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12/15/2005:

"WTO: ‘Importing Food is Importing Unemployment'"

...a vast majority of the developing countries, whether in Latin America, Africa or Asia have, in the first 10 years of WTO, turned into food importers. Millions of farmers have lost their livelihoods as a result of cheaper imports.

If the WTO has its way, and the developing countries fail to understand the politics that drives the agriculture trade agenda, the world will soon have two kinds of agriculture systems -- the rich countries producing staple foods for the world's 6 billion plus people, and developing countries growing cash crops like tomatoes, cut flowers, peas, sunflowers, strawberries and vegetables.

This is what happened in many of the Latin American countries that were forced to dismantle food security and diversify to cash crops as part of the conditionality that came along with structural adjustment loans. The same strategy is now being legitimized for the rest of the world under the legal framework of the WTO.

As the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have repeatedly emphasized, the dollars that developing countries earn from exporting these crops will eventually be used to buy food grains from the developed nations -- in reality, passing the reins of food security back into the hands of rich countries.

For India, a major farming country, that would mean going back to the days of a ‘ship-to-mouth' existence before it struggled to achieve food self-sufficiency on the backs of hundreds of millions of small farmers.

It is the livelihoods of these farmers, as well as the food security of the people they fed for decades, that is at stake at Hong Kong.
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