The Oakland Institute - Publications

Don't Dare Despair

Mon, 25 Apr 2005 16:49:36 -0400

by Ravi Rajan*

Americans who read the fine print on the state of the economy, the mismanagement of the Iraq war and the corruption in the White House have every reason to be disappointed with the results of what has been appropriately described as the Apocalyptic Election. The spectre of four more years of the same, and of the escalation on the war on our environment and civil liberties is enough to send a shiver down the spine of any thoughtful citizen who shares the Great American Ideal. Understandably, the seemingly abrupt extinguishing of the candle of hope has produced a wave of despondency. Yet, this, if anything, is time to re-commit, re-group, and galvanize the sheer potency of people power. Given the gravity of the issues that face the nation, the slogan for the moment is simple and compelling – Don’t DARE despair!

A quick glance at some basic ground realities provides a starting point. At the outset, the diverse multitudes that take refuge in the democratic camp are united as perhaps never before. The almost genetic predilection toward chaotic dissent and mutual recrimination caricatured so tellingly by Monty Python in The Life of Brian has mercifully remained unexpressed so far in this election season. Second, despite all the talk about an irrevocably divided nation, the fact remains that in states as varied as North Carolina, Montana and Colorado, the electorate awarded Democrats significant victories in the State legislatures even while looking elsewhere for the national ticket. And let us not forget that barely two electoral cycles ago, Bill Clinton won Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, New Mexico, Tennessee and West Virginia. To talk about a divided nation and write off the South in what was an extremely close and complex election, the outcome of which will take months to fully grasp, is to be needlessly knee-jerk. As the dust settles on Election 2004, pollsters and strategists will doubtless get busy exploring the scope and dimension of every potential and possibility. However, if there is one thing to learn from the Republican success in this election, it is that people power does matter. Indeed, but for the passion and commitment of the rank and file of their diverse coalition, Mr. Bush might well today be riding dust bikes in Crawford. Yes, we in the liberal democratic camp tried hard, and we must congratulate ourselves on this - but let us face it – they did more. Our response, therefore should be sustained activism - not cynical analyses that engender either paralysis or despondency. Everyone of us matters, every little contribution counts. And we dare not despair.

The goals for the democratic camp are obvious. In the short and medium terms, we have to do our best to defeat the White House Oligarchs as they attempt to push through their pet projects. We also need to reclaim lost ground in Congress and the Senate in 2006. It is important here to remind ourselves of what exactly is at stake. Put simply, the War on Terror is guise to wage three other potent and deadly wars– against innocent foreigners, against the poor and elderly at home, and against the environment at home and abroad. The continued offensives in Iraq, like the one currently underway in Fallujah, are illustrations of the first war. By all accounts, such campaigns inflict untold suffering on innocent people. In the process they also increasingly alienate the entire Arab and Islamic world against us, thereby contributing to the growing terrorist litter. An example of the second war is the proposal to dismantle Social Security. This scheme has the potential to wreak havoc on the lives of the millions of middle and lower middle class Americans who toil day and night to fill the coffers of the big corporations. As for the third war, what is more symbolic and material than the Alaska drilling proposal and the recalcitrance over Kyoto? There is work to be done, and most definitely, no time to despair.

The first thing that every one of us has to do to realize these goals is to take the responsibility to ensure that the issues that we all feel are so fundamentally important for our nation and our future, do not disappear into obscurity – but that they frame every political decision contemplated in the next four years. Mr. Bush and his portly deputy have not lost time claim the popular mandate. We, the people, have to make sure that the question of what exactly the mandate is - is highlighted and remains at the fore of the public debate. To this end, we need, first and foremost, to hold the media to task, and ensure that they do not quickly divert attention to some other topic, as is their wont. One way to attempt the seemingly impossible here is to organize a relentless campaign with the media – thousands of letters to editors, phone calls, petition drives, to let the editors know that we care about issues and that we demand serious, investigative reporting. Similar tactics, and also newer ones, such as internet blogging, can be employed with regard to our representatives who will listen if they sense that there is real and tangible public outrage that could potentially upset their re-election chances. It is important to remind ourselves that almost half of the electorate voted against Bush in Election 2004 and that a sizable proportion of the rest chose his ticket in the context of a campaign framed by mind numbing fear. It is therefore very much in the realms of possibility to forge newer coalitions – across party lines, on specific issues, be it Social Security or Alaska oil drilling. It is indeed possible to galvanize people and unite them on the issues that matter tangibly and in real terms. Americans may have differences on cultural matters and on how to fight the War against Terror, but all the opinion polls in the run up to Election 2004 indicated that the country also shares a great many concerns. Our task, as liberal democrats, is to unite the people over these issues by building issue based coalitions – and thereby challenge, or limit the scope of the mandate claimed by Mr. Bush. Those amongst us who are social entrepreneurs need to lead, organize and mobilize. Every one else must join the various groups, participate and pitch in. Those of us on the coasts must reach out to the Heartland, just like our predecessors did in the context of the Civil Rights movement. We have our task cut out, and do not have the luxury to despair.

Whilst we re-group, we will also do well to recognize that for every Redneck who would like to eliminate “towel heads”, there are probably two or more who exercise their franchise in the belief that they are acting morally and justly in keeping with their faith. These genuinely God fearing people can, in principle, be touched by messages that appeal to the gospel. Rather than shy away from the Church, here is an opportunity to invoke the primordial messages of innate goodness that exist at the core of every religion. Rather than fight to keep the Ten Commandments off the City Square or government buildings or courtrooms, here is an opportunity to hold those who scream “religion” to account on their own terms. History is replete with examples of religious institutions acting on behalf of justice and fairness – one need only look at the Civil Rights struggle in the deep South to see several such instances. Then, as now, there are two diametrically opposed interpretations of the scriptures; then as now, there is an opportunity to forge coalitions and messages to enable the side of justice and emancipation to triumph over those of oppression and tyranny. We can choose to let Bush and co. gallop away in to the sunset on their hobbyhorses of patriotism and God. We can equally use moral suasion and religious commandments to show the believers in the Bible belt that Bush and his cronies are perhaps the best illustration yet of the famous Johnson quotation, “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” To do all this implies repairing broken bridges and fixing abandoned roads – and indeed none of this can be done in one day. But again, Rome was not built in a day. We need to act now and think generationally. And if we are really concerned about our country’s future, it is absurd to waste time in a state of despair.

I have every confidence that a combination of Republican hubris and misrule, effective new strategy gleaned from hindsight and some plain old fashioned luck can once again bring the Democrats in to the centre of governance. I am also sure that as we speak there are many politicians plotting and hatching just such comeback schemes. However, while we give them our support, we need to ask whether the goal of all our political energy is to merely bring back the Democratic party. I refer here to the constant refrain about the need to be centrists, and to be in the “mainstream” in order to stand the chances of succeeding in the electoral game. I can indeed appreciate political strategy and can hardly blame politicians who propound “centrism” as the way to displace the far Right. Indeed, politicians can only work within the cultural parameters afforded them by the societies they work in. The question is: What do we want our polity to be? Should politics be based on values or on expediency? The Republicans have, over the past three decades, answered this question clearly and unequivocally and as a result appear consistent and principled, and to some, inspirational. The liberal democratic camp, on the other hand, has consistently compromised. We have been complicit in perpetrating the excesses of globalization, the loss of jobs, and the despoliation of the environment. We are also guilty of tolerating, if not abetting, corporate scams on ordinary people. It was in our watch that a social welfare system that lifted millions of common folk from poverty was thoughtlessly destroyed. And it is a liberal democrat who is the most faithful foreign ally of the Bush regime. The question we all need to ask is: “What do we stand for?” Are we are or we not a coalition that represents the aspirations of common people and stands for justice and equity? Are we or are we not an alliance of people who aspire to the higher ideals of freedom and liberty for all? If the answer to either question is “yes,” then we should not be cowed down by concerns of being on the fringes of mainstream culture. If we are indeed principled, and truly believe the values we profess, our task must be to re-shape our world brick by brick, edifice by edifice, song by song, idea by idea. Let us not forget the far Right were out in the boonies of popular culture but a couple of decades ago. For all our disdain for some of what they stand for, let us recognize their discipline, their organization, and their commitment to a set of core values and principles. Popular culture is not and has never been a static entity. On the contrary, it shaped by blood, sweat, tears, and inspiration. We have our work cut out, and definitely no time to despair.

* Ravi Rajan is an Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. He can be reached at srrajan@sbcglobal.net. The thoughts expressed in this essay represent the views of the author and not that of his employer.

(C) 2004 By The Oakland Institute. All Rights Reserved. Please Obtain Permission to Copy.

Food Fight!

Mon, 25 Apr 2005 16:51:33 -0400

The San Francisco Food Professional Society, October 22, 2004, Commonwealth Club, San Francisco
Keynote Speech, Anuradha Mittal, Director, The Oakland Institute

It is wonderful to be here with my colleagues like Zeke Grader from the Institute For Fisheries Resources & PCFFA, who I believe are leaders in the struggle for an equitable food system. So thank you for your invitation. I am honored to be here with you all.
I want to share what resonates with me when I think of Food. Frances Moore Lappé wrote that Food is personal and political. As a child growing up in India, food was about community, about festivals, and about celebration around harvest times. It was very personal.
Even as school children, I remember my conversations with friends when the monsoons were late and how from a young age we all knew what it would mean for the farmers because those who grew our food were also our neighbors and our family members. We knew where the fields were and we knew what the earth yielded, how it was worked.
Over the last few years something has shifted. There is a growing detachment with food. This past September, I was in India and almost everyday, regional and national newspapers reported farmer suicides. Everyday, tucked away in the back pages, a small article reported that two or three farmers had taken their lives by consuming pesticides. It is estimated that between 1997-2003, almost 25,000 farmers have killed themselves. The numbers have numbed the nation. And yet some of us know that each of these suicides is really a kind of murder for which we can point to the WTO, unfair subsidies, and other far reaching policies whose architects do not farm the fields of Andhra Pradesh, for example.
A few months ago John Hepburn, GE campaigner for Greenpeace Australia-Pacific, and my good friend visited me. We talked lots about food and our work. On his return he sent me an email message about saying Grace before an evening meal. He wrote “in most cases this has been a general ‘give thanks to the lord’, but in some circles it is a heartfelt thank you to the people who make our meals possible. It is an opportunity to appreciate where our food really comes from.”
This started a conversation about what Grace would look like today if we really did appreciate all of the hands that played a part in creating our evening meal? Maybe something like this…
“...We give thanks to Cargill for setting up the grain handling systems and the crushing mills. And the contract haulers and harvesters for getting the grain from the farms into the silos.
We give thanks to the banks for lending farmers the money so that they could buy equipment and finance planting.
We give thanks to the seed merchants for selling the seed.
We give thanks to the chemical companies for manufacturing the pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers.
We give thanks to the petroleum industry for providing raw materials for the chemicals, and for providing fuel for transportation.
We give thanks to neighbors for not complaining too much about spray drift.
We give thanks to the waterways for quietly accepting all of the nutrient and chemical run off.
We give thanks to the atmosphere for dealing with all of the CO2 emissions from the petrochemical use.
We give thanks to the frogs for being Okay with being born with five legs because of Atrazine run-off into their habitat.
We give thanks to the parents of children with leukemia in agricultural areas for not causing riots.
We give thanks to rural communities for being willing to die slow and silent deaths as farmers gradually sell up, and businesses close down.
We give thanks to future generations for subsiding the cost of our food so that we can continue to ship food all over the world in one of the most irrational and wasteful systems ever devised.
We thank those children of our children who will today, and into future, pay the environmental costs of this absurdist routine.”
What’s called ‘modern industrial agriculture,’ driven by the engine of economic globalization, has replaced family farms with corporate farms, farmers with machines, mixed crops with monocultures, and has traded local food security for global commerce. This phenomenon of cold detachment from our food system is best described by Wendell Berry in Fatal Harvest: “One of the primary results – and one of the primary needs- of industrialism is the separation of people, places and products from their histories. To the extent that we participate in the industrial economy, we do not know the histories of our families or habitats or of our meals. This is an economy, and in fact a culture, of the one-night stand. ‘I had a good time,’ says the industrial lover, ‘but don’t ask me my last name.’ The industrial eater says to the svelte industrial hog, ‘We’ll be together at breakfast. I don’t want to see you before then, and I won’t care to remember you afterwards.’ ”
The agricultural system in the United States where Americans depend on profit-driven corporations for 95 percent of their food can only be described as the canary in the mineshaft of the corporate controlled agricultural system.
In the 1930s, 25 percent of the U.S. population lived on the nation’s 6 million farms. Today America’s 2 million farms are home to less than 2 percent of the population. The U.S. Dept of Labor projects that the largest job loss among all occupations between 1998-2008 will be in agriculture. This is not surprising given an average farm-operator household earns only fourteen percent of its income, the rest from off-farm employment. However, these figures pale in comparison to one fact. The number one cause of death for farmers in the U.S. is suicide!
It is the same industrial agriculture, profiting the big agribusiness which has driven food producers both in the U.S. and in India to starvation and death.
This crisis is best exemplified in our state of California, one of the world’s leading agricultural economies. Today California has a higher proportion of corporate farms and a smaller percentage of family farms than the national average with corporate farms accounting for almost half of all farms with a net income of over $500,000! This conversion of our food into commodities and replacement of family farms with corporate farms is evident through food trade in California where more raw farm products are shipped into California than are shipped out, making the state a net importer of food. And while California imports large quantities of raw farm products, 43 percent of the state’s harvest is exported, nearly half of it internationally.
This food trade is truly upside down and backwards given that a large portion of California’s exports are to countries that either produce the same commodities they are importing or could obtain the same product much closer to home. For example, twenty percent of California table grapes are destined for China, when China is the world’s largest producer of table grapes. Half of all exports of California processed tomatoes go to Canada, while the U.S. imports $36 million worth of Canadian processed tomatoes yearly. California exports brussel sprouts to Canada at the same time it imports brussel sprouts from Belgium. New York City ports ship California pistachios worth $70,000 to Italy while importing $50,000 of the same from Italy. Canada is the second most important destination for California cherries, yet each year the U.S. imports $19 million worth of Canadian cherries.
This corporate globalization of food has left its mark on California’s fishing industry as well. In the 1970s the state’s tuna canning industry was among the largest and most profitable in the world. In 1985, California was abandoned in favor of American Samoa and Puerto Rico because of their lower labor costs and less strict environmental regulations. In 2000 only 12% of fish consumed in the state were caught in California. At the same time, almost 75 % of California’s catch is exported to other countries. Since most of the exported fish are less valuable species, the states spends nearly 10 times as much on imprints as it receives from exports.
While economically this makes no sense, this ‘modern’ agriculture also weighs heavily on our lives and our environment. Today per-acre pesticide use in California is almost ten times the national average. Between 1990 and 1995, 38 millions tons of toxic waste were spread as fertilizer on California fields. This chemical based agriculture has damaged 81 percent of the state’s lake area, 75 percent of its estuary and wetland area and 23 percent of its rivers while manure waste from industrial dairy farms threatens the drinking water of 65 percent of Californians
And this does not come without an impact on our social well-being. While consolidating corporate agribusiness’ control over our food system, ‘modern’ agriculture leaves little for farmers, farm workers, and the rural communities that traditionally have nurtured, and been nurtured by small farms and their products. On average, farmers keep only nine cents out of every food dollar. In California, the smallest 50 percent of farms capture less than one percent of the states’ agricultural revenue. Between 1982 and 1997 the total number of farms declined by 10 percent, with the smallest farms declining by 20 percent. Three quarters of farmworkers earn less than $10,000 a year and have the highest rate of malnutrition of any sub-population in the country. Fewer than 10% receive health benefits.
Hunger and food insecurity has increased in the state. Over five million Californians are food insecure with Fresno and Tulare, the country’s leading global food producers, reporting the worst food insecurity. The problem is even worse in low-income neighborhoods and inner city areas which face food redlining. While 3 companies control 57 percent of the huge food retail market in California, food supermarkets chains are redlining inner city areas in favor of more affluent city neighborhoods and suburbs. West Oakland, with 32,000 residents and a 60 percent unemployment rate has only one supermarket compared to 40 liquor and convenience stores. And the price of food in these stores is almost 30 to 100 percent higher than the price in the grocery store. Again, these numbers only begin to convey how these conditions impact on human health and the public welfare in general.
Federal policies have contributed greatly to the decline of our countryside. The crop subsidies farm bills don’t go to farmers who resemble John Steinbeck’s Joad family, but to mega-rich American corporations and wealthy individuals. Most family farms get nothing but a tax bill. In California the biggest farms reap the lion’s share of USDA’s farm subsidies. From 1995 to 2002, the top 1 percent of California recipients took in one quarter of the subsidies, with an average payment of $2.3 million per farm. Most subsidies go to agribusinesses producing monocrops for export: cotton, rice, and to large-scale dairy farmers. Farmers practicing sustainable agriculture and those marketing locally get almost no support.
But any system built upon structural inequities is ultimately unsustainable. It fuels conflict and struggle along the lines of class, gender, and ethnicity, till it consumes itself. Today’s corporate-controlled food system is just such a case.
But do not see this food fight as without hope. I personally have made the decision to fight this fight by looking for reasons to keep on keepin’ on. And I am glad to share my reasons with you with you.
I cannot over emphasize that:
In an open challenge to the corporate take over of our food system, a vibrant food system is growing all over America and California is at the vanguard of that struggle. Hundreds of family farm groups, farm workers, community gardeners, and environmentalists are working to ensure community food security where everyone has a safe, culturally acceptable, nutritional diet through a sustainable food system that ensures community self-reliance and social justice. Farmers’ markets have doubled in the past decade while the burgeoning Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement is helping individuals form a direct relationship with local farms, thus supporting both the farmer and the communities’ needs. Innovative examples such as Peoples’ Grocery and their mobile farmstand subvert the current paradigm by doing the real work of providing low-income communities with viable and nutritious sources of food.
California is the largest organic fruit and vegetable state, producing more than 50 percent of the country’s organic produce. This does face a major threat from genetic contamination caused by genetic engineering. Since the early 1990s, there have been field trials of GE with the biotech industry hoping to commercialize GE crops in California.
Meanwhile, as the Monsanto’s of the world drift and settle across vast territories, people are communities are fighting back and our food, health, and our social networks win when they do. In recent victories, on March 4, 2004, Mendocino County, California set the standard for the rest of the country by becoming the first county to ban the cultivation of GM crops and animals. Soon after, four other countries, Butte, Marin, San Luis Obispo, and Humboldt each submitted enough signatures to put similar measures on the November 2nd ballot. Several other counties including Alameda, Napa and Sonoma have launched similar citizen-led initiatives. Farmer to farmer campaigns are strengthening the farmers movement to take back our food system
Each of these examples—farmers’ markets, CSAs, county level measures, urban gardens, and farm to school programs —are not isolated examples of an alternative or of dissent. These are about change that is taking place on the ground: slowly, organically, and steadily. Its best crop is a new consciousness where we recognize these struggles are the new civil rights movement of the day, which in small and large ways are replacing the industrial food-system with a more sustainable and life-affirming agriculture. And this movement both inspires and is inspired by the international struggles in which similar movements in communities all over the world are reclaiming food, making it personal and assuring their own food sovereignty.
So what is Food Sovereignty?
Food Sovereignty requires that we:
1. Prioritize local, regional, and national needs, based on agriculture that consists of small farmers, indigenous peoples, fisherfolk, and other local communities;
2. Protect local and national markets of basic food stuffs, giving priority to the products of local farmers;
3. Promote and enforce farmer's rights including access to land, water and seed;
4. Promote sustainable peasant agriculture which is more productive and protects our biodiversity.
5. Promote a direct, shared and decentralized relationship between food producers and the rest of the community;
6. Enforce genuine land reform to ensure redistribution of land.
7. And lastly, design a new farm economy which should be the centerpiece of the country’s economic development model.
Yes, another relationship with food is growing around the world which makes our food both personal and political. It is about us knowing where our food comes from. It is moving towards smaller-scale food systems that are localized, diverse, and ecologically-based. It is about food grown in harmony with nature, rather than an industrial food system that treats nature and earth as an obstacle to be overcome.
And this model is economically viable. For example when farmers sell directly to local shops, restaurants or directly to the local community through farmers markets or CSA schemes, farmers can keep as much as 80 to 90 percent of the price of food. If just 10 percent ($85 per person per year) of Californians’ food expenditures were directed toward food produced within the state, an estimated $848 million in additional income would flow to the state’s farmers, $1.38 billion would be injected into California’s overall economy, $188 million in tax revenue would be generated, and 5,565 jobs would be created.
Sufi poet Hafez wrote: The small man builds cages for everyone He knows. While the sage, Who has to duck her head When the moon is low Keeps dropping keys all night long For the Beautiful Rowdy Prisoners.
This food fight is throwing keys to the rowdy prisoners. John wrote to me: By definition, this change will not be led by experts, corporations or politicians. It will be led by individual people like you and me…people like our mothers, our brothers and sisters, our neighbors… Like all exciting journeys, reclaiming our food culture and shortening our evening Grace where we can thank our farmers and nature, will start with the first step. I am proud to be with you all who have taken that first step already!

(C) 2004 By The Oakland Institute. All Rights Reserved. Please Obtain Permission to Copy.

America AmBUSHed! Report Card on Bush’s Four Years in the White House

Mon, 25 Apr 2005 16:50:49 -0400
As the United States heads towards elections on Tuesday, November 2, 2004, the world is watching. The election outcome will not only have an impact on America, but will reverberate across the globe. This fact sheet documents the outcome of the Bush administration’s policies on Americans with the hope that it will provide voters with information and help them make an informed choice on November 2, 2004. Also visit http://www.udecide.org/

Poverty
Today American poverty levels have swelled to 35.9 million Americans, that’s an additional 1.3 million Americans living in poverty since 2002. Most alarming is that 1 in 5 children are living below the poverty line. This is a decade high of 12.9 million children. African Americans suffer the worst, with twice the national rate living in poverty, 24.4 percent.
BUSH ADMINISTRATION FAILS!

Wages & Unemployment
1.6 million jobs have been lost since January 2001 under Bush’s leadership. The actual number of Americans suffering from employment woes is 14.1 million. Officially and unofficially, this includes those unemployed, underemployed (only able to find part-time work) and those so discouraged that they have given up looking for work. This means that one in four families are ‘working poor,’ that’s 9.2 million American workers incapable of supporting their families with full time or multiple jobs. African Americans held the highest percentage of unemployment at 10.9% – almost twice that of white Americans and the nation as a whole!! One in five women, versus one in eight men, received an annual income below the official poverty line for a family of four. Women’s average earnings reached a record low since 1995, with women earning an average $30,724 per year. This means the ratio of female to male earning is $0.76 to $1.00.
BUSH ADMINISTRATION FAILS!

Healthcare
The number of uninsured Americans has increased to 45 million, up from 43.6 million in 2002. These newly impoverished Americans have increased the number of Medicaid recipients to 35.6 million, escalating already outrageous insurance rates. Bush has proposed tax credits and Healthcare Savings Accounts to help the 45million Americans without health insurance, but has proposed no actual funding.
BUSH ADMINISTRATION FAILS!

Corporate America vs. Average Americans
Corporate profit gains account for the optimistic perception of the economy, not workers’ incomes. Income growth for workers’ wages and salaries has hit a record low at a meager 15 percent growth. This is in contradiction to the growth income of corporate profits, which have been the highest of any recovery period, at a startling 47 percent growth. In fact, in the FY 2003, the median annual income for a full time worker was $32,240.Yet in the same year, CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies enjoyed a median annual income of $4.6 million! The average American has not experienced an advantageous economy as the Bush Administration would have us believe. On October 22, 2004, Bush signed into law a new sweeping $136 billion tax cut for corporate America, which constitutes the most far-reaching rewrite of corporate tax law in two decades. This new tax law, which will benefit multinational corporations is intended to replace the $49.2 billion export tax incentive and aims to shower corporations in a wide array of industries with extensive tax breaks over the next decade.
BUSH ADMINISTRATION FAILS!

Domestic Programs
Overall Bush has imposed a hold on the majority of domestic programs: transportation, environment, education, housing, veteran assistance and job training. He is proposing to hold these departments at a 0.5 percent annual increase, which amounts to substantial cuts in real dollars since it is less than half the amount of current inflation (1.3%). The Bush budget for 2004-2009 lays out a plan for 128 programs to be eliminated, 65 this year and 63 over the next five years. Most are small programs and only account for $4.9 billion of the $2.3 trillion budget, nonetheless they are programs that predominantly serve children, the poor, the sick and public housing communities. The Environmental Protection Agency will be cut by 7.2 percent (Bush actually proposes $1.2 billion funding for research into alternative energy sources, but does not actually propose direct funding from the budget for this effort. Instead, he suggests the funding come from the sale of leases for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge!!)
BUSH ADMINISTRATION FAILS!

National Deficit
Since September 30, 2003, the national debt has increased an average of $1.72 billion each day. The National Debt Clock marks America’s current outstanding national debt at over $7 trillion. With America’s population at 294 million, that makes each citizen’s share of that outstanding debt $25,046.66. While the Bush Administration blames this on recession’s slow recovery and September 11th, many point to Bush’s excessive tax cuts, predominantly benefiting the wealthiest Americans.
BUSH ADMINISTRATION FAILS!

Defense Spending
The UN estimates that the $1trillion global military spending cap could be broken this year because of the increase of worldwide defense spending. The United States is responsible for almost half of this global defense spending, meaning that the United States is spending on defense almost as much as the rest of the world combined. The US’ projected budget for FY 2005 includes an estimated $1.15 million per day, or $11,000 per second on defense spending.
BUSH ADMINISTRATION FAILS!

* Research compiled by Shannon Laliberte, Research Associate, The Oakland Institute.

(C) 2004 By The Oakland Institute. All Rights Reserved. Please Obtain Permission to Copy.

Food Sovereignty: A New Farm Economy to Challenge Economic Globalization

Mon, 25 Apr 2005 16:52:27 -0400

Globalization: Risks & Resistance, XI World Congress on Rural Sociology, Trondheim, Norway, July 26, 2004

Plenary Paper by Anuradha Mittal, Director, The Oakland Institute

XI World Congress on Rural Sociology is opportune gathering to share knowledge on globalization, risks and resistance. As we meet here in Trondheim, we need to be concerned about the negotiations taking place in Geneva among the World Trade Organization (WTO) members.
The ongoing trade talks in Geneva around the July draft package, aimed at reviving the so called Doha ‘Development’ Round, which have floundered since the collapse of the 5th Ministerial in Cancun, are a reminder of the crisis of inequity and hypocrisy within the WTO. The callous disregard of the concerns of the developing countries in the field of agriculture in the text put before the 147 members, endorses the reprehensible treatment of development issues in the WTO. Agriculture being an area where developing countries might compete head-on with the industrialized nations – the draft asymmetrically panders to the interests of the politically influential corporate agriculture in the U.S. at the expense of millions of poor farmers across the Third World. It further enables rich countries to protect their markets in ‘sensitive’ products from import competition from developing countries while encouraging export dumping at artificially low prices by proposing a framework for new blue box subsidies to accommodate its richest member, the U.S. In addition, the draft openly discriminates by adopting a non-committal approach to the Special and Differential treatment needs, sensitive products and special safe guard mechanisms and leaves them for a “post framework stage.” At the same time, the draft overlooks the demand of African countries for the Cotton Initiative to be treated on a stand-alone and fast-track basis, and instead, adopts the U.S. demand to consider this issue under the broader agriculture negotiations.
Worse still, in the WTO agriculture talks this week, where 3 billion lives are at stake, negotiations are once again shrouded in secrecy, and are taking place between only five Members - the U.S., EC, Australia, Brazil and India. According to Tim Groser (New Zealand’s Ambassador chairing the talks), these are the ‘interested’ parties and they are providing him with ‘political guidance.’ Many countries, including even developed countries such as Canada, Switzerland and Japan are incensed that most probably the new draft will be a package which the five members have agreed amongst themselves and will be presented to the other 142 members of the WTO as a take-it-or-leave-it text. Intense pressures are being put on capitals to tow the line. If the talks ‘succeed,’ billions in the South will loose their livelihoods, especially, in the agriculture sector.
For thousands of years, small farmers have grown food for their local communities – planting diverse crops in healthy soil, recycling organic matter, following nature’s rainfall patterns, and maintaining our rich biodiversity. This agricultural system was built on the farmers’ accumulated knowledge of the local environment, passed on from one generation to another. Today, it is confronted by both an environmental and a moral crisis.
What’s called ‘modern industrial agriculture,’ driven by the engine of economic globalization, is replacing family farms with corporate farms, farmers with machines, mixed crops with monocultures, and has traded local food security for global commerce. This phenomenon is best described by Wendell Berry in Fatal Harvest: “One of the primary results – and one of the primary needs- of industrialism is the separation of people, places and products from their histories. To the extent that we participate in the industrial economy, we do not know the histories of our families or habitats or of our meals. This is an economy, and in fact a culture, of the one-night stand. ‘I had a good time,’ says the industrial lover, ‘but don’t ask me my last name.’ The industrial eater says to the svelte industrial hog, ‘We’ll be together at breakfast. I don’t want to see you before then, and I won’t care to remember you afterwards.’ ”
The agricultural system in the United States is no different. The family farm system and farmers have been sold out to corporate agribusiness with ever-increasing numbers of farm bankruptcies and foreclosures reaping a grim harvest of suicides, alcoholism, and a loss of community. In the 1930s, 25 percent of the U.S. population lived on the nation’s 6 million farms. Today America’s 2 million farms are home to less than 2 percent of the population. There are more people behind bars than behind the wheel of a tractor! Small family farms have been replaced by large commercial farms, with 8 percent of U.S. farms accounting for 72 percent of sales. Between 1994-1996, about 25 percent of all US hog farmers, 10 percent of all grain farmers, and 10 percent of dairy farmers went out of business. The U.S. Dept of Labor projects that the largest job loss among all occupations between 1998-2008 will be in agriculture. This is not surprising given an average farm-operator household earns only 14 percent of its income from the farm and rest from off-farm employment. However, these figures pale in comparison to one fact. The number one cause of death for farmers in the U.S. is suicide!
Federal policies have contributed greatly to the decline of the American countryside. The farm bills crop subsidies don’t go to farmers who resemble John Steinbeck’s Joad family, but to wealthy American corporations and wealthy individuals. Most family farms get nothing but a tax bill. Subsidizing well-heeled agribusiness interests has ensured the continued exodus of independent family farmers from the land. Taxpayer money helps bankroll the nation’s largest farmers, helping them to buy up struggling neighboring family farms and creating a “plantation effect” that turns independent farmers into sharecroppers.
Farmers are losing control of the food as it's going through the chain. The share of four largest pork packer corporations went up from 44 to 62 percent between 1992 and 2001. In 2001 four poultry firms controlled 53 percent of the market, the top four firms in beef controlled 81 percent of the market, the top 10 agrochemical corporations controlled over 84 percent of the $30 billion agrochemical market. Grain distribution was even more concentrated. Two companies, Cargill and Continental, controlled about two-thirds of the grain in the world.
This agricultural system robs not just the U.S. family farmers, but the world’s poor. Wielding the World Bank, the I.M.F., and international trade agreements like the WTO, the U.S. is opening up foreign markets for its agribusiness corporations, by forcing poor countries to remove subsidies and lower tariffs. Today one out of every four acres in America is grown for export. And it has accomplished this by dumping cheap subsidized surpluses into the Third World countries. It exports corn at prices 20 percent below the cost of production, and wheat at 46 percent below cost. The result is a reverse Robin Hood effect – robbing the world’s poor to enrich American agribusiness.
In 1997, over 2,000 farmers committed suicide in the Anantpur district of Andhra Pradesh in India. Another 600 farmers committed suicide in Punjab, known as the granary of India, during the same period. An Indian journalist, P. Sainath, who visited all the police stations in Ananthpur reported that 1600 of the 2000 suicides were committed by drinking pesticides and that most of the farmers had defaulted on their loan payments to the bank. The New York Times (June 6, 2004) reported that debts had driven 50 to 100 farmers to take their own lives in Andhra Pradesh since a new –state government took office in mid-May, 2004. It is estimated that between 1997-2003, over 20,000 farmers have taken their lives in India. When faced with a dead end, they have opted for death.
But any system built upon structural inequities is ultimately unsustainable. It fuels conflict and struggle along the lines of class, gender, and ethnicity, till it consumes itself. Today’s corporate-controlled food system is just such a system.
Mexico was once self-sufficient in basic grains but now, largely as result of North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), it imports 95% of soy, 58% of rice, 49% of wheat, and 40% of its meat. NAFTA is killing the Mexican countryside, with an estimated 600 peasant farmers forced off their land each day. In January 2003 Mexican farm leaders, under a united front “Countryside Can’t Take it Any More,” started a hunger strike to protest the agriculture chapters of NAFTA. The hunger strike was accompanied by demonstrations along the U.S. Mexican border, on highways, at airports, and at the offices of transnational agri-business corporations. Farmers in Mexico saw an outpouring of support for their struggle, both nationally and internationally. And this cross border organizing is the response that is challenging the liberalization of rural livelihoods.
It was present in Cancun in September 2004 at the Fifth Ministerial of the World Trade Organization. On September 10, Lee Kyung Hae, leader of the Korean Federation of Advanced Farmers Association, climbed the barricades that were built to keep away over 15,000 protesting farmers, indigenous people, and youth in Cancun, from the trade talks aimed at bringing trade barriers down. Wearing a sandwich board that read “The WTO Kills Farmers,” Lee Kyung Hae took his life with a knife to the heart. Lee had watched over the years, hundreds of his comrades displaced from their lands. His own farm foreclosed four years ago. His dedicated his life to not only the Korean countryside, but to rural struggles around the world.
Don’t let this resistance seem without hope. The farmers around the world, the stewards of our land and keepers of nature’s inheritance to humanity, have been walking this path, without thinking about hopelessness. They have not quit. Even in Cancun, the barricades and the creation of the police state could not save the talks. Trade negotiators representing the Third World countries walked out of the talks saying that “no deal is better then what is being offered.”
I personally have made the decision to fight this fight by looking for reasons to keep on. And I am glad to share my reasons with you with the hope that they will inspire you to continue this struggle. I cannot over emphasize that: Today the rural communities are responding to corporate take over of our food system with their anti-corporate farming laws. In Pennsylvania inspired by the anti-corporate farming law in South Dakota, community activists have worked to get local governments adopt this law, preventing factory farms from being sited in their rural communities.
In an open challenge to the corporate take over of our food system, a vibrant food system is growing all over America. Hundreds of family farm groups, farm workers, community gardeners, and environmentalists are working to ensure community food security: where everyone has a safe, culturally acceptable, nutritional diet through a sustainable food system that ensures community self-reliance and social justice. Farmers’ markets have doubled in the past decade while the burgeoning Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs) is helping communities form a direct relationship with local farms.
On March 4, 2004, Mendocino county in California set the standard for the rest of the U.S. by becoming the first county to ban the cultivation of GM crops and animals. Biotechnology is another tool to convert our food into commodities. Soon after, three other countries, Butte, Marin and Humboldt, submitted enough signatures to put similar measures on the November ballot. Several other counties including Alameda, Napa, Sonoma have started similar citizen-led campaigns while the GE Free Boulder County Campaign has been launched in Colorado. Vermont has become the first state to require manufacturers of genetically modified seeds to label and register their products. In the meanwhile, Angola has joined other nations like Zambia and India in rejecting GM food aid.
International protests against the GM foods have become a regular feature. In May, the main entrance leading to Parliament in Cape Town, South Africa, was turned into a cereal when protesters campaigning against genetically modified organisms (GMOs) emptied bags of yellow maize and substitute milk to highlight their concerns. The protest was organized in support of Biowatch, an NGO, which is currently involved in litigation in the Pretoria High Court on the lack of information from the government on the licensing and production of GMOs in South Africa. In another highly visual event, campaigners delivered a petition telling the WTO not to undermine the sovereign right of any country to protect its citizens and the environment from Genetically Modified (GM) foods and crops in May 2004. The delivery of the ‘citizen's objection’ to the WTO was a part of a global ‘bite-back’ campaign against a complaint filed at the WTO by the US, Argentina and Canada of blocking trade in GM crops and foods.
And while the Canadian Supreme court placed corporate rights over farmers rights, Percy Schmeiser and his wife Louise in their courageous 7–year battle against Monsanto have ignited an international resistance to the corporate intellectual property regimes. Just this month, about 1,500 activists, lead by Jose Bove, tore out rows of GM maize in Southern France.
In June thousands marched saying “No to Free Trade and to the Exploitation of Transnational Companies” in Sao Paulo, Brazil on the eve of UNCTAD meetings. And thousands representing trade unions, peasants, small farmers, women, consumers, students, migrant workers, urban poor, anti-war and anti-neoliberal globalization activists gathered in Seoul, Korea in June to demonstrate against the World Economic Forum, globalization and the war. Thousands of students, activists and farmers took to the streets in downtown Panama City in July to protest U.S.-Panama free trade talks taking place in another part of the city, demanding that the talks be halted given trade openings would devastate Panama's farm sector.
Each of these examples - anti-corporate farming laws, farmers’ markets, international protests against free trade, county level measures - are not isolated examples of an alternative or dissent. These are about change that is taking place on the ground - slowly, organically, and steadily. Its best crop is a new consciousness where it recognizes these struggles as the new civil rights movement of the day, which will transform the industrial food-system to a more sustainable and life-affirming system. The rallying cry of this movement is: Food Sovereignty is a fundamental human right.

So what is Food Sovereignty?

Food Sovereignty requires that governments:
• Prioritize local, regional, and national needs, based on agriculture that consists of small farmers, indigenous peoples, fisherfolk, and other local communities;
• Protect local and national markets of basic food stuffs to give priority to the products of local farmers;
• Promote and enforce farmer's rights including access to land, water and seed;
• Promote sustainable peasant agriculture which is more productive and protects our biodiversity;
• Promote a direct, shared and decentralized relationship between food producers and the rest of the community;
• Enforce genuine land reform to ensure redistribution of land.
• And lastly design a new farm economy which should be the centerpiece of the country’s economic development model.
It is true that whenever Third World governments have balked at U.S. and EU dictated trade proposals, they have been shown into a darkened room where they are bludgeoned with threats to cut off preferential market access, suspend aid, or otherwise have their arms twisted. However, I believe that the movement to create and sustain a just and healthy farm economy will prevail. This movement might be barricaded miles away by riot cops and military from the convention centers where trade negotiators meet. Despite this repression, right now capitals are buzzing with action as the civil society, citizens and others lobby against an unfair proposal that is being forced upon the developing countries in Geneva. Despite police harassment, groups and individuals continue to hold press conferences and take action in Geneva itself. After all, as the Sufi poet Hafez said:

"The small man builds cages for everyone
He knows.
While the sage,
Who has to duck her head
When the moon is low
Keeps dropping keys all night long
For the
Beautiful
Rowdy
Prisoners."

(C) 2004 By The Oakland Institute. All Rights Reserved. Please Obtain Permission to Copy.

The Last Plantation

Mon, 10 Apr 2006 22:51:27 -0400

By Anuradha Mittal with Joan Powell
January 2000

"No justice, no peace! No farms, no food!" shouted hundreds of black farmers and their supporters as they walked past the cheering crowds lining the streets of downtown Atlanta for the annual Martin Luther King March on January 17, 2000. They also carried posters of guns. "A white USDA employee was found guilty of carrying a loaded gun to his office," one of the demonstrators explained, "which he used to intimidate a black farmer asking about his USDA loan application in 1998. His punishment was one day's suspension with pay. So since they can bring guns to work, we thought we'd bring posters of guns to a peace rally."⁽²⁾ Police estimated that over 15,000 people followed the marchers to the Martin Luther King memorial for a rally later that afternoon. Gary Grant, president of the Black Farmers and Agriculturists Association (BFAA), said at the rally, "Landless people are but refugees in a strange land."⁽³⁾ He was referring to the plight of black farmers in the United States.

In November 1992, Melvin Bishop's farm in Eatonton, Georgia, suffered severe damage from a tornado. Other farm businesses in the area also suffered in the aftermath of the tornado with losses of crops, livestock, supplies, equipment, barns and storage areas. These losses resulted in reduced family income, delayed production, stunted business growth, and for some, a total loss of their livelihood.

After the storm, Melvin Bishop, president of the Georgia BFAA, went to the USDA to fill out applications for disaster relief, an emergency loan, and an operating loan. For the next seven months, the official at the USDA office gave him the runaround by inventing irrelevant reasons to put him off. Finally, in May of 1993 he was denied not only disaster relief, which he qualified for, he was also denied emergency and operating loans. No reasons were given.

When testifying at the Eatonton stop of the Economic Human Rights Bus Tour along with several other black farmers, Melvin Bishop said, "Even more devastating than the tornado was being denied USDA funds appropriated for emergency disaster and relief purposes. The process involved in waiting and standing in long lines to shuffle paper, completing forms and applications, was physically, mentally, and emotionally draining."⁽⁴⁾

His situation is not unique. Melvin Bishop is among hundreds of black farmers who have filed administrative complaints or lawsuits charging that for decades USDA loan officials have discouraged, delayed, or rejected loan applications because of their race. These charges have been upheld by federal officials. The farmers say that such discrimination is a major reason that the nation's already tiny corps of black farmers is dwindling at three times the rate of farmers nationwide.

Many of us would think that racial discrimination is over in today's America. After all, the United States ratified the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights in 1992 and the Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination in 1994, and claims moral leadership on human rights. But discrimination against black farmers continues in violation of the most basic human rights and human dignity that every American should be able to enjoy, especially in our present booming economy.

The Perennial Crop of Bias: Failed Promises of Reconstruction

Racial discrimination against the black farmer is not new. The plight of black farmers begins approximately with Emancipation in 1865, the beginning of the period when all African Americans, at least on paper, could own land.

Under authority of the Confiscation Act of 1861, General William Sherman issued Special Field Order 15 in January 1865, granting to each 40,000 freedmen possessory titles to forty-acre homesteads on the Georgia and South Carolina Sea Islands and coast. Following this land grant, what could have been one of the most momentous decisions in the annals of the U.S. Congress was made. In the closing midnight session of the Thirty-eighth Congress, on March 3, 1865, Congress passed the Freedmen's Bureau Act, leasing to "every male citizen, whether refugee or freedman" forty acres of abandoned or confiscated Southern land for three years with option to purchase thereafter, so he could establish for himself a family farm and gain a foothold in the American economy. Only a few weeks earlier, members of the Congress had approved the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. constitution and agreed that "the Negro" was to be a free man, never again a slave. Now they took action to put him on the road to economic independence.

Unfortunately, these plans for the redistribution of Southern lands were never carried out. The bill as brought before the house held no promise of permanent land ownership for the freedmen. At the end of the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson pardoned and returned land to many white aristocrats, ensuring the persistence of the semi-feudal economic order of the antebellum years.

In the absence of federal policy underscored by federal pressure, racial prejudice, and the lack of money, only limited amounts of confiscated federal property passed into African American hands, leaving the farmers mostly without a land base. The Bureau attempted to place relations between white planters and black laborers on a legal footing by enforcing a code of contract labor with set wages and hours, but old patterns quickly asserted themselves.⁽⁵⁾ As a substitute for land ownership, most African Americans became sharecroppers or tenants on plantations owned by whites. In many instances they were reduced to peonage, a condition not very different from their former status under slavery. As sharecroppers, blacks cultivated small tracts of large subdivided plantations, turning as much as one half of each crop over to the planter in rent.

Sharecroppers generally had to purchase their own seed, farm tools, and household goods from local merchants on credit with outrageous rates of interest.

The early promises of Reconstruction largely went unfulfilled. Purchase costs of the Freedman's Bureau forty-acre lots were often beyond the means of black tenant farmers, and after the withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877, local Democratic officials lost no time blocking and evading, whenever possible, the efforts of African Americans to buy property of their own. The concentration of land in a few wealthy white hands would remain the rule. In post-Reconstruction Blackbelt counties, the richest top ten percent of farmers owned one-half to two-thirds of the land.⁽⁶⁾

The economic structure was not the only aspect of Southern agriculture to persist with pernicious effects into the next era. A hundred years earlier cotton had become the region's permanent cash crop, and many former slaves knew how to grow little else. Lack of skills and the need for liquid assets assured that African Americans at all levels of land tenure-sharecroppers, tenants and owners-devoted more of their acreage to cotton production than whites did. Only 3.7 percent of African American farmland was planted in crops besides cotton or corn, compared with 10.1 percent of farmland owned by whites. Furthermore, throughout the South and especially amid the freedmen, information was scarce about the imperatives of fertilizing and crop rotation, and even where information existed, the solutions cost money. The slow depletion of the soil would prove merely one of the perils of monocrop farming.

Overproduction depressed the value of cotton in the last decades of the 19th century, but from 1898 to 1913 prices rose again. This period saw the development of a nascent African American middle class, with attendant increases in literacy rates and the founding of dozens of African American-owned banks and agricultural colleges. There was an increase in land ownership as well-African Americans held three million acres in 1875, eight million in 1890 and 12 million in 1900.⁽⁷⁾ The peak year of African American land ownership was 1910 when blacks owned an estimated 15 million acres, with 175,000 farms fully owned, 43,000 partially owned, and 670,000 share cropped.⁽⁸⁾

Much would change with the advent of World War I. In 1914 the cotton consuming countries of Europe halted all transatlantic commerce for three months. The bottom swiftly fell out of the cotton market, with losses of $500 million reported by Southern farmers in the initial months of the crisis. Government and philanthropic aid in the form of credit and low interest loans went almost exclusively to white farmers. Most African American banks failed. By 1918 only one remained in Alabama and two in Mississippi, down from a 1911 peak of seven and eleven respectively.

It was, however, the boll weevil plague that would wreak the greatest devastation. Originating in Central America and Mexico, the insects had begun eating crops and by 1920 a major infestation had spread across the cotton belt. White farmers, though badly affected, were able to diversify into other crops in significant numbers. With their lending institutions gone and race relations worsening throughout the South, black farmers fled in the hundreds of thousands to Northern cities.⁽⁹⁾

A Legacy of Bias: State's Response to Rural Crisis

During the Great Depression, the federal government again tried to promote land tenure and income stability for rural African Americans. However, the programs initiated were in most cases too short-term to have significant impact, administered in a discriminatory manner, or geared toward the more solvent and educated upper tiers of those in need. Attorney and professor Harold A. McDougall, in surveying the history of government aid to the minority farmer, notes "The traditional underlying flaw of all agricultural subsidy programs is that they subsidize ownership of the land rather than labor upon it. The small black farmer in the South is critically affected by the substitution of capital for labor in agriculture, a substitution encouraged and exacerbated by more than a generation of government subsidies."⁽¹⁰⁾

Early New Deal agricultural policy as represented by the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) of 1933 embodied this tendency most blatantly. Payments made to large landowners to reduce cotton acreage were officially to be distributed to their lessees as well, but most of these reallocations never took place. Under pressure from the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union, formed by the biracial coalition of tenants and sharecroppers to protest the inequities of the AAA, President Roosevelt issued an executive order establishing the Resettlement Administration (RA) in 1935. Charged with relocating destitute families to subsistence farms and training them to grow their own food, the RA achieved moderate success but imposed a busy and heavy-handed bureaucracy on the farmers it served-at the program's peak it employed twice as many personnel as homesteaders.⁽¹¹⁾

Instituted in 1937, the Farm Security Administration (FSA), took over the functions of the RA and approved cooperative grants and loans to low income farmers seeking to lease land; acquire farm implements, livestock, insurance and other resources; or form buying and marketing associations. The FSA did help establish innovative cooperative and collective farming projects. Several all-black cooperatives of this type were founded; a few others were reportedly integrated without incident. But a 1940 survey counted less than 2,000 black farm families benefiting from FSA programs, a particular shame when one considers that African Americans receiving FSA loans actually boasted a better repayment record than whites, whose gross incomes exceeded theirs by 60 percent. Beginning in 1943, pressure from established agricultural interests resulted in restrictions on the FSA and in 1946 it was replaced with the Farmers Home Administration (FmHA).⁽¹²⁾

In the 1960s, the civil rights movement and Great Society antipoverty programs gave renewed impetus to the drive to reverse black land decline. With the aid of various church and advocacy organizations and private foundations, cooperatives intended specifically to benefit African American subsistence farmers were founded across the South. Out of this movement emerged the Federation of Southern Cooperatives (FSC), established in 1967 to assist primarily African American rural families in the formation of cooperatives and credit unions, the securing of landholdings, and the promotion of public policy favorable to family farms. In 1972 the Emergency Land Fund (ELF) was founded, later merging with the Federation in 1985. The endurance of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund signals an increased reliance on local community-based solutions, a useful emphasis, given the continued reluctance of Farmers Home Administration to loan to low income nonwhites and the refusal of cooperation on the part of many more established and prosperous white-controlled cooperatives.⁽¹³⁾

The Legal Challenge:
Pigford versus Glickman Class Action Lawsuit

In 1920, 925,000 farmers (14 percent of all farms) were African American. By 1950, black land ownership had declined to 12 million acres, and in 1969 it was down to 5.5 million acres, a drop of 54 percent in just twenty years. Between 1982 and 1992, the number of black farmers in the United States dropped by 43 percent, from 33,250 to 18,816.⁽¹⁴⁾ A 1990 House Committee report said black farmers were on the verge of extinction. At that time, African Americans made up roughly one percent of the nation's farmers and were disappearing at a rate almost five times greater than whites.⁽¹⁵⁾ The African American farm owners who still survive are bucking a dismal trend. In 1999, less than 18,000 African American farmers, out of a total 1.9 million U.S. farmers, owned less than 1 million acres.⁽¹⁶⁾ It was then predicted that by the year 2000, there would be no black-owned land in America.⁽¹⁷⁾

This dramatic loss of black-owned farmland is the result of a combination of historical discrimination and financial lending policies that have left black framers out of assistance programs. In a report released by the Farmers Home Administration (FmHA) in April 1997, 91.4 percent of the farm loans in 1997 went to white farmers, 2.3 percent to black farmers, 4.2 percent to Hispanic farmers, and 1.2 percent to Native Americans.⁽¹⁸⁾ In February 1997, Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman and Assistant Secretary for Administration Pearlie Reed held civil rights listening sessions, which revealed the dismal record of racial discrimination, neglect, and abuses by the USDA. Even Secretary Glickman acknowledged that "it's very clear that small farmers in general, and African American farmers in particular, are having a harder and harder time keeping their land. There are lots of explanations but no excuses."⁽¹⁹⁾ Following the listening forums, the Civil Rights Action Team (CRAT) developed 92 recommendations, the vast majority of which have yet to be implemented.

The Civil Rights Commission, which studied the problem in the 1980s, said that black farmers believe they are "subjected to disrespect, embarrassment, and humiliation" by USDA officials. Black farmers wait far longer for loan decisions, and are more likely to be rejected for loans than their white counterparts. In making a discrimination finding in a farmer's case, USDA investigators found that white farmers in his county typically waited 84 days for loan decisions, while black farmers' average wait was 222 days.

Investigators also found that 84 percent of the white applicants had their loans applications approved, while only 56 percent of the black applicants were granted loans. As a result, each day black farmers lose 1,000 acres of land, and they claim 53 percent of USDA land holdings formerly belonged to them.⁽²⁰⁾

Government studies have also shown that minority farmers are underrepresented on the local committees that make loan decisions, particularly in the South. One internal USDA probe found that local officials were "rude and insensitive to black farmers," that their projected crop yields were calculated differently from those of white farmers and that African Americans were sometimes rejected because of "computation errors."

To further add to the woes of the black farmers, President Reagan cut the USDA budget in 1983 by eliminating its civil rights complaint division. That ended any federal investigation of complaints filed by minority farmers. But black farmers were never informed that the complaint division had been abolished. When their loan applications were routinely rejected by county lending committees, their local appeals went to the same loan officers who had rejected their original applications. They were then invited to file complaints to Washington by local officials who knew the complaint division no longer existed. These complaints piled up in a vacant room in the Agriculture building in Washington.

This discrimination has ignited protests and demonstrations over the years. In 1990 the first lawsuit was filed against the federal government on behalf of black farmers by the Farmers Legal Action Group (FLAG), with the assistance of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund. The lawsuit demanded acquiring from the government complaints of discrimination filed by the black farmers against the Farmers Home Administration and other documents regarding civil rights compliance within the FmHA and USDA. FLAG was successful in acquiring the complaints. It then attempted to add substance to the lawsuit by making it into a class action suit, which was not a successful effort.

In April 1997, hundreds of black farmers marched in Washington and testified before the Black Congressional Caucus. They testified that FmHA intentionally tried to drive black farmers out of business by not providing loans in a timely manner and eventually foreclosing on their operations. In 1997 in the Timothy Pigford, et al. versus Glickman class action lawsuit, over a 1,000 black farmers sued the USDA, seeking $3 billion in compensation. They charged that racist administration of USDA lending agencies had materially harmed black farmers. The case covered claims from 1983-the year the department's office of civil rights was disbanded-to 1997, the year after the office was restored. In January 1999, the USDA and attorneys for the farmers reached an out-of-court settlement. The agreement calls for forgiveness of the plaintiffs' government debts and a one-time tax-free $50,000 disbursement to each farmer. Those with well-documented cases of discrimination could take their cases to an arbitrator, but would then forfeit the right to the payment and debt cancellation option.

Many black farmers are not happy with the way the settlement concluded since it does not solve their problems. Blissfully unaware, Secretary of Agriculture, Dan Glickman called his department's response to the black farmers' class action "our appointment with history," at a press conference on January 5, 1999.⁽²¹⁾ Black farmers would say that the USDA was a little late.

The deal is still far less than the $3 billion farmers initially sought. The average debt for farmers involved in the lawsuit is $75,000 to $100,000. According to Winston Monk and his wife, who lost their business and then saw their farm put up for auction, "Giving the farmers $50,000 does NOT make up for acres lost, incomes the farmers have been without, and the fact that in many cases farmers have no land to leave to their children and grandchildren." Many farmers lost it to moneylenders and an economy which refused to help, though aid was readily available to white farmers.⁽²²⁾ Monk's farm was assessed at $237,000, and picked up for $88,000 by Harry Wass, representing the USDA.

Several black farmer groups have faulted the agreement because it does not force the USDA to change its policies to permanently stop discrimination in loans and assistance. According to John Boyd, president of the National Black Farmers Organization (NBFA), "It's not enough here for a lifetime of losses, a lifetime of pain and suffering."⁽²³⁾ Consequently, black farmers from 22 states agreed unanimously in February 1999 to reject the proposed settlement of $375 million, calling the government's offer "chicken feed." They characterized the settlement as "disgusting, racist, tyrannical; a betrayal, a sabotage, and the final nail in the coffin of the black farmer and land owner."⁽²⁴⁾

Eddie Slaughter of Buena Vista, Georgia, and vice president of BFAA and one of the original plaintiffs, explained why the farmers rejected the settlement: "There is no justice in this consent decree. It doesn't hold anybody accountable for violating the law. The same county supervisors and board members who denied loans and seized our property would still be in office. The $50,000 payment won't even buy a good used tractor. And it does nothing about the land that has been taken from us."⁽²⁵⁾

The historic Pigford versus Glickman class action suit was to be the panacea for past injustices; it has turned out to be nothing but a nightmare for many of the farmers. According to BFAA president, Gary Grant, "No other victims have ever had to furnish such proof after a culprit has pleaded guilty to actions that can only be seen as sabotage."⁽²⁶⁾ Tens of thousands of black farmers were encouraged to file liquidation claims, then told by claims adjusters that their claims were denied and the discrimination which they alleged did not occur. The denials do not take into account that much evidence was destroyed or misplaced by officials during the thirteen years the USDA's civil rights agency was defunct.

The media has done a good job at convincing Americans that the consent decree is working well. On December 10, 1999 (recognized internationally as Human Rights Day), black farmer organizations rallied at Lafayette Park in Washington, DC to call upon the nation's elected officials to set the record straight before the end of the millennium. They demanded that no people should have to go into this new century with the type of shenanigans that are still being heaped on them by a government that criticizes other countries' human rights record and ignores its own.

The nation and the world need to know of the human rights violations by the USDA and Department of Justice that continue to cause undue and unnecessary anguish for black farmers. Many black farmers are still being intimidated and discriminated against: the process for payment of farmers is moving too slowly, and there is a rejection rate of over 40 percent, using frivolous reasons.

Stephan Bowens, a lawyer for the Land Loss Fund, has pointed out that farmers whose claims have been approved are not receiving the debt relief promised by the USDA. Many farmers have been denied relief without the government submitting any evidence to contradict their claims. More important, systemic changes have not taken place in the USDA to eliminate discrimination against the plaintiffs and all other black and similarly disadvantaged farmers, and the USDA is still not returning land to black farmers from its inventory.

What's Needed Now⁽²⁷⁾

A coalition of black farmer organizations is working diligently to keep the prediction of "no land by the year 2000" from coming true. According to the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, the settlement is only a start and in no way rights all wrongs black farmers have experienced at the behest of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Among other things, black farmer organizations are demanding the USDA take the following steps to strengthen the settlement:

Return of Land: Return foreclosed lands to the black farmers and pay adequate compensation for the abuse of their human rights over the decades.

Registry of Black Farmers and Landowners: Implement Civil Rights Action Team (CRAT) recommendation number 28 requiring the USDA to create a voluntary registry of black and other nonwhite farmers and landowners. This registry will serve as a baseline measuring tool to determine the number of blacks and other minority farmers and the extent of their land holdings. The registry will assist the USDA in planning outreach, education, and technical assistance programs. The registry will also assist the USDA and farmer organizations in evaluating the effectiveness of USDA services and programs in maintaining diversity and plurality in the ownership of farmland in our nation.

Support for Outreach, Technical Assistance, and Education Funding: For the implementation of the settlement to be effective and supportive of black farmers, there is a need for a program of concentrated outreach, education, and technical assistance for Black and other disadvantaged farmers. In 1990, Congress authorized $10 million to be allocated every year (Section 2501 of the Minority Farmers Rights Act) for this purpose. This was the first time the Federal government targeted funding for technical assistance and outreach for minority farmers. The Act was a response to the 1982 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report stating that the primary reason black farmers have lost land is because of the USDA itself. However, at no time since 1990 has the full $10 million been awarded-in fact, black farmers have been shortchanged by over $50 million in the past nine fiscal years.

Better USDA Research and Education Funding and Activities: More support and funding is needed from the USDA for research, education, and extension activities geared to the needs of black family-sized farmers, instead of all its activities catering to the needs of the large-scale farmers.

Democratization of the USDA/Farm Services Agency (FSA) County Committee System: The FSA County Committee election system must be reformed and made more democratic and representative. There are only a handful of African American committee members elected across the South. As a result the system has failed to provide fair representation of black and other minority farmers on these critical local decision-making committees.

Full Implementation of the CRAT and National Small Farm Commission Recommendations: In 1997, the USDA published the Civil Rights Action Team report and in 1998 the National Commission on Small Farms published "A Time To Act," which contained recommendations for improving the USDA's services to its black farmer and all family farmer customers. The implementation of the legal settlement should include full implementation of the recommendations in these reports.

Tax Considerations: Enhanced tax considerations and exemptions for family sized farmers and landowners to keep landholdings in agriculture, forestry production, and wetlands.

Farm Bill for the Farmers: Serious alterations and/or complete revision of the next Farm Bill is necessary to strengthen America's family farmers by providing a minimum price safety net and programs to end the discrimination against small family farmers.

Quick action is imperative to sustain African American land ownership and farming. A swift and honest response by the USDA could slow the drastic decline of black farmers. In this way, the USDA could address its long history of racial discrimination in a manner that promotes political equality and economic justice.

The time is right to honor the Economic Human Rights of America's black farmers and stem the tide of black land loss and restore their right to be stewards of the land. In the words of Ralph Paige, executive director of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, "Many of our ancestors lost their lives to own land, to earn a living from the land, to raise their families in the richness of the Southern rural culture that is distinctly our own. Help us hold on to this important and valuable resource. We have a right to this land!"⁽²⁸⁾

For more information on how to support the struggle for justice for the black farmers contact:

Federation of Southern Cooperatives
2769 Church Street, Eastpoint GA 30344
(404) 765-0991

Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association
PO Box 597, Buena Vista GA 31803

Notes

1. Malcolm X quoted at Northern Negro Grass Roots Leadership Conference, King Solomon Baptist Church, Detroit, MI, November 1963.

2. Dr. Ridgely A. Mu'mim Muhammad, ''Still No Farms, No Food,'' in The Farmer, Volume 2, Number 11, January 18, 2000.

3. Ibid.

4. Melvin Bishop, Testimony at the Congressional Progressive Caucus Economic Human Rights Bus Tour, Georgia, November 12, 1999. The tour was sponsored by Food First and the Institute for Policy Studies.

5. Harold A. McDougall, ''Land Reform and the Struggle for Black Liberation: From Reconstruction to Remote Claims,'' in Charles C. Geisler and Frank J. Popper, eds., Land Reform, American Style (New Jersey: Rowman Allanheld, 1984) pp. 173–74.

6. Manning Marble, ''The Land Question in Historical Perspective: The Economics of Poverty in the Blackbelt South, 1865–1920,'' in Leo McGee and Robert Boone, eds., The Black Rural Landowner-Endangered Species: Social, Political and Economic Implications (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979).

7. Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, The Negro in the South (Northbrook: Metro Books, 1972).

8. ''The Land Question in Historical Perspective.''

9. Ibid., pp 6–24.

10. ''Land Reform and the Struggle for Black Liberation.''

11. Ibid., pp. 179–180.

12. Ray Marshall and Lamond Goodwin, Cooperatives and Rural Poverty in the South (Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1971), pg. 30.

13. Ibid.

14. Robert Browne, ''The South,'' in Peter Barnes, ed. The People's Land: A Reader on Land Reform in the United States (Creston, IA: National Coalition for Land Reform, 1975).

15. Congressional Black Caucus Priority Issue: Black Farmers (Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, 1998).

16. Diane Mathiowetz, ''Black Farmers Reject USDA Offer,'' Workers World, March 4, 1999.

17. Policy Recommendations to Enhance Economic Development in the Rural South, Submitted by the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, November 1999.

18. Congressional Black Caucus Priority Issue.

19. Jane Braxton Little, ''Facing Extinction, Southern Black Farmers Unite to Compete,'' The Progressive Populist, Vol. 3, No. 9, September 1997.

20. Congressional Black Caucus Priority Issue.

21. Ibid.

22. Jo Campbell, ''Big Aggie Bows to Black Farmers,'' Ecotopics International News Service, May 5, 1999.

23. Barbara Hagenbaugh, ''Black Farmers Demand more Money in US Settlement,'' agweek.com, March 1999.

24. ''No to USDA,'' New Journal and Guide, February 24, 1999.

25. ''Black Farmers Reject USDA Offer.''

26. ''Black Farmers To Call on White House to Bring Justice,'' BFAA Press Release, December 10, 1999.

27. ''What's Needed Now'' has been derived from contribution made by Ralph Paige, Executive Director, Federation of Southern Cooperatives and Eddie Slaughter, Vice President, BFAA, at the Congressional Progressive Caucus Economic Human Rights Bus Tour, Georgia, November 1999.

28. Ralph Paige, ''The Plight of African American Farmers & Black Land Loss,'' NAACP Annual Convention Plenary, July 15, 1998, Atlanta.

Originally published as a Food First Backgrounder Winter 2000 Vol. 6 No. 1

Voices from the South: The Third World Debunks Corporate Myths on Genetically Engineered Crops

Tue, 24 Aug 2004 13:59:32 -0400

Edited by Ellen Hickey and Anuradha Mittal
A joint publication of Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy
and Pesticide Action Network North America
June 2003

The battle over genetic engineering is being fought across the world, between those who champion farmers' rights to seeds, livelihood and land, and those who would privatize them. Food First, together with the Pesticide Action Network, has brought together a range of views from critics of GE food.

Download the entire report (PDF 1.5 Mb)

Freedom to Trade? Trading Away American Family Farms

Mon, 05 Jul 2004 20:41:25 -0400

Anuradha Mittal with Mayumi Kawaai
September 2001

On January 1, 1995, the World Trade Organization (WTO) was established. It is home to a series of trade accords that include agreements on services, agriculture, intellectual property rights, and other issues never before included in international trade rules. The organization was established with a commitment to raise standards of living and ensure full employment in the context of expanding trade, while upholding the objective of sustainable development. The reality has been almost the opposite.
At the last ministerial held in Seattle in 1999, negotiators were confronted by 70,000 prostestors: a coalition of students, teachers, farmworkers, factory and steel workers, consumers, environmentalists, feminists, spiritual leaders, animals rights activists, human rights advocates, friends and families, and representatives from more than 100 countries. They stood together for fair labor standards, environmental protection, public health, human rights, and democratic values over the "corporate interest first" agenda of the trade talks. The meeting eventually collapsed under the weight of the protests inside and outside the conference center.
In the wake of the Seattle debacle and other protests against the international financial institutions that have gathered strength since then, the next ministerial is being planned to be held in Doha, Qatar. The built-in agenda has several items of concern, with agriculture being one of the key areas. A communiqué issued following the twenty-second Ministerial held in Punta del Este, Uruguay, in September 2001, emphasized that the next ministerial should provide a clear commitment to end discrimination against agriculture and fully integrate it into WTO rules. This commitment is designed to achieve fundamental reform of agricultural trade through elimination of all forms of export subsidies and reduction of domestic support. ⁽¹⁾
The US administration has been a key advocate of the Agreement on Agriculture (AOA) in the trade talks. President Bush has used agriculture as an excuse to push the vote on Trade Promotion Authority (TPA, once called Fast Track) through Congress. This will allow him to negotiate international trade agreements that Congress can only approve or reject, but not amend. President Bush has argued, "I want America to feed the world. We are missing some great opportunities, not only in our hemisphere, but around the world. These are opportunities for people who earn a living the hard way... These are opportunities for working people." ⁽²⁾ In other words, trade agreements are good for American farmers.
This position has been supported by the USDA secretary Ann Veneman and former secretaries Dan Glickman and Clayton Yeutter. Glickman claimed that "without expanding access to trade, we will see income come down. There are lots of positions on this, but there is no question that the President needs TPA - needs the authority to go out and negotiate trade deals." ⁽³⁾ Yeutter even singled out labor unions, radical environmental advocacy groups, and anti-globalization forces as the main opponents of farmers. ⁽⁴⁾
What is the Agreement on Agriculture?

Prior to the Uruguay Round in 1995, agriculture fell outside the discipline of the predecessor to the WTO, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), ironically because of pressure from the United States. With the US threatening to leave GATT unless it was allowed to maintain protective mechanisms for sugar, dairy products, and other agricultural commodities, Washington was given a "non-time limited waiver" on agricultural products. Despite this early reticence, however, the need for "rules of engagement" in the struggle for Third World markets got the European Union (EU) and the US to press for the inclusion of an Agreement on Agriculture (AOA) in the Uruguay round. With the rhetoric of free trade, the two superpowers used the agreement to regulate monopolistic competition - for the right to exploit the Third World - between them. ⁽⁵⁾

The AOA sought the liberalization of trade in agricultural products by opening up markets, and cutting domestic supports and export subsidies to help create more equal competition in the market. Instead this agreement has turned into the first step in making food production into a business monopolized by a few. ⁽⁶⁾ The AOA has created an unfair global trade system. It has not only proven to be a threat to the stability of Third World farmers who do not have competitive advantages, but has resulted in a US domestic agricultural policy that favors agribusiness over family farmers.
The Bones of the Agreement

The three key provisions in the AOA are:

Market access: The extent to which a country allows imports of foreign products. It aims to regulate and lower protectionist barriers relating to tariffs, and the minimum and current trade quotas in order to improve access to markets.

Domestic support: The annual monetary support given by governments to agricultural producers either in direct payments or tax breaks, or in the form of infrastructure and research. The AOA classifies these supports into several categories - those that are acceptable because they are minimally trade distorting, and those that are not acceptable; those that have ceiling levels, and those that do not.

Export subsidy: Provisions that strive to reduce the amount of subsidies countries can give to export goods on the world market at prices lower than those in their domestic markets. Today, the countries that can afford to subsidize exports can take markets away from more efficient producers by undercutting the actual cost of production.

How the AOA has Affected Family Farmers in the US

Even before the AOA was drafted, US policy for the last 20 years has been to depress agricultural commodity prices, with the stated aim of increasing US market share in agricultural trade. Despite these efforts, the US market share in principal grain exports has fallen steadily during this period. Although only 30 percent of US agricultural production is traded internationally, the great weight of US agricultural policy is dedicated to dropping commodity prices, with devastating impacts on family farmers and rural communities.

Soon after the AOA came into effect in 1996, the US implemented the Federal Agriculture Implementation and Reform Act (FAIR). This new act was seen as a means to provide income and price stability for US farmers. ⁽⁷⁾ The goal was to expand agricultural exports with promises of a return to a free market, greater freedom for farmers, and reduced levels of government spending and controls. This bill, drafted in a period of high agricultural commodity prices, was formulated and supported by the representatives of corporate farms and agribusiness, even though farmers as well as policy makers knew that it lacked a safety net for family farmers. ⁽⁸⁾

The most significant change FAIR brought about was the elimination of deficiency payments. These payments compensated farmers for the difference between the price received for their crops and the actual cost of production. ⁽⁹⁾ The deficiency payments were replaced with Production Flexibility Contracts, fixed payments to farmers based on past production levels, and not reflecting either current or projected production. ⁽¹⁰⁾ Production Flexibility Contracts preserved and even enhanced export subsidy programs. For both wheat and dairy exports, the US Secretary of Agriculture was directed to implement maximum volume and funding levels consistent with the GATT Uruguay Round commitments to develop markets throughout the world. ⁽¹¹⁾

While the intent was to stabilize prices and farm incomes by maximizing export sales opportunities, export subsidies were distributed mainly to the exporters and agribusiness, and did little to alleviate market price volatility for family farmers. ⁽¹²⁾ In fiscal year 2000, the US government paid $28 billion in subsidies, mostly to large landowners, under the so-called "Freedom to Farm" legislation of 1996. These payments comprised 49 percent of net farm income in 2000 and kept large farm operations in business, allowing US agribusiness to continue to pay below cost-of-production prices for agricultural raw materials. ⁽¹³⁾ All while the family farmers were driven off the land.

Recently, the US House of Representatives passed an emergency aid package of $5.5 billion for farmers. Once again, however, this money will not necessarily go to the farmers in dire straits, as the aid is not based on need. ⁽¹⁴⁾ The actual problem is not the amount of money the government spends, but how and to whom the money is allocated. These farm policies have generated an average 15 percent annual return on equity for agribusiness, compared to an average two percent return for the US farmers. ⁽¹⁵⁾

The 1996 FAIR act reduced the number of strategies open to the producers in the US, forcing farmers to increase production in an effort to realize a more efficient scale. ⁽¹⁶⁾ American family farmers have faced record low prices and unfair market competition, while taxpayers have footed the bill for record levels of spending on farm programs. At the same time, corporate agribusiness has made record profits. Farmers with little control over the price of their products, are exposed to an economically volatile situation.

The Crisis of American Agriculture

Lou Anne Kellman, a retired Chicago lawyer, inherited a 900-acre farm in Texas in the mid-1980s. In some years, Kellman would lease her land to a rice farmer and the government would reward her with subsidy checks. In other years she let her land lie fallow, and the government paid her that too. She said, "I made $80,000 in one year for not farming. If you look at mine and my husband's combined income, that's ridiculous... It's like welfare for the rich." ⁽¹⁷⁾

Today America's family farmers are in a crisis. Thousands of farm families are being forced off the land each year, but the agricultural establishment sees their exodus as inevitable, saying that those who fail are simply inefficient and unable to keep up with the changing times. The only option farmers have been offered is to get big enough to be competitive, get corporate contracts to reduce risks, or get out of farming.
Subsidies Evade Family Farmers

After the Great Depression, government policies were designed to reduce risks to family farmers. Crop insurance and disaster programs reduced production risk, and a variety of price and income support programs, plus set-aside programs that paid farmers to remove excess land from production, reduced price risks. But the 1996 Farm Bill, based on the US commitment to international trade agreements, eliminated price and income supports and replaced them with annual income payments, to be phased out on a fixed declining schedule over seven years.

Taxpayers may not realize it, but the money they send to Washington is hastening the demise of family farms through agricultural subsidy programs that purport to save them. A recent study of federal farm data indicates that farm aid has gone to a host of individual and institutional investors, for whom farming is at most a minor sideline. ⁽¹⁸⁾ Almost 63 percent of the $27 billion in federal farm subsidies doled out in 2000 went to just 10 percent of America's farm owners, including multimillion-dollar corporations and government agencies. ⁽¹⁹⁾ Basing subsidy payments on farm acreage rather than financial need means that some of the wealthiest members of Congress received farm aid from farm programs they voted for. At least 20 Fortune 500 companies and more than 1,200 universities and government farms, including state prisons, received checks from the federal programs touted as a way to prop up needy farmers. Subsidies also went to real estate developers and absentee landlords in big cities from Chicago to New York.

Government aid made up almost half of total farm income nationwide in 2000, most of it parceled out through programs aimed at making sure farmers don't go under when the prices they get for crops are not enough to pay their bills. However, two-thirds of America's farmers did not benefit from traditional income support programs. ⁽²⁰⁾ The disparity is a symptom of a support system that is out of kilter with the needs of the average cash-trapped farmer. Most payments are tied to acreage: more land equals bigger checks.

Corporate Concentration of Agriculture

Economic globalization, driven in part by the WTO, has increased corporate influence throughout the US food supply system. Giant multinational corporations now control almost all aspects of American agriculture, with agricultural decision-making consolidated in a handful of corporate boardrooms.

Part of the difficulties faced by family farmers are the logical result of a situation where farm prices are set by whoever holds the most power. ⁽²²⁾ In the 1980s, economic literature pointed out that there was a general agreement that the market is no longer competitive if the four largest firms held 40 percent of the market. ⁽²³⁾ This concentration ratio used as a bench mark shows that family farmers have little control over the market. For example, in the flour milling industry the top four firms held 62 percent of the market in 1997. The share of four largest pork packer corporations increased from 44 percent to 57 percent from 1992 to 1999. ⁽²⁴⁾ Today they control 62 percent of the market. ⁽²⁵⁾ The top four firms in poultry control 53 percent of the market and the top four firms in beef control 81 percent of the market. ⁽²⁶⁾

"Farmers have lost control of the food as it's going through the chain."
- Craig Hill, Farmer ⁽²¹⁾

Corporate concentration of both farm inputs and markets has intensified. On the input side, considerable consolidation has taken place among firms that supply farmers with seeds and chemical inputs. The top 10 agrochemical corporations control over 84 percent of the $30 billion agrochemical market. ⁽²⁷⁾ Grain distribution is becoming even more concentrated. Two companies, Cargill and Continental, shared 50 percent of US grain exports in 1994; today they control about two-thirds of the grain in the world. ⁽²⁸⁾

This accelerated concentration of the food industry has had as much impact on the political process as it does on the livelihoods of small farmers. Cargill, the world's largest grain-trading company, had a disproportionate role from the start in shaping the rules under the old GATT framework. President Nixon's first trade advisor was William Pearce, a vice president of Cargill. Another Cargill alumnus, Daniel Amstutz, drafted President Reagan's agricultural proposal for GATT. ⁽²⁹⁾ Thus the longstanding trend in trade negotiations in which agribusiness profits are favored at the expense of family farms should be no surprise.

Falling Prices

"Non-enforcement of US laws has allowed corporate advocates of current US agricultural trade policy to reap record profits while farmers and ranchers go out of business or work second jobs to subsidize their operations. The independent family farmer is being destroyed in order to bring down prices enough to enable agribusiness to capture export markets."
- Neil Ritchie, national organizer of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy ⁽³⁰⁾

The US agricultural policy has long been directed at bringing the unit price agribusiness pays to farmers down to at least the world market price of any given agricultural commodity. ⁽³¹⁾ With the declining prices of agricultural commodities, farmer's income and economic independence have been jeopardized. Overall, the "all farm products" index decreased from 107 to 95 in the period of 1997 - 1999. The ratio of prices received to prices paid decreased from 91 to 82 in the same period of time. ⁽³²⁾ The unit prices of wheat, rice, corn, and soybeans, all dropped between 1995 to 2000.

American family farmers have been the net losers, as the prices they receive are below the cost of production. Family farmers produce too little to affect total supply and ultimately prices. Reducing their output - rather than helping boost prices - would translate into less revenue for them. ⁽³³⁾ This means that family farmers have to keep boosting the production of agricultural commodities to bring home even the smallest amount of income.

Exported to Death

FAIR offered a deal to the farmers: accept a cut in subsidies in exchange for deregulation and the promise of increased exports through the WTO and new trade deals with Latin America. The rapid growth in US agricultural exports - they more than doubled between 1985 and 1996 - encouraged many farmers to support the deregulation strategy. But for family farmers, the farm bill and the export-led growth strategy upon which it was based, has been a death knell. Rising exports have not translated into rising incomes for farmers, due to relentless declines in the real prices of basic farm products. The structure of American agriculture has been transformed for the worse.

As hard as it may be to believe, despite substantial growth in the volume of exports the total dollar value of all the exported wheat and flour, feed grains, and rice has dropped since 1996. ⁽³⁴⁾ In the fiscal year 1996, the highest export trade balance was recorded - $59,867 million - while the export balance of fiscal year 1999 was $49,148 million, roughly a 20 percent decrease over three years. ⁽³⁵⁾ The US farm trade balance declined by more than $13 billion between 1996 and 1998, and prices plummeted. Corn prices fell by 56 percent, from $4.30 per bushel in 1996 to $1.89 in 1998. Wheat prices dropped from $4.57 per bushel in 1996 to $2.46 in 1998; a drop of 46 percent. ⁽³⁶⁾ Export markets have proven more volatile than domestic ones, and globalization has increased the vulnerability of farmers to sudden price swings. ⁽³⁷⁾

Farmer Income is Declining

"This year's crops will generate just enough revenue to break even. That's nothing to live on."
- Joe White, farmer in Kansas ⁽³⁸⁾

Small family farms are defined by the USDA National Commission on Small Farmers as farmers with less than $250,000 gross receipts annually on which day-to-day labor and management is provided by the farmer and/or the farm family that owns the production or owns, or leases, the productive assets. ⁽³⁹⁾ Approximately 94 percent of all US farmers fit into this category. $250,000 may appear quite large amount of money at first, however, after production costs are deducted, this is barely sufficient to provide a net farm income of $23,159.

More than 80 percent of a farmer's gross sales go into farming expenses. According to a recent USDA census, total farm production expenses increased from $130,779,261 to $150,590,993 - roughly 15 percent. ⁽⁴⁰⁾ On the other hand, net farm income ⁽⁴¹⁾ decreased by almost 12 percent during 1998 - 2000. ⁽⁴²⁾

Many who inherited farms are faced with the tough decision of whether or not to continue farming. In the years 1994 to 1996, about 25 percent of all US hog farmers, 10 percent of all grain farmers, and 10 percent of all dairy farmers went out of business. ⁽⁴³⁾ With little profit from the field, many of them had to let go of farms that had been in their families for generations. ⁽⁴⁴⁾ As the economic pressures of farming have intensified, the rate of suicides has jumped, as shame and severe depression have increased among farmers. ⁽⁴⁵⁾

The Death of the Family Farm

Small farms contribute to "a diversity of ownership, cropping systems, landscapes, biological diversity, culture, and traditions" as well as environmental benefits and economic opportunities for rural communities. ⁽⁴⁶⁾ The crisis in American agriculture has endangered rural communities. As corporate agribusiness has replaced the owner-operated farms and ranches and, as farm size and absentee ownership has increased, social conditions in the local farming communities have deteriorated. ⁽⁴⁷⁾ Despite the annual influx of billions of taxpayers dollars to the farm sector, the US Department of Agriculture reports that since 1945, the number of farms has declined by two-thirds in the US, while the area in farmland acres has remained the same. ⁽⁴⁸⁾

The Bureau of Labor Statistics of the US Department of Labor has projected that the number of people engaged in family farming will decrease from 1,307,712 in the year 1998 to 1,135,018 in 2008, a 13.2 percent decrease. This is the largest projected job loss among all occupations in 1998 - 2008. ⁽⁴⁹⁾ Farming towns are in deep poverty. The newest data on income levels in each of the nation's 3,110 counties from the US Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis, shows that only one among the poorest 50 counties is a metropolitan county; most are very rural, agriculturally dependent counties. ⁽⁵⁰⁾ The average farm-operator household in 1990 earned 14 percent of its income from the farm and the rest from off-farm employment. In the same year, 22 percent of US farm-operator households had incomes below the official poverty threshold, twice the rate of all US families. ⁽⁵¹⁾ Not finding economic opportunities in farming and rural areas, younger generations are leaving farming and rural towns.

The United States now has more prisoners than farmers. According to the Washington-based Justice Policy Institute the American prison population recently topped two million. According to the last farm census, there were 1.9 million farms in the US. In other words, there are more people behind bars that there were behind the wheel of a tractor. ⁽⁵²⁾ An aging trend has also been observed in the farm and ranching population. ⁽⁵³⁾ According to the 1997 Census of Agriculture, between 1992 and 1997 the number of farmers and ranchers age 25 or younger decreased by 25 percent, and the number aged 25 to 34 decreased by 28 percent. ⁽⁵⁴⁾ According to the government statistics, nearly half of all the US farmers are older than 55 - the average age is 53 - while just eight percent are younger than 35.

The fundamental reason for the existence of most rural communities is to support those engaged in agriculture. But it takes people, not just production, to support a community. Larger farms tend to bypass rural communities in buying the production inputs and marketing their products. Also a rural community is far more than a rural economy. It takes people to fill the church pews and school desks, to serve on town councils, to justify investments in health care and other social services, and to do the things that make a community. The decreasing number of family farms chronicles the deaths of rural communities, where family farm dollars paid to equipment dealers, grocery stores, and gas stations recirculated through the local economy four times. ⁽⁵⁵⁾

Opportunity for Change

American family farmers, the supposed beneficiaries of the trade agreements, marched with the workers and environmentalists in Seattle and put the issue of the globalization of agriculture on the agenda of social and economic justice. Leland Swenson, president of the National Farmers Union at a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing said, "the outcome of previous trade talks - coupled with the Freedom to Farm program - have left US farmers and ranchers too exposed to the volatile global marketplace. The changes have put US producers at a disadvantage compared to competitors. The turbulent market has left family farmers and ranchers hanging by a thread. We will strongly oppose any effort to limit the level of direct aid governments may provide to producers." ⁽⁵⁶⁾

This opposition to proposed trade rules is growing. At the Rally for the Rural America held last year in Washington, DC, family farmers and grassroots organizations came together to provoke congressional action on America's deepening farm and rural crisis. The diversity of organizations backing the rally signaled how widespread the concern is over the future of rural America.

The message of this growing resistance is clear: It is time to stop artificially expanding trade without regard for the consequences. The 1996 Farm Bill, driven by America's obligations under the trade negotiations, was a complete failure. It failed to generate export-led growth, and it transferred risks to farmers while cutting their income. The costs implicit in future WTO and other trade negotiations are potentially huge. These costs include the loss of livelihoods of tens of thousands of American farm families. Given the absence of benefits, the American government should not trade away American family farmers' protections.

The model that drives overproduction in the US and drives American farmers off the land is the same model that drives peasants off the land in the Third World. ⁽⁵⁷⁾ For a fraction of the amount American taxpayers currently pay, it should be possible to design a system that preserves family farming and builds a healthy rural America without damaging the ability of farmers in other countries to make a living.

The growing opposition is beginning to build a blueprint for the New American Farm - based on the multifunctional aspect of agriculture, which produces both public and private goods and services. The nation's agriculture should provide national food security. This would guarantee that no nation is starved into submission by another nation. Agriculture should ensure national food equity so that no one goes hungry regardless of ability to buy food. Agriculture should be designed to protect the natural environment, to protect the soil, earth, air, and water that are absolute necessities of life on earth. All of these are legitimate public goods and services, invaluable to society, but cannot be provided by the private economy of free trade.

References

1. www.cairnsgroup.org/meetings/min22_communique.html
2. "Bush Argues for Food Exports," Associated Press, June 22, 2001.
3. Roger Bernard, "Washington Watch: Bipartisan Push for Trade Promotion Authority," www.agwatch.org, August 27, 2001.
4. Ibid.
5. Aileen Kwa and Walden Bello, "Guide to the Agreement on Agriculture: Technicalities and Trade Tricks Explained," Focus on the Global South, December 1998.
6. Ibid.
7. "A Time to Act: Report of the USDA National Commission on Small Farmers," USDA National Commission on Small Farmers, January 1998.
8. Steve Suppan, "How Will the Free Trade Area of the Americas Impact Agriculture?," Institute for Agriculture and Trade, 2001.
9. Sophia Murphy, "US Agricultural Trade Policy and WTO, "Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, April 1998.
10. "Guide to the Agreement on Agriculture," op. cit.
11. Gigi DiGiacomo, "Agricultural Market Liberalization in the United States," Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, October 1998.
12. "Guide to the Agreement on Agriculture," op. cit.
13. "How Will the Free Trade Area of the Americas Impact Agriculture?," op. cit.
14. "House Approves $5.5 Billion in Emergency Aid for Farmers," The New York Times, June 27, 2001.
15. Steve Suppan, "Agriculture and Food Security Under the Free Trade Area of the Americas Negotiations," Institute for Agricultural Trade and Policy, 1998.
16. "US Agricultural Trade Policy and WTO," op. cit.
17. "Farm Aid Crops Up in Unlikely Pockets," Chicago Tribune, July 3, 2001.
18. Ibid.
19. "Most Farm Aid Goes to the Powerful," Associated Press, September 10, 2001.
20. "House Approves $5.5 Billion in Emergency Aid," op. cit.
21. "Presidential Candidates Propose Farm Remedies in Iowa," CNN.com, August 4, 1999.
22. "Farm Activists Report Successful Seattle Protest Events," WTOWATCH.org, December 7, 1999.
23. William Heffernan, "Report to the National Farmers Union: Consolidation in the Food and Agricultural System," February 5, 1999.
24. Ibid.
25. "Corporate Farming Notes," Center for Rural Affairs, September 2001.
26. Ibid.
27. "Globalization, Inc. Concentration in Corporate Power: The Unmentioned Agenda," ETC Group communiquÃ©, July/August 2001.
28. "Corporate Farming Notes," op. cit.
29. Karen Lehman and Al Krebs, "Control of the World's Food Supply," in The Case against the Global Economy, eds. Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996).
30. "Ventura to Push Farm Agenda in June Trip to Washington," Star Tribune, June 8, 1999.
31. "How Will the Free Trade Area of the Americas Impact Agriculture?," op. cit.
32. "Table 4: Indexes of Prices Received and Paid by Farmers, US Average," Economic Research Service/USDA, www.ers.usda.gov/publications/agoutlook/may2000/ao271k.pdf
33. "Crop Agriculture Faces Long-Term Price and Income Problems," testimony of Daryll E. Ray before the House Committee on Agriculture, February 14, 2001.
34. "Table 2: US Agricultural Exports: Quantity and Value of Major Commodity Groups, October-September 1980/1981-1999/2000," Economic Research Service/USDA, www.ers.usda.gov/data/fatus/data/fy2000/table2.htm
35. "Total Value of US Agricultural Trade," Economic Research Service/USDA, www.ers.usda.gov/data/fatus/otherfatusdata.htm.
36. Robert Scott, "Exported to Death: the Failure of Agricultural Deregulation," Briefing Paper No. 86, Economic Policy Institute, 2000.
37. "Exported to Death," op. cit.
38. "Economic Good Times Not Rolling Down on the American Farmers," CNN.com, June 30, 1999.
39. "A Fair Income For Farmers," Agricultural Outlook, Economic Research Service/USDA, May 2000.
40. "Farm Income Down in 2000," Agricultural Outlook, Economic Research Service/USDA, May 2000.
41. Net farm income is the difference between cash receipts and cash expenses. This cash-based concept measures the total income farmers receive in a given year, regardless of the year in which the market output was the produced. It indicates the availability of funds to cover expenses such as operating costs, finance capital investments and savings, service debts, maintaining living standards, and paying taxes.
42. "Farm Income Down in 2000," op. cit.
43. "Agriculture and Food Security Under the Free Trade Area of the Americas Negotiations," op. cit.
44. The Global Banquet: Politics of Food, video, Maryknoll Productions, 2001.
45. "Hard Economic Times Bring Depression, Shame for Struggling Farmers," CNN.com, May 25, 2000.
46. "A Time to Act," USDA National Commission on Small Farms, www.reeusda.gov/agsys/smallfarm/report.htm, January 1998.
47. "The Case for Redirecting US Farm Policy," Center for Rural Affairs, http://www.cfra.org/resources/case_for_redirect.htm
48. Neal Peterson and Nora Brooks, "The Changing Concentration of US Agricultural Production During the Twentieth Century" Fourteenth Annual Report to Congress on the Status of Family Farm, no. 27, Economic Research Service/USDA, July 1993.
49. "Farmers Projected to Have Largest Job Loss in 1998-2008," Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Department of Labor, stats.bls.gov/opub/ted/2000/feb/wk2/art02.htm.
50. "The Latest Data on Rural Poverty," Center for Rural Affairs, www.cfra.org/newsletter/2001_07.htm#The%20Latest%20Data, July 2001.
51. "Control of the World's Food Supply," op. cit.
52. "Prisoners and Plowshares: Who Will Feed the Inmates?" Rural Advancement Foundation International, August 31, 2000.
53. "Cultivating a New Generation of Farmers and Ranchers," Center for Rural Affairs, June 2001.
54. Ibid.
55. "Control of the World's Food Supply," op. cit.
56. "NFU says WTO Agenda Must Preserve the Right to Set Domestic Farm Policy," WTOWATCH.org, October 1, 1999.
57. Peter Rosset, "The Multiple Functions and Benefits of Small Farm Agriculture in the Context of Global Trade Negotiations," Food First Policy Brief No. 4 (Oakland, CA: Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1999).
Originally published as a Food First Backgrounder Fall 2001 Vol 7. No. 4

# # #

Open Fire and Open Markets: Strategy of an Empire

Mon, 05 Jul 2004 20:30:16 -0400

By Anuradha Mittal
June 2003
"The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps."
-- THOMAS FRIEDMAN, THE LEXUS AND THE OLIVE TREE

Once, empires were built through direct conquest. Armies plundered their way across continents, claiming to bring the light of civilization to the savages of dark continents. Beneath it all, always, was the dispossession of millions for the enrichment of a few.
Imperial America's foreign policy is no different. With the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States emerged as the uncontested solo superpower in the world. Having achieved a "pre-eminence not enjoyed by even the greatest empires of the past,"(1) the US is focused on securing its power globally, through both military and market interventions. (2) America's "war for freedom" or "war on terrorism" is at one with its expansionary goals for the market: open invasion in some places, and open markets everywhere! Successive US administrations have used the rhetoric of economic freedom and opportunity to describe this policy: "free trade," "liberalization," "deregulation," "globalization." It is pushed -- when necessary at the point of a gun -- for countries the world over. This is the new Monroe Doctrine, underlying the empire's foreign policy -- that the United States will dominate affairs around the world -- expressed here in terms of economics, with the ubiquitous military underpinnings left discreetly in the background, unspoken, because there is no need to speak of them.

Recolonization of the South
by the US is a carefully crafted
strategy.

Eruptions of armed aggression by the US should not distract us from the underlying logic of economic imperialism. Recolonization of the South by the US is a carefully crafted strategy. First it cut its UN contributions. Then it shrank aid to the Third World, using its trade agenda as a justification. It uses both carrots -- trade agreements for acquiescent states like Israel and Jordan, military aid and graft for once-"friendly" Iraq and Afghanistan -- and sticks -- embargoes and bombs for noncompliant nations such as Cuba and out-of-favor Afghanistan and Iraq. Today we see an escalation of both these techniques.
Open Invasion: The Truth Behind Operation Iraqi Freedom

"Even though the war has not completely ended, we are already started on the process of rebuilding Iraq....Thanks to the speedy success of the military operation, the task we face has turned out to be very different. There is no humanitarian crisis in Iraq." (3)
-- DEPUTY SECRETARY OF DEFENSE PAULWOLFOWITZ'S TESTIMONY TO THE SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE, WASHINGTON, DC, MAY 22, 2003

The imperialist big picture for Iraq goes beyond reconstruction. It is to create a dream economy, completely privatized and foreign-owned, within a year of invasion and without waiting for a new government. Tim Carney, senior adviser to the Iraqi ministry of industry and minerals, said the coalition planned to start privatizations as soon as an interim administration was in place and heralded privatization as "the right direction for twenty-first-century Iraq." (4)
As the US set up Iraq's interim administration (headed by an American official), the war on Iraq was shadowed by a battle among American corporations to win reconstruction contracts. Headlines of entrepreneurial websites read: "Iraq Construction Spells Opportunity. Small Businesses are lining up to win Contracts for the Rebuilding of Iraq: Have you taken a Number Yet?" (5) Lobbyists with resumes reflecting years with the CIA and the military appeared to advise and open highly lucrative doors for their clients in postwar Iraq. One such adviser declared, "Iraq is going to be Afghanistan on steroids as far as nation-building is concerned. There are a lot of opportunities emerging in a full range of sectors." (6)

Remaking the global oil
market is not necessarily the endgame:
rebuilding Iraq the way corporations want is.

Not all such opportunities are open to all. Before the war, in early March, USAID secretly asked six US companies to submit bids for $900 million in government contracts to repair and reconstruct water systems, roads, bridges, schools, and hospitals. Coincidentally, the six companies -- Bechtel Group Inc., Fluor Corp., Halliburton Co., Louis Berger Group Inc., Parsons Corp., and Washington Group International Inc. -- were also generous contributors of $3.6 million dollars in individual, PAC, and soft money donations between 1999 and 2002, 66 percent of which went to Republicans. (7)
In late March, the first contract was awarded, without competition or detailed explanations of total cost, to Vice President Dick Cheney's old employer, the Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) unit of Halliburton Co. Halliburton contributed $708,770 between 1999 and 2002, 95 percent of it to Republicans. (8) USAID also awarded a $4.8 million contract to manage the Umm Qasr ports in southern Iraq to Stevedoring Services of America (SSA), a private company and the country's largest marine terminal operator, (9) 77 percent of whose contributions between 1999 and 2002 went to Republicans. (10)
Bechtel landed the largest USAID contract: an initial award of $34.6 million, with funding of up to $680 million over 18 months subject to congressional approval. (11) Former Secretary of State George Shultz, a Bechtel board member, is also chair of the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.
Other Bechtel executives with Bush administration ties include senior vicepresident Jack Sheehan, who sits on the Defense Policy Board formed to advise Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Bechtel chairman Riley Bechtel, a member of the President's Export Council, which advises the White House on international trade matters. (12)
The most hotly contested contracts will be to rebuild Iraq's oil industry. The empire has left the selling of Iraq's oil resources -- the world's second-largest -- to Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi and former Iraqi petroleum ministry officials. Last year, Chalabi, whose close ties with Richard Perle, Rumsfeld, and Cheney predate the current Bush administration, met with US oil executives. Afterward, Chalabi made it clear he would give preference to an American-led oil consortium, and suggested that previous deals with Russia and France totaling billions of dollars could be voided. (13)
But remaking the global oil market is not necessarily the endgame: rebuilding Iraq the way corporations want is. Transfer of public goods to private hands in Iraq is intended as an initial step in widespread privatization in the region. Conservative arguments have tended this way for months. An op-ed in the Wall Street Journal headlined "Taking Iraq Private," by Robert McFarlane, national security adviser during the Reagan administration, and Michael Bleyzer, chief executive of an equity fund management company, argued that "the US and its allies would be well advised to put together a team of private sector business leaders as a 'steering committee' to supervise and monitor economic restructuring." (14)
Similarly, in a paper presented last fall at a conference convened by the right-wing Heritage Foundation (and revised in March 2003), Ariel Cohen and Gerald O'Driscoll wrote: "To rehabilitate and modernize its economy, a post-Saddam government will need to move simultaneously on a number of economic policy fronts, utilizing the experience of privatization campaigns and structural reform in other countries." The authors assert what they call Lesson No. 1: "Privatization Works Everywhere." (15) This despite recent signs from, of all places, the World Bank, that privatization hasn't lived up to any of its promises. (16)
Privatization does work for the empire, though. Almost overnight, Baghdad has been turned into a vast emporium of imported goods in a McDonaldized Iraