http://www.cjonline.com/stories/121203/opi_farmers.shtml

Washington no friend of farmers

  By George Naylor and Wenonah Hauter
MinutemanMedia.org

 This year, the efforts of farmers, consumers, and fair trade activists
to protest unfair trade policies have had dramatic results. In November,
meetings held in Miami to negotiate the Free Trade Area of the Americas
(FTAA) ended early, and in September, negotiations of the World Trade
Organization (WTO), held in Cancun, broke down.

These developments may be a turning point in the struggle to protect
our food system from corporate takeover. By refusing to compromise, the
developing countries played David to the corporate Goliaths who dictate
the trade agenda of the United States and European Union.

Far-reaching agricultural trade policies and low commodity prices are
already battering farmers around the world. In just under a decade, the
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has driven millions of
family farms to extinction. In recent years, prices for corn and
soybeans in the United States have been lower than in 1978. Since 1994,
close to one million Mexican farmers have been displaced, uprooting
rural residents who then move to large cities and the United States
looking for work.

The blame for low prices is often assigned to the subsidies given to
U.S. farmers. Cheap U.S. grain unfairly floods other countries and
destroys their rural economies. Therefore, the argument goes, getting
rid of subsidies would make the price of grain rise. While the use of
subsidies is hypocritical and clearly not in the spirit of free trade,
the missing link in the debate is that corporations benefit from the
subsidy system, not farmers.

When farmers are under economic stress from low prices, they do exactly
what corporations want -- they maintain or even increase production,
sparking a downward price spiral. The first U.S. farm program in 1933
solved this by placing a floor under prices, buying crops in times of
abundance to create a food security reserve, and establishing soil
conservation programs to take land out of production. But since the 1996
Freedom to Farm Bill eliminated price floors under basic commodities,
prices have been determined by traders at the Chicago Board of Trade and
other exchanges. This law also eliminated the food security reserve and
conservation set-asides, so every bushel produced must now be dumped on
the market. Thus farmers have no choice but to plant "fencerow to
fencerow."

The elimination of price floors created an enormous amount of
uncertainty in agricultural markets, uncertainty that has been addressed
each year with billions of dollars of direct payments to farmers. In
other words, eliminating price floors has simply allowed the giant food
corporations to pay a very low price for farm commodities, while the
U.S. taxpayer pays for subsidies to keep farmers afloat. In effect,
consumers have financed the industrialization of our food system. It's
corporate welfare in disguise.

While the cheerleaders for free trade claim that their goal is
"efficiency" that will somehow benefit us all, the sad truth is that
free trade agriculture policies pit farmer against farmer, and put the
interests of consumers at the bottom of the list. Because U.S. and WTO
agricultural policies suit the interests of corporate agribusiness, they
allow much of the cost of producing food to be imposed on others
(through government subsidies to make up for low prices, environmental
damage caused by intensive production practices, and low wages paid to
farmers and food workers.) Under such policies, large companies profit
from a "cheap" food supply, while independent family farmers are forced
off the land.

Farmers from around the world are organizing to preserve their food
sovereignty to control their own destiny when it comes to food
production, farm policy and trade; rather than being rolled over by the
corporate-driven WTO and free trade. They first called on the WTO to get
out of agriculture, and now they are demanding the same from the FTAA.
Here in the United States, groups like the National Family Farm
Coalition are calling for an end to the current subsidy system,
restoration of a food security reserve, and a price floor that enables
farmers to earn a fair return from the market, not the taxpayers. This
is how we will achieve a food system that values family farm production,
local food, a countryside with clean air and water, and the right of
family farmers around the world to survive.

George Naylor raises corn and soybeans on his family farm in Churdan,
Iowa. He is president of the National Family Farm Coalition. Wenonah
Hauter is the director of the energy and environment program at Public
Citizen, a national, nonprofit consumer advocacy organization based in
Washington, D.C.

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