ETERNAL VIGILANCE

Farming for Families and Food,
Not Corporate Profits

By Corrina Steward
April 19, 2005
Foreign Policy In Focus
Editor: Emira Woods,
Institute for Policy Studies

Two contradictory visions of globalization are sweeping around the world: one favors a top-down model of economic development via militaristic, corporate aggression. The other favors grassroots-led, democratic pluralism and seeks to produce diverse local development models suited to the needs of local communities.

Proof of these inconsistencies abounds. Paul Wolfowitz’s election to the presidency of the World Bank signifies the advancement of a militaristic approach to controlling global resources; at the same time, thousands around the world continue to protest against the war in Iraq and other examples of U.S. imperialism. Schemes to privatize water, agricultural crops, and other life-giving resources continue to be pushed through proposed trade agreements and state-corporate relationships; yet, global social movements are calling for community sovereignty with unprecedented forcefulness and international solidarity.

One of the biggest ironies is that global agricultural production is regulated by international trade rules when nearly 90% of food is produced for local consumption and never traded on the global market. José Bové, a leader of the international farmers' movement Via Campesina, points out that, “No one would have believed [before the World Trade Organization came into existence] that we would get to the point where the biggest social movement in the world is a farmers’ movement.”1

It is indeed surprising that agriculture--the most rudimentary form of industrial capitalism--is at the center of trade conflicts during this advanced stage of global industrialization. Yet, it also indicates a huge misunderstanding by free marketers of the local realities in the agricultural regions of the developing world, and even in U.S. and European farming communities.

Trade Rules for All, Benefit Few

The World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) focuses on market access, export subsidies, and domestic support as a means for implementing a fair trading system. Reform in these areas focuses on export-oriented farming, which receives the majority of government support, and does not guarantee improved livelihoods for the farmers producing for non-export markets or on a small scale.

The WTO measures overlook several practices and trends, including the key issues of dumping of overproduced commodities and corporate control of the agricultural market.

A recent Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy report pointed out that dumping is a human rights issue: “Coupled with the lack of social safety nets, [dumping] has caused serious human rights concerns since the implementation of the AoA, particularly for small-scale farmers who lose their livelihoods due to competition from subsidized, dumped imports.”2 The human rights argument goes even further. Not only does dumping eliminate economic opportunities for rural communities, it denies local farmers the social and cultural values of their farming practices.

Corporate control of agricultural markets is intricately linked to government subsidies and also has human rights implications. In February, the Bush administration proposed reducing the annual ceiling on payments to U.S. farmers from $360,000 to $250,000. George Naylor, president of the National Family Farmer Coalition (NFFC), argues that this would pit U.S. cotton and rice producers against other U.S. commodity producers because the caps would only affect the former.3

Rather than allow a rift between U.S. commodity producers, Naylor insists, “Farmers have got to get together to say ‘this is ridiculous.’ We’re destroying our communities, our resources, all for the benefit of a few corporations. This policy is not good for us, for the United States. It’s only good for those few corporations.”

Corporate agribusinesses are the main profiteers of subsidies as they provide the means for keeping production costs low. Subsidies perpetuate a vicious cycle of poverty and resource degradation by encouraging overproduction of crops, soil erosion, increased pesticide use, below-cost prices, and deflated farmer income. Agribusiness benefits from subsidies through the lowering of crop prices, which minimizes their costs and increases their profits.

“The same forces that are working against farmers in Africa and El Salvador are working against farmers in Iowa,” Naylor concludes. Due to the poverty and resource degradation cycle, producers are forced to take whatever price commodity buyers offer--limiting farmers’ capacity to define their livelihoods.

Democratizing Global Agriculture

As trade agreements seek to homogenize global agriculture policies and production, Via Campesina--a global network of farmers with as many as 200 million members--is calling for local policies and diversified production models. They are making farming communities’ needs central to agricultural policies and providing a much-needed reality check to U.S. and European Union trade negotiators.

Via Campesina has begun to carve out a new policy space in global agricultural politics for “food sovereignty.” The concept of food sovereignty is gaining political and social leverage as proposals like the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) continue to threaten the ability of family farmers in both the North and the South to determine how food will be produced and who will make food production decisions. Via Campesina’s members believe in “the peoples’, Countries’, or State Unions’ RIGHT (sic) to define their agricultural and food policy, without any dumping vis-à-vis third countries.”4

Inserting food sovereignty into current agricultural trade and policy debates reframes them to approach national resources from a human rights approach rather than an economic one. The human right to essential resources is not a new concept. Several United Nations treaties already recognize the right to food, and traditional community rights over biodiversity are supported by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.

