To our brothers and sisters of the countryside,
To our elected representatives,
To all people of good will.
Confrontations between governments and civil society groups around the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) show that agriculture is at the forefront of globalization struggles. This is not surprising: agriculture is a critical issue for any nation concerned about food security, the livelihood and well-being of rural people, and long-term impacts on soil and water resources.
Given the economic power of the United States, this country plays a decisive role in resolving global issues of agriculture and trade. Therefore, American citizens can call into question the approach taken by our elected officials and trade representatives.
The Bush Administration has taken an aggressive approach to knocking down trade barriers, even as government subsidies to large farms contribute to the unfairness of global trade. Their unabashed belief that an unfettered global market and increased trade will lead to prosperity for all ignores the built-in disparities that favor transnational corporate interests over local communities and vulnerable groups.
A counter belief based on social justice and the common good calls the faithful to stand up and sort through the mixed blessings of market forces and global trade. The faith community needs to raise serious questions about hunger and health, the dignity of farmers, access to land, farmworker rights and environmental stewardship.
Agriculture is certain to be ignored in the 2004 election campaign – unless local communities across the country demand attention to farm, food and social justice issues. Both rural producers and urban consumers need to hold accountable those who would lead us and act in our name.
________
|
"If we continue to view the countryside exclusively in market
terms, we cannot expect anything less than increased poverty,
destruction of rural culture, greater out-migration, and worse
yet, a spiral of violence and death which is completely inconsistent
with God's plan for a life of dignity and justice for all His sons
and daughters."
Mexican Bishops of the Episcopal Commission for Social Action, Jan. 2003
|
Refrains from Mexico
The National Catholic Rural Life Conference has become increasingly involved in trade issues at various levels. In October, we joined with Catholic Relief Services and the Mexican Bishops Conference to sponsor a forum for U.S. and Mexican farmers. That forum was a step towards a convergence among farmers and rural advocates on both sides of the border to understand and confront the perverse forms of globalization. These are not anti-trade anarchists who massed together to discuss common oppressions, but farmers, journalists and social scientists who have experienced or observed the consequences personally and on their people of corporate-controlled trade and resource-extracting "investments".
NCRLC representatives also attended the ministerial meetings of World Trade Organization in Cancun this September, joining other accredited non-governmental organizations in witnessing and analyzing the play of governmental trade negotiations. These negotiations ended without any consensus, the second time in five such ministerial meetings, due to hardening disputes between nations of the South and industrialized nations of the North, primarily the U.S. and the E.U.
It is plain to say that poor nations of the global South are primarily agricultural producers. What is less clear is that they are not poor because they are primarily agricultural producers. Instead, decades of industrialization and foreign investments – carried out in the name of "development" – have led to an extraction of wealth from their countries. They are now pressed to open their markets to agricultural trade so that their last vestiges of sovereignty are given away to the calculations of corporate boardrooms. Transnational corporations assure government officials that food security is better served by such a system, even as nations of the North continue to heavily subsidize their agricultural producers for the same purpose: food security.
Last year’s U.S. Farm Bill, with the support of the Administration, locked in crop subsidies to provide more than $100 billion to commodity producers over the next 10 years. These are mainly for the "big five" commodities: corn, soybeans, rice, wheat and cotton. These are food and fiber staples that the world needs, and that farmers around the world can grow, if given the chance, for their own economic benefit and that of their nations. According to recent estimates, wealthy nations of the North give six times as much money in subsidies to their own farmers as they gave in total foreign aid to poor countries. To say that the U.S. farmer feeds the world can be called into question. We may in fact be creating the causes of hunger, and that is a grave social injustice.
Raising a political issue
If agriculture and trade policies are raised in the U.S. election campaign, the American public can begin to reclaim their moral standing in the world. The debate will be muddied, no doubt, by politicians of the American South and the Midwest who will claim that subsidies are a necessary response to the needs of U.S. farmers. While vulnerable farmers and their rural communities do require the support of government programs, the distribution and amounts of subsidies needs to be challenged. The vast majority of farm subsidies go to huge farms, which in turn churn out cheap grains for agribusiness. When poor nations are forced to reduce protections and open their markets, the small farmers of the Third World are put into direct competition with U.S. and European agribusinesses bloated with highly subsidized grains.
