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The Agreement on Agriculture should be called a Cargill Agreement.
It was former Cargill Vice-President, Dan Amstutz, who drafted the
original text of the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture. Opening
Southern markets and converting peasant agriculture to corporate
agriculture is the primary aim of Cargill and hence the Agreement on
Agriculture.
But opening markets for Cargill
implies closure of livelihoods for farmers. W.T.O. rules are not
just about trade. They determine how food is produced and who
controls food production. For Cargill, capturing Asian markets is
key. Asia happens to be the largest agricultural economy of the
world, with the majority involved in agriculture. Converting
self-sufficient food economies into food dependent economies is the
Cargill vision and the W.T.O. strategy.
Even half of population growth by 2008
will happen in Asia as well as 30 per cent of the world income
growth in the next decade. People in India and Vietnam spend more
than half their incomes on food, while the Chinese spend more than a
third. If better food could be delivered more efficiently, more
income would be freed up to spend on other things like motorbikes,
cellular phones, even computers. A global open food system would be
the one where the regions that grow food best are linked through
with regions that need food most. That system describes a region
where the best areas for growing food - the Americas - are linked
through trade with the areas where food is needed the most, Asia."
Because the Agriculture Agreement of
W.T.O. is an agribusiness treaty it distorts production and trade
from the perspective of nature, small farmers and all consumers,
especially the poor. It is a recipe for ecological destruction,
devastation of family farms, and ruination of citizens' health.
Behind the apparent neutrality of rules for "domestic support",
"market access" and "export competition" are distorted assumptions
and myths about food production and distribution.
These Cargill myths are enshrined in
the W.T.O. agriculture agreements. The first myth is that America is
the best region for growing food and America grows the best food.
The reality is that America is a model of how not to grow and
produce food. The second myth is that free trade allows food to be
delivered "efficiently". The reality is that without massive
subsidies and dumping, U.S. corporations could not capture South
markets, and "free trade" is based on a "food swap", with countries
importing and exporting the same commodity and all countries pushed
into trade in a handful of commodities controlled by the
agribusiness giants - not on exporting what a country can uniquely
produce and importing what it cannot.
The related myth is that dumping
"frees" up incomes of farmers who can then buy "motorbikes, cellular
phones and computers". The reality is that dumping destroys domestic
markets, collapses markets, destroys livelihoods and incomes,
collapses rural incomes, and erodes purchasing power and
entitlements. Impoverished farmers join the ranks of the hungry.
Indebted farmers commit suicide. Starvation deaths and farm suicides
are the tragic outcome of trade liberalisation of food systems.
The built-in review in Article 20 of
the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) should have provided an
opportunity to revisit the flawed assumptions on which the (AoA)
rests. Instead, in the Draft Cancun Declaration, the review has been
brushed aside, and a commitment made without consultation on further
liberalisation.
The tragedy of the U.S. model of the
food system: A system designed to destroy farmers and public health
The first myth of globalisation is
that the U. S. is the best region for food production and the best
source of food.
A group of us recently produced "Fatal
Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture" (ed. Andrew Kimbrell,
Foundation for Deep Ecology/Earthscan) which documents the
ecological and social costs of the U.S. farming system. In 1995, at
a meeting we organised on Globalisation and Food Insecurity, A.V.
Krebs, an expert on U.S. Agribusiness showed how U.S. farmers were
being destroyed while the power of agribusiness grew.
In 1990 nearly 22 per cent of U.S.
farming households had incomes below the official poverty threshold,
twice the rate for all U.S. families. In 1993, over 88 per cent of
the average farm operator household income was derived from off-farm
income. From 1982 to 1993 the index of prices received by farmers
for inputs multiplied over threefold to 23 per cent.
Is it any wonder that during the
period from 1990 to 1994 our farmers saw an almost minuscule 1.98
per cent return on their investment?
