ABSTRACT
Once the word ‘multinational’ is mentioned, you immediately think of growing foreign capital power that moves goods and management skills around the world in the pursuit of high profit and the preservation of land and income inequalities, being necessary for the production and sale of their strategic goods. They are accused of: being followers of colonial powers and part of their own governments’ foreign policy in developing countries; being exploitive, replacing domestic labour by capital-intensive technologies and food crops by high-value exportable crops; and their alliance with local landlords and influential government officials in order to maximize their profits and preferential treatment in taxation. On the other hand, in some development literature multinationals are credited with translating research into development of modern, efficient agricultural production, and with helping countries to achieve their aim of greater foreign exchange earnings via exporting cash crops. Yet, a major difficulty in examining these controversial but important devel-
opment issues is the scarcity of case studies and hard evidence on their socioeconomic effects in rural areas. Even the limited material available is sometimes anecdotal and distorted because of the difficult nature of such welfare issues as equity, participation, malnutrition and poverty. It is for these reasons that we stress a few country-specific situations on which some information is available. The material that I shall soon present from Cote d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Malawi, Mexico, the Philippines and the Sudan indicate how the manifold activities of the multinationals have affected peasants’ access to land, employment and incomes. More careful evaluation is needed of the socio-economic implications of multinational corporations (MNCs) for the rural economy of the developing countries before one can fully judge their impact.