What evidence is there to substantiate this cause and effect? The Mexican farmers who visited Iowa last month said that tens of thousands of families lost their farms in Mexico after NAFTA came into effect ten years ago. The evidence is also showing that nations throughout Africa and Latin America, where populations are rural and most farms are small, face a similar social nightmare unless something is done to eliminate injustices in the global agri-food system.
Beyond cutting subsidies to huge commodity producers, the other challenge is to curb the power of agribusiness corporations in the processing and distribution of agricultural goods. During the coming election year, faith communities need to ask political candidates to develop proposals that will protect family farmers around the world and will ultimately build ties of solidarity among the world’s people. Otherwise, it’s a system of domination that will hang over us all.
What evidence do we have of this? There is no doubt that the major demand in world trade talks is for a more liberalized system of trade and foreign investments. This is certainly argued by the U.S. and other industrialized nations with a surplus of agricultural goods to export. The central message we heard at the WTO meetings in Cancun and now hear at the FTAA meetings in Miami is clear: market forces rather than government policies should regulate the international food system and national farm policies.
However, with four grain corporations controlling over 80% of world cereals trade, is not this language of "free trade" misleading? For the United States, 82% of corn exports and 65% of soybean exports are controlled by three agribusiness firms: Cargill, ADM and Zen Noh (a part of Mitsubishi).
Reclaiming a moral standard
Farmers have figured out that they are not going to export their way to prosperity, or for that matter to break even. The dwindling share of government subsidies that make it to small- and medium-sized farmers help to cover costs of production. Only the very big are getting bigger and richer, while the rest are barely hanging on.
In response to these troubling disparities in the global agri-food system, the U.S. Bishops have written a Catholic reflection on food, farmers and farmworkers. The Bishops’ Conference affirms that suppressive concentration and growing globalization of agriculture are having the effect of pushing some ahead and leaving others behind.
The Bishops state that market concentration and globalization "are pushing us toward a nation and world where the powerful can take advantage of the weak, where large institutions can overwhelm smaller structures, and where the production, marketing and distribution of food and the protection land lie in fewer hands."
A transfer of authority from governments to corporate traders, whose activity is guided by the profit motive, is the overriding goal of market liberalization. The NCRLC rejects this objective on ethical grounds. We do not believe either that such liberalization will resolve the problem of industrialized over-production, or that it will address the wider social, ecological and economic issues which are raised by globalization.
Emphasis on overseas markets continues to strain our natural resource base and undermines the efforts of other countries in attaining food security and feeding their own people. This is true now as it was more than a decade ago when the European Ecumenical Organisation for Development stated:
________
|
"As Christians we cannot accept that the most basic right of the human community,
the right to food, or our collective responsibility to prevent hunger, should be
subordinated to what the U.S. Catholic Bishops have called ‘the arithmetic of the
market place’ and corporate interests."
(What Option for the Poor?, 1990)
|
Roads to rural security
Along with our partners in sustainable agriculture and community food security, NCRLC advocates for a farming system based upon appropriate levels of output and environmentally sustainable forms of production. Otherwise, we are locked into a cartel system based upon production for its own sake and the exploitation of foreign markets. In order for this goal to be realized, politicians and trade representatives will need to recognize the legitimacy of a wide range of government policies designed to subordinate narrow economic principles to broader objectives of the common good.
To this end, NCRLC will sponsor a workshop on understanding international trade and searching for roads to rural security next February in Washington, DC during the annual Catholic Social Ministry Gathering. This workshop will look at key issues surrounding global and regional trade negotiations in respect to food security and sovereignty. The teachings of the Church on trade and development as these relate to agriculture and food will be examined and applied. Participants will outline a vision of a just and beneficial system of international trade that enhances rather than displaces local food systems. We will reclaim moral standards and, true to our tradition, lay new roads for rural security.