As a result, from 1987 to 1992 in the
U.S., farm entries dropped to less than 67,000 per year while exits
averaged 99,000 per year, resulting in the net loss of 32,000 farms
a year?
While displacing farmers has been
justified on grounds of productivity, in fact, small farms are more
productive than large ones. As our former Prime Minister Ch. Charan
Singh had stated, agriculture being a life process, in actual
practice, under given conditions, yields per acre decline as the
size of farm increases (in other words, as the application of human
labour and supervision per acre decreases). The above results are
well-nigh universal: output per acre of investment is higher on
small farmers than on large farms. Thus, if a crowded,
capital-scarce country like India has a choice between a single
100-acre farm and forty 2.5-acre farms, the capital cost to the
national economy will be less if the country chooses the small
farms.
However, it is the small farms and
small farmers who are being destroyed by globalisation and trade
driven economic reforms. Five million peasants' livelihoods have
disappeared in India since "reforms" were introduced.
Displacement of farmers and
destruction of soil, water and biodiversity are two negative
dimensions of the U.S. food system. Threat to public health is
another fatal aspect of an industrialised, corporate controlled food
system. As U.S. food culture spreads through globalisation it
spreads health hazards. The intense controversy over high pesticide
residues in Coke and Pepsi in India is one example of the public
health hazards posed by U. S. style industrial food culture.
The epidemic of obesity is another
symptom. Nearly 70% children in the U.S.A. suffer from obesity and
exhibit metabolic disorders formerly seen only in adults such as
diabetes, high blood cholesterol, high blood cholesterol, high blood
pressure. Today 44 million American adults are obese and another 6
million are "super obese". Obesity is now second only to smoking as
a cause of mortality in the U.S. The CDC (Centre for Disease
Control) estimates that about 280,000 Americans die every year as a
direct result of being overweight. (Ref: Eric Schlosser, Fast Food
Nation, Penguin, 2002). The annual health care costs in the U.S.
linked to obesity are $240 billion, in addition to the $33 billion
spent on diet products and weight loss schemes.
With globalisation, this bad food
culture dominated by profits has spread worldwide. In China, 30%
children in 12 school were found to be obese. In India nearly 7.5%
children are obese. In Chennai, 18% are overweight. Two in five
Delhi students have high cholesterol and diabetes. Besides, the
health hazards of industrial foods and junk foods, the U.S. is now
becoming a source of new hazards in the form of genetically modified
organisms (GMOs). Europeans have refused to consume GM foods. India
and Zambia refused GM corn as food aid.
There is a global treaty, the
Biosafety Protocol, to regulate trade in GMOs. However, the U. S. -
driven by the biotech industry and agribusiness - would like trade
in GMOs deregulated and citizens denied the freedom to know and
choose. The U.S. threat to introduce a dispute against the EU on
GMOs is an example of how W.T.O. rules support the imposition of bad
food, and deny countries and citizen their right to food safety and
good food.
Distorted Trade: Subsidies and Dumping
W.T.O. rules are not leading to
efficiency. They are distorting production and trade. Disciplines on
"Domestic Support" is a key element of the Agreement on Agriculture.
However, these rules do not remove northern subsidies to
agribusiness, they deny support to rural producers. Rich countries
give more than $400 billion of subsidies. These do not go to small
farmers but to grant farms and exports, both in the U.S. and E.U.
The U.S. and E.U. conveniently crafted out a mechanism of amber box,
blue box and green box to leave their subsidies untouched, and in
fact to expand them as the U.S. did in the new Farm Act.
Green Box and Blue Box subsidies are
totally excluded from reduction commitments in W.T.O. These include,
research extension, marketing and promotion and infrastructure,
direct payments in the form of decoupled income support, and
structural adjustment assistance. Decoupling was a Cargill
invention, and has now been introduced as a main plan of CAP reform
in the EU. While the myth is that Green Box and Blue Box subsidies
are "decoupled" from production, and are therefore not trade
distorting, "decoupled" support distorts both production and trade
by removing the bottom from prices.
