Chicago Tribune | By Hugh Dellios and Andy Martin | September 14, 2003
CANCUN, Mexico -- Hilario Kauich Canul plants corn each year on land his family has farmed near the Caribbean coast since Mayan times. But now he doesn't understand why the local cooperative won't buy his product anymore.
"I can only sell house to house," Kauich said, holding up a protest sign in Cancun last week.
His lament is one of many at the World Trade Organization talks in the resort city, but it echoes those of George Naylor, an Iowa soybean farmer who feels trapped into accepting U.S. agricultural subsidies, and Lee Kyung Hae, the South Korean rice farmer who committed suicide in front of Mexican riot police Wednesday.
The three planters came to Cancun with thousands of others last week to criticize imbalances and distortions of the world's agricultural trade practices, which they said are designed to benefit big corporations at the expense of millions of small-scale farmers around the globe.
Friction over policies
While the trade negotiations have pitted Europe, the United States and other rich nations against the developing world, they also have become a faceoff between big farmers and small, many within the same countries, including the U.S.
"Our agricultural policy is not good for the U.S. and not good for the people of the U.S.," said Naylor, the president of the American Family Farm Association, whose family has farmed 470 acres in Iowa since 1919. "Does it make sense to export our crops for less than it costs to make them?"
Negotiators at the summit got their first look Saturday at a draft of a declaration that drew criticism from just about everyone who read it. Developing countries complained that it catered to rich nations such as the United States, U.S. congressional leaders complained that it wasn't tough enough on the Europeans, and the Europeans said they also had "big problems" with portions of the text.
With just one more day scheduled in the Cancun talks, the key stumbling blocks in the remaining hours were likely to involve the extent to which nations would be required to cut agricultural subsidies and tariffs and the so-called new issues of investment, competition, government procurement and trade facilitation, which many developing nations have refused to address.
The 146 member nations of the WTO came to the trade summit in hopes of paving the way for a global free-trade deal by 2005, which supporters say will deliver benefits to millions of producers and consumers.
Farmers have been at the center of the protests. They say the plight of millions, including their families, has been ignored as the U.S. and others pressure the world to adopt the abstract ideal of free trade.
Thousands march
At a march Saturday, several thousand protesters with ropes and wire cutters tore through a fence that police had erected to keep them away from the conference center.
In response to the protests, U.S. officials say the slow disappearance of small-scale farmers is attributable to advances in technology and efficiency, not trade policies.
"It's a natural process of economic development for these small farms to become fewer in number and larger in size," said J.B. Penn, undersecretary for farm and foreign agriculture services in the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
But across town from the WTO convention center, critics and protesters have held a weeklong series of seminars decrying U.S. agriculture policies as distorting global markets and hurrying the extinction of small farmers worldwide with a lot of suffering along the way.
On Thursday, a University of Tennessee professor argued in a presentation titled "Rethinking U.S. Agricultural Policy" that federal farm policies since 1996 have led to a collapse in global grain prices that has hurt small farmers worldwide, without being reflected in lower prices for consumers.
One result is that farmers in Mexico and elsewhere cannot compete against more efficiently produced and government-subsidized exports of U.S. corn, while at the same time, those developing nations are being encouraged to drop trade protections for their farmers.
"There is no question that the U.S. is exporting poverty," said Daniel de la Torre Ugarte, a Tennessee professor who is originally from Peru.
A report by Oxfam last year blamed the plight of millions of Mexican corn farmers on the speed with which their country dropped barriers to U.S. corn under the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement.
Since then, corn prices for Mexico's 15 million farmers have dropped more than 50 percent, while the price of tortillas made from the corn has risen 150 percent, the Oxfam report said.
Hauntingly similar problems are included in a pamphlet that Lee 56, handed to reporters Wednesday before the farmers march where he scaled a fence and then plunged a knife into his heart.
Like Mexico, South Korea has benefited in some areas from free-trade policies. But Lee described a tragic spiral of surplus produce, cheap imports and a fourfold drop in income that left many Korean farmers desperate.
He wrote of another farmer "who abandoned his life by drinking a toxic chemical."
Naylor, the Iowa farmer, said the U.S.-led policies are driving many small American farmers out of business, while keeping others afloat artificially. Recent statistics seem to support his claims.
An analysis by the not-for-profit Environmental Working Group found that the top 10 percent of recipients receive 71 percent of all U.S. farm subsidies.
Government statistics show that the number of farms decreased between 1992 and 1995 from 1,925,300 to 1,911,859. The figures also reveal the number of farms with more than $100,000 in sales increased from 333,865 to 345,988.
With the shouts and drumbeats of protesters all around him, Naylor argued that the U.S. should reinstate the price floors eliminated in the 1996 Farm Bill, which allowed big agriculture corporations to buy up corn and soybeans dirt cheap but increased subsidies to keep small farmers going.
$12 billion in subsidies
A farm bill signed by President Bush last year put the total number of U.S. farm subsidies at more than $12 billion a year, although that was down from an average of about $20 billion each of the three previous years.
"If they said no more subsidies, all farmers would be out of business next year, because not one dollar would be lent to them [by the banks]," Naylor said.
"My dad always said he hoped I would get a college education but that if I wanted to come back home that was fine with him because farming is the finest profession there is," Naylor said.
"The romance is gone out of farming now."Chicago Tribune:
