According to an Associated Press report dated July 10, 2008, the EPA decided in May that an American life isn't worth what it used to be. The EPA based its new estimate as the culmination of more than two decades of "neoliberal" logic encompassed by the peculiar over-quantification of everything known as cost-benefit analysis. The AP report states that the "value of a statistical life" is $6.9 million in today's dollars, a drop of nearly $1 million from just five years ago.