NOW Magazine | By Wayne Roberts | October 2-9, 2003
Dorothy and Toto went all the way from Kansas to Cancun to meet the Wizard of the World Trade Organization. They were amazed to discover that the Wizard was all smoke and noise, and that the Wizard had no power other than what they and their uptight and worried friends, like the tin man and the lion who had no courage, granted to the Wizard.
The original Wizard of Oz, few people know, pretended to be a children s story, but was written to inspire the Populist farm revolt coming out of the American Midwest of the late 1800s, when organizers urged farmers to raise less corn and more hell. Perhaps the most radical book ever written in North America, its deep insight into the nature of power provided an accurate prophecy of what could happen to the seemingly all-powerful World Trade Organization as soon as it was confronted.
The WTO dictated the world s food and trade policies for almost a decade. But the collapse of negotiations at its September meetings in Cancun exposed the WTO as having no power except that which the leaders of poor countries gave it. The talks collapsed simply because there was no consensus to proceed.
There is now a leadership vacuum in world food and trade policy such as has not existed since the end of World War 11. Those who positioned themselves as critics of the WTO are now called upon to present their alternatives, not just their complaints. Which perhaps explains why such an eerie silence has followed the collapse of WTO talks at Cancun.
The Cancun meeting had an overly ambitious agenda of cooling out the leaders of poor countries, who d been promised a development round of talks that would deal with their ever-deepening poverty, while advancing the industrialized world s Singapore sling of worldwide privatization of key resources and economic institutions.
Three forces brought this agenda to naught.
First, the WTO lost intellectual and ethical credibility among normally pro-free trade opinion makers in the First World, who reeled at the brazen hypocrisy of demanding that poor countries open their markets to free competition from rich countries, while rich countries protected their markets and subsidized their farm exporters. In a typical year, the wealthy countries in the OECD donated $US 52 billion worth of aid to poor countries, while bankrupting farmers in poor countries by forcing them to compete against farmers bankrolled with $US 311 billion in subsidies.
The New York Times editorialized against the rigged trade game that resulted in harvesting poverty around the world. Canada s Globe and Mail bemoaned the lopsided playing field designed to protect the few from free and open competition that would benefit so many, while the British Guardian set up a kickaas website against agricultural subsidies that robbed poor countries of market share. The United Nations Kofi Annan and the Food and Agricultural Organization, normally staunch defenders of expanding trade, called on rich countries to give the poor a break. Respected international charities such as Oxfam demanded that the WTO make trade fair.
Rights and Democracy, funded by the Canadian government to oversee human rights on the global scene, issued a statement saying that human rights to food and dignity overrode trade.
The second force came from poor countries themselves, backed by leaders of civil society and volunteer groups around the world. Populist presidents of Brazil, Venezuela and Argentina organized a Group of 21 countries, including India and China thereby representing a majority of the world s population and farmers -- which demanded both relief from WTO double standards and open methods of debating future policy.
The alliance with global social activists happened smoothly, in part because Brazil s governments had long sponsored annual anti-globalization social forums giving a warm welcome to leaders of Non-Governmental Organizations, used to getting the cold shoulder from First World governments.
The third force came from the governments of wealthy countries, prepared to see the WTO project collapse rather than concede to an organization where every government had an equal vote. After all, the WTO displaced the UN as the global governing body of choice precisely because the UN was too prone to majority pressure and too tied up with human rights commitments
US representatives came to Cancun already prepared to switch horses midstream and trade with a coalition of the willing who d sign on to bilateral trade agreements modeled on NAFTA. Over half the world s 250 bilateral trade agreements have been adopted during the last decade, while the WTO -- obviously never the only great white hope -- was taking shape.
Picking up the pieces will be challenging.
First, the free trade critique of the WTO s double standards on protection and subsidies dramatically understates the real problem facing the world s two billion farmers. Get ready for more rhetoric about the power of markets and competition to fix the farm crisis, Elbert van Donquersgoed of the Christian Farmers Federation of Ontario warned when word came of Cancun s collapse.
The dirty secret of world food trade, more disgraceful than free trade hypocrisy, is that there s more food in the world than anyone knows what to do with. That s why all governments try to protect against imports or subsidize exports. There s so much abundance or overproduction that the pricepoint veers toward zero. Even if all subsidies were banned, according to a new study released in Cancun by the University of Tennessee-based Agriculture Policy Analysis Centre, the prices farmers receive for food would not go up more than a nickel for a bushel of grain or more than five per cent for meat.
Making it easier or fairer for farmers in poor countries to produce for and sell to wealthy consumers in the First World does little to solve the abundance problem or help the world s 840 million people who go to bed hungry every night, or the 15000 children who die every day from undernourished bodies.
Abundance beckons us to shape a new world food system by retooling it so it meets objectives of human and planetary health rather than trade, and so that it s based on sharing of the plenty, not competition that s as obsolete as scarcity.
"Replacing subsidies that promote overproduction with conservation payments that preserve the quality of the land would allow worthy farmers in rich nations to survive, in a way that would be both less expensive for the taxpayers and less shameful for the farmers, an inspired editorial in the Salt Lake Tribune argued during the Cancun talks. If the focus doesn t change, the rich nations agricultural policies will continue to make people hungry. Which is a very strange thing for an agricultural policy to do.
That is the frightening truth that Dorothy and Toto discovered at Cancun
WHO WE ARE: This e-mail service shares information to help more people discuss crucial policy issues affecting global food security. The service is managed by Amber McNair of the University of Toronto and Wayne Roberts of the Toronto Food Policy Council, in partnership with the Community Food Security Coalition, World Hunger Year, and International Partners for Sustainable Agriculture.NOW Magazine:
