Agribusiness: Farming Subsidies Destroy Food Security
CategoriesThe European "Common Agricultural Policy" and its related monster, US grain and meat export subsidies, have been a cancer on our food production pathways, eating into food quality by stimulating industrial scale production that depletes the earth's mineral wealth. Even more importantly, these policies are driving large numbers of our small farmers off their farms which have, for thousands of years, been the mainstay of food production and have provided relative food security. Today, farmers are paid either to NOT produce, or are given subsidies even when overall production of a commodity, like milk, exceeds demand.
Foods get imported and exported for no other reason than to obtain the subsidies - often one country imports a similar amount of produce as it exports. Transport costs and subsidies are wasted for no result other than enriching those on the top of the food chain. Small farmers in Europe and the US do not qualify for the subsidies that are largely reserved for the big producers. As a consequence, many of them move into the cities and try to find other jobs.
And even more importantly, the farmers of developing nations suffer because they cannot compete with highly subsidized imports from Europe and the US. This makes a mockery out of our "foreign aid", often linked with conditions to buy so much grain or rice from the "donor" country. Aid has been accused of ruining the economy of the poorest developing nations by creating debts that have become an almost insurmountable barrier to economic development.
The World Trade Organization and the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization are not helping to re-balance things. Indeed they are beholden to huge financial and industrial interests. It seems that free trade has been given the status of a sacrosanct principle - but only as long as the direction of trade is from the rich to the poor countries. The subsidies make sure of that, as well as the rules worked out in international Committees and Commissions such as the Codex Alimentarius, which only days ago passed guidelines for supplements that favor big business and free trade over small producers and over people's health.
ISIS Org's Rhea Gala describes the agricultural disaster-in-waiting in her recent article "Agriculture without Farmers". The Institute of Science in Society is organizing a conference to discuss what to do. The Sustainable World International Conference will take place on 14 and 15 July in Westminster, London (see program here).
See the article here...
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Agriculture without Farmers
The WTO and EU agricultural policies are sweeping farmers off the land in droves and threatening world food security. Rhea Gala
The full paper with references is posted on ISIS members’ website. Details here
Farming has evolved over thousands of years with the farm as the basic unit of local community and culture. Its practice was shaped everywhere by geography and the creative skills of the farmer to be optimally productive. Since the arrival of the tractor and the industrial ‘green revolution’ of the 1940s, small family farms have lost out to big industrial farms, and much of the local knowledge accumulated over the millennia has disappeared
Trade policies benefit agribusiness: Small farmers everywhere are impoverished
In industrialized countries like the UK where the population is largely urban, 200 000 farms have disappeared between 1966 and 1995. The annual UK Common Agricultural Policy budget of £3bn gives 20 percent of farmers (large agribusinesses) 80 percent of subsidies. Government figures show that 17 000 farmers and farm-workers left the land in the year 2003, having failed to make a living.
While only 5 percent of the population in the European Union (EU) are still farming, at least half a million farm-workers were still leaving the land annually before the EU was enlarged by 15 new members in May 2004. It is now likely that Poland alone will lose up to two million agricultural livelihoods as a result of joining the EU. EU figures suggest that half of north European agriculture will disappear within a generation, as it continues to be squeezed out by the institutions that claim to give it support.
In the US, between 1950 and 1999, the number of farms decreased by 64 percent to less than two million, and farm population has declined to less than 2 percent. Ninety percent of agricultural output is produced by only 522 000 farms. Canadian statistics similarly reveal that farm numbers have decreased by 10 percent between the 1996 census and 2001; there were less than 247 000 farms in the country in 2001.
This relentless process of consolidation drives the heart out of the countryside, causing social and economic decay, and replaces it with an intensive industry that cares nothing about plant or animal diversity, quality or compassion in farming, but is solely interested in bringing down prices.
‘Free trade’ policies made by and for the rich countries of the North not only destroy the livelihood of small-farmers at home, they also encourage the dumping of subsidized goods (selling at less than the cost of production) from the North onto the markets of the poor South, distorting local markets, and leaving farmers in developing countries also unable to compete.
This has become a global scandal, as 75 percent of the population in China, 77 percent in Kenya, 67 percent in India, and 82 percent in Senegal still depend on farming for their living. These numbers are plummeting, however, as families dispossessed of their land are driven to the cities, where they may find themselves unable to afford to pay for the food they used to grow.
Agribusiness degrades the environment while governments do nothing
‘Free trade’ policies of World Trade Organization (WTO) promote overproduction of agricultural commodities causing damage to wildlife depleting soil, water, and fossil fuels; and at the same time compromising food quality, with substantial repercussions on public health. They also greatly exacerbate global warming in many ways, not least the millions of unnecessary food-miles added to agricultural commodities. Professor Jules Pretty of Essex University estimated that the total external costs for conventional agriculture in the UK, paid for by the taxpayer, added up to £2.34bn for the year 1996.
The UK government remains a chief obstacle in the fight against international poverty and environmental degradation, despite its seemingly green credentials on climate change, and its recent high profile in tackling poverty in Africa. That is because the UK continues to espouse an economic model that promotes privatisation and trade liberalisation as the key to reducing poverty and protecting the environment, although that model has proved to have the opposite effects. The UK has been at the forefront of EU efforts to push through an aggressive ‘free trade’ agenda at the WTO.
Transnational corporations (TNCs) have been allowed to gain control of supply chains and exert a stranglehold on global food security through a process of ownership of seed, proprietary chemicals, and other inputs, as well as virtual monopoly of food processing and retail outlets. Yet our governments are refusing to rein in the increasing power of TNCs that have been swallowing each other up until only a handful remain.
The Agreement on Agriculture of the WTO and the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union are largely responsible for precipitating this global catastrophe in our food production system.
The Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union
When the EU introduced the CAP in the early 1960s, it struck a deal with the US under the framework of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) negotiations. The US accepted the new border protection mechanisms put in place by the EU for food, in return for a commitment by the EU to allow unlimited import of feedstuffs from the US at zero tariff. The EU agreed because it was still a net importer of food and feedstuffs; but only 15 years later, the EU itself was producing large surpluses of grain and animal products as a direct result of this deal.
The zero tariff for feedstuffs enabled Europe’s huge surpluses of the 1970s to be dumped on developing countries, creating a major global problem. Feedstuff imports from the US had led directly to the industrialization of animal production in the EU and its associated environmental problems.
The CAP, which aimed to "ensure a fair standard of living for the agricultural community", has for many years provided direct aid to farmers based on area, production, and number of livestock units (animals). This policy gave large monocultural farms enormous subsidies, caused massive overproduction that lowered prices, drove small farmers out, and consolidated the power of agribusiness. TNCs have become vast selling seed, pesticide, machinery etc to farmers at great profit, buying produce at below the costs to farmers, and selling it on to consumers on a huge scale and at enormous profit.
The CAP reform of 2003 introduces a new system of single farm payments that ‘decouples’ the link between support and production. It comes into force in 2005-6 except for new member states, and its s
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