Cancun, Monday morning, September 15th
by Br. David Andrews

Yesterday afternoon, Sunday, September 14 -- feast of Santa Maria, wife of Saint Isidore, patron of farmers and the NCRLC -- proved to be the undoing of the WTO in Cancun. I attended the WTO NGO briefing at 2:00 pm in the afternoon, one that had been delayed since 9:30 am, and found that there was little the briefers had to tell. We could appreciate that the Group of 21, leaders of the developing world block, led by Brazil and India, was holding out against the EU and US. The issues being discussed were the so called "new issues" or the Singapore issues, not the problematic farm debate. These were four issues: transparency in government procurement, investment, competition policy and trade facilitation.

The large scale liberalization of trade in national and local economies in these areas would force developing countries to relinquish many of the economic development tools that industrialized countries used to build their economies and create or hold onto jobs. The WTO foundered on the Singapore Issues, so identified from the 1996 Singapore Ministerial Conference. Just consider the investment issue: the direction proposed by USA and EU was to expand the existent multilateral agreement on investment policy TRIMS, which elaborated on existing GATT provisions prohibiting government requirements TO PURCHASE INPUTS LOCALLY OR TO SELL THEIR OUTPUT DOMESTICALLY RATHER THAN EXPORTING IT. Thus, an export economy was favored by treaty over local development or a local economy. The standard of living of local communities were placed on a less important scale of values than the export profits from local resource extraction.

The current law or agreement on investment depends upon bilateral agreements through government-to-government contacts rather than to multilateral frameworks. Currently there are 2,100 such bilateral agreements. In Doha in 2001, a case was made for constructing a multilateral framework to secure transparent, long term, stable and predictable cross border investment, particularly for long term investment. The developing countries wanted to incorporate a development dimension into any prospective agreement. In the mid-1990s the OECD proposed a multilateral agreement on investment MAI, at the WTO the explicit agreement was that this had no place in the current negotiations. But of course it is the same principle.

In the 1940s, the NCRLC published the results of a study on corporate farms and family farms in California which found that the corporations acted as the GATT agreement suggests, no local inputs, no local or domestic circulation of benefits. All was focused on profits and internal well-being of the corporation. Since the 1970s, the NCRLC has promoted and supported the anti-corporate farming laws in the Midwest and local control provisions. This is substantiated by recurrent research that such provisions support local communities and local economies. Foreign direct investments tend to support resource extraction industries, not local or domestic development; there is no corporate responsibility to local economies.

For these reasons, whether at home or abroad, these types of economic schemes deserve to be opposed both by developing countries and by local communities in the North, including the heartland of America. You can read about the growing poverty in agricultural communities by looking at the Center of Rural Affairs new report entitled "Swept Away". Also, you can find points of significant agreement in the US and countries of the South by attending NCRLC's Bi-National Farmers Forum on October 13th in Des Moines, Iowa (visit our website www.ncrlc.com). At this full-day forum, Mexican and US farmers, journalists, and scholars will compare impacts of agricultural trade on their sectors. No doubt common experiences and concerns will be made evident.

Best wishes to all, and thanks for reading our dispatches. Watch for more in the future as we at NCRLC attend a meeting on trade in Mexico City at the end of this month with the Mexican bishops. Also stay tuned to our farmers forum in October and as we prepare for the Free Trade Area of the Americas ministerial in Miami at the end of November. By way of preparation too, you might consider attending our national meeting in Albany, New York November 7 and 8, "Rural Life Change and Challenge". Also around that time, the US Bishops should be issuing a national statement on agriculture issues. NCRLC has been a consultant on that over the last three years. So, we've got a lot on our plates, stay tuned to www.ncrlc.com.

In peace, Brother Dave