With food sovereignty, the rights-based approach to international dialogue has resulted in new alliances between the global North and South, such as the alliance between U.S. farmer groups like the NFFC and peasant farming organizations in Central and South America . The food sovereignty fight is a multinational farmers’ struggle against corporate agribusiness and the national and international policies that support them.

Rather than focusing on limiting subsidies, NFFC explains that the poverty and resource degradation cycle could be controlled by:

1) Increasing global commodity prices through price supports;

2) Maintaining reserves of excess production to be used in times of need (e.g., drought) and as a means of maintaining steady commodity prices; and

3) Stopping production of a given commodity when there is an oversupply.

To implement these measures requires the right to prevent foreign imports from flooding national and local agricultural markets and reigning in corporate influence on the market. Cultivating local control begins with solidifying basic rights: rights to land and water and rights to political and social capital for marginalized communities.

Signs of Change

Despite the refusal of U.S. leadership to acknowledge that democratic, grassroots approaches to development are popularly supported world-wide, this model is gaining considerable ground. Every day, the Landless Peoples’ Movement in Brazil gains access to land necessary for community self-sufficiency and demonstrates that local control of vital resources is more environmentally and economically sustainable. Other movements-- from local food networks in the U.S. , to cross-border agro-ecological collaborations in Central America-- are formulating their own community-based development models.

Via Campesina is changing the language of agricultural trade from a language of corporatization to a language of farmers’ rights and local sovereignty. This resistance to corporate agriculture is the basis of hope for rural communities around the world.

Corrina Steward is a resource rights specialists at Grassroots International in Boston, MA. She wrote this commentary for Foreign Policy In Focus. For more information on social movements working on food sovereignty and the Resource Rights for All initiative, go to: www.grassrootsonline.org.

Endnotes

Bove’s comments are taken from a talk on “Food Sovereignty and Resource Rights” at Grassroots International in Boston, MA on March 7, 2005.

Smaller, C. 2005. Planting the Rights Seed: A Human Rights Perspective on Agricultural Trade and the WTO. Backgrounder No. 1, THREAD Series, IATP: Minneapolis , MN .

Naylor’s comments are taken from a talk on “Food Sovereignty and Resource Rights” at Grassroots International in Boston, MA on March 7, 2005.

Via Campesina. 2003. What is Food Sovereignty? http://www.viacampesina.org/IMG/_article_PDF/article_216.pdf

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Editor's comment: Corrina Steward does a fairly good representation here in outlining the problem of corporate agribusiness.

We might add that this also includes companies such as the GMO seed producer Monsanto plus others, and must necessarily also include the chemical companies which produce herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers. And also Archer Daniels Midland which has taken controll of the ethanol production and related government subsidies. Butanol is a much better alcohol fuel and would benefit farmers and many others much more.

What she fails to grasp completely, and misidentifies as another form of globalism, is the nationalism that is apparent in the so-called "global social movement" which is, as she puts it, "calling for community sovereignty."

We will make a clarification here that is so very important; several clarifications. To do this we must have clear definitions of globalism and nationalism.

For this we take an excerpt from our home page. In the following excerpt, we define both nationalism and internationalism. Internationalists are, of course, globalists.

PATRIOTISM AND NATIONALISM vs. INTERNATIONALISM
Our thanks to the staff of American Free Press for the following excerpts from their editorial as it appeared in Vol. 1, No. 14, November 26, 2001.

“In the book, Populism vs. Plutocracy, published by the assassinated patriotic and nationalist organization, Liberty Lobby, the following definition of nationalism appears on page 275:

NATIONALISM. Populists are nationalists and patriots, but do not blindly “rally round the flag,” locking in step with the whims of the plutocratic elite that has manipulated patriotism for its own baleful aims. True nationalists believe in developing and strengthening their nation from within, maintaining the integrity of its cultural heritage and historic sovereign borders and they place their own nation’s interests first. They do not start wars of imperialism and respect the national instincts of others. The plutocrats condemn nationalism precisely because it interferes with their aim to submerge all nations into a Global Plantation under their domination. Nationalists around the globe increasingly understand this menace.

That doesn’t sound bad at all. In fact, it’s downright attractive to the editors of this newspaper and probably to you too.”