With free fall of farm prices, farmers
are pushed into higher levels of external input intensification and
enlargement of farm operations in a desperate bid to stay afloat.
Artificially low prices that are decoupled from costs of production
are the most important distortions in trade. And low prices are more
closely connected with monopoly in agribusiness than with
overproduction. U.S. and E.U. do not have real surpluses or
"overproduction". U.S. imports twice as much beef as it exports.
U.K. imports twice as much milk as it exports. The issue is not
overproduction but "distorted" production.
Decoupled support therefore promotes
non-sustainable large-scale industrial production and low prices. It
is therefore intrinsically linked with and coupled to
non-sustainable production and unjust prices. It is decoupled from
sustainability and justice. The very structure of W.T.O. rules
therefore distorts trade against small farmers, against food
sovereignty and against trade justice. The rules are trade
distorting in and of themselves.
That is why movements worldwide are
calling for a removal of agriculture from W.T.O. rules and southern
governments are seeking exceptions from these trade distorting rules
which promote dumping and wiping out of small farmers. Dumping has
increased as a consequence of W.T.O. From 1995 to 2001 dumping
jumped from 23% to 44% in wheat, from 9% to 29% in soya, 11 to 33%
in maize and 17 to 57% in the case of cotton.
Just as U.S./E.U. forced a distorted
trade regime in agriculture on the South in the Uruguay Round after
introducing a Peace Clause to not touch each others subsidies, the
two rich regions have once again made a deal at the cost of he
South, just before Cancun.
When poor countries are forced to
remove import restrictions and reduce tariffs in the face of high
subsidies and high levels of dumping by rich countries, poor farmers
are wiped out, and with them the food sovereignty of the South.
Impoverished farmers do not buy cell phones and computers as
projected by Cargill. They kill themselves in desperation or they
starve.
Reintroducing QRs and increasing
tariffs in a survival imperative for farmers of the South. QRs are a
right to defend ourselves from perverse dumping that is leading to
genocide. The W.T.O. distortions in our food and agriculture must be
removed as a matter of emergency. Thousands of farmers are dying.
Millions of people are being robbed of their food entitlements.
Justice and sustainability must be brought back as key determinants
in food and agriculture policy locally, nationally and globally.
Three strategies that eventually lead
to the same outcome are available as alternatives to be pushed for
in Cancun:
- Remove agriculture from W.T.O.
(Peasant Movements)
- Reintroduce QRs (Peasant Movements
and some Southern Governments)
- Introduce a Food Security or
Development Box to exempt developing countries from W.T.O. rules
(developing country Governments). The three strands could create a
synergy as they did in Seattle.
These steps are necessary to defend
peasant survival, rural livelihoods, food sovereignty and public
health. Simultaneously, sustainable and safe systems of food
production and just and fair systems of distribution, which are
evolving everywhere, need to be strengthened and extended. The
Manifesto of the International Commission on the Future of Food,
which I chair, has outlined this shift. W.T.O. cannot be allowed to
become a mechanism for dismantling our food security and public
health.
We will not allow W.T.O. to become a
trade barrier to sustainability and justice. In Cancun, governments
must hear a concerted, coherent and committed voice of diverse
movements from across the world. "Another agriculture is possible.
Another agriculture is necessary. Another agriculture is happening."
References:
- Quoted in Oxfam Briefing Paper No.32
"Boxing match in agricultural trade. Will W.T.O. negotiations knock
out the world's poorest farmers?"
- A.V. Krebs, "The Corporate Reapers:
Towards Total Globalisation of our Food Supply" in "Sustainable
Agriculture and Food Security: The Impact of Globalisation" edited
by Vandana Shiva and Gitanjali Bedi, Sage Publications, 2002
- Charan Singh, p119 "Economic
Nightmare in India, 1984, National Publishing House, New Delhi
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