Liberalizing Food Trade to Death

[struggle4progress]

by Shawn Hattingh

People across the world, from Mexico to Mozambique, have once again been taking to the streets in protest. The reason is to demand that their most basic need be met: access to food. With food prices skyrocketing over the last few months, billions of people around the globe have been relentlessly driven towards starvation. The various states in which these protests have taken place have reacted swiftly and brutally. They have deployed security forces armed with shields, batons, water cannons, stun grenades, tear gas, rifles, and even machine guns against the protestors. Hundreds of people have been killed.

Billions of people are struggling to afford food because of the huge disparities and inequalities that have been exacerbated by the current economic system -- neo-liberal globalization. Over the last 30 years, almost all states across the world have adopted neo-liberal economic policies. Neo-liberal policies have favored giant corporations' interests over those of people and have enabled a handful of companies to gain a virtual monopoly over the human food chain and make massive profits. The poor, however, have suffered consequences of neo-liberal policies: if people can't afford the prices these monopolistic companies charge, they don't get food ...

Although the IMF, the US, and the WB demanded that the Third World states end any form of assistance to small-scale farmers, they encouraged these same states to continue assisting agricultural corporations and large-scale farmers that were exporters. From Brazil to Kenya, Third World states were pushed to grow export crops that were needed or desired in Europe and the US. For instance, Kenya was instructed to focus on growing flowers for export to Europe while Brazil was told to focus on soy beans for export to the US. Thus these states -- along with the IMF, the WB, and agricultural multinationals -- prioritized such export crops over food for domestic consumption ...

The majority of countries of the South have been forced to drastically cut the subsidies they offer to their small-scale farmers due to the SAPs. The AoA, however, allows countries -- in the light of SAPs, only the US and the EU -- to continue subsidies as long as they do not directly distort trade. In effect, this has allowed multinationals, such as Cargill and Monsanto, to continue to receive massive subsidies from the US and the EU. In 2002, the US government passed the US Farm Act, which enabled the US state to provide American farmers, mostly large multinational firms, with $180 billion in subsidies over 10 years. The US Farm Act was considered WTO compliant ...

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/hattingh060508.html

[yurbud]

1. add food to the growing list of things we can't trust ''markets'' to sort out

[depakid]

2. Also add it to the list of policies that will be decimated by peak oil

Wealthy nations who've destroyed their own local and sustainable production capacities will be impacted as severely- if not more so, than poorer nations.

Seems to me the next few decades will be "interesting times" for nations dependent on long supply lines and/or imported food. Particularly nations like the US, whose economies are now largely based on the financial and service industries.

What goes around comes around....