Now, if you don’t think it sounds good, then you must be an internationalist. The editorial states further, “That term, too, is defined in this book. See page 273 and read the definition of that term:

INTERNATIONALISM. A hope of naïve idealists that the eradication of all national and racial borders will usher in world peace in which everyone will live happily ever after. Internationalism has been a dream of poets and religious leaders for millennia. In actual application, however, internationalism can only produce mass confusion and tension, anarchy and violence. Internationalists are used by plutocrats, who finance their activities, to break down national boundaries and promote multiculturalism, an essential step to complete their conquest of the world and the formal erection of their world super state, the Global Plantation.

And how does this relate to “patriotism”? We continue again from the editorial, “…patriotism and nationalism are very different…they’re opposites. Patriotism is an emotion. All sorts of people can be patriots — or imagine themselves to be.

“On the other hand, nationalism is a philosophy, nothing emotional about it. It is a recipe, a concrete plan.

“The only alternative to nationalism is internationalism. If you’re not one, you must be the other. If you’re not a nationalist, you must be an internationalist, and vice versa.

“If you’re not a nationalist you have to be a “citizen of the world” — an internationalist.”

Indeed, long after the folly of the internationalists and their global transnational capitalism has been dismantled, there will still exist simple capitalism, not necessarily the industrial capitalism spoken of in the foregoing article.

People will always need basics of survival such as food, clothing, shelter and other necessities. Thus, there will always be simple capitalism. It is the modern fascist form of supercapitalism embodied in the form of the transnational corporations that is bleeding the wealth of the peole nd destroying prosperity.

To see why globalism and unrestrained international capitalism is nothing short of suicidal for the future of the economic well being of the entire world we must get a clear picture of The Nature of Wealth (online book).

Hopefully you have all strapped on your thinking caps, though it seems that the only group who might have a problem with that are the institutional economists who have been brainwashed into believing the myth of Keynesian economics, specifically, that we can gain prosperity with deficit spending. The lie is exposed since in America we borrow $2.16 to produce each $1.00 in GDP. Charles Walters explains,

"When confronted with the truth of NORM's (National Organization for Raw Materials) data, these politicians and academics swallow hard and follow with the great intellectual response, "Yes, but things have changed, the old rules no longer hold. Yes, but America has become a service economy. Yes, but we live in a global economy. Yes, but with space satellites and the Internet, we communicate with the world at will so we can create wealth by human will". They laugh when we suggest this codified opulence rests on the laws of energy and thermodynamics and a nation's willingness to apply these laws to its economic system. The mere suggestion that irrefutable economic laws govern our economy and consistently yield certain overall ratios of cost to income and savings bring think tanks up fighting from their chairs, even though the entire apparatus of organized society is governed by these same laws."

And organizations such as National Family Farmer Coalition (NFFC) still maintain that there should be price supports when the Private Enterprise System has the ability to regulate prices in the following manner: production times price equals income. That is, parity equals cost of production plus a living wage to farmers. This is the mechanism that will set the prices, and government only needs to affirm it, not support it in any way other than to set the guidelines for determining parity. Charles Walters states further,

"Therefore, when the total annual production of goods and services flow through the economy at their 100% natural par value, (the intrinsic value rather than the perceived value of a product or service), then sufficient income is created along the way to distribute and consume those same products and services every year without creating excessive debt in the process. Thus a failure within the pricing system at the raw materials stage of production is especially harmful because it is duplicated each time the raw material flows through another stage of the economy."

Parity to raw material producers is the impetus that drives the economic engine of the nation. And it will do it without creating debt since it is all earned income and none of it is siphoned off the pay the usury of the banksters.

Every dollar spent by a farmer produces a seven times (1 to 7) trade turn in the economy. That means for every dollar a farmer spends it creates seven more dollars further along in the economic cycle. For other raw material producers it is a one to five trade turn.

Truly, the deadliest enemy of a free society has been the demise of independent (private) enterprise and the family farm. This is the final curtain for the most dramatic social experiment in history: the American Dream.

There is a way to stop it — the construction of an economy operating in tune with the laws of physics.

For more information on how U.S. prosperity and the economy has been betrayed by corporate interests see the book by Charles Walters, UNFORGIVEN, The American Economic System SOLD for Debt and War.

And also study The Nature of Wealth (online book), by the National Organization for Raw Materials (NORM) above for much more information on this vital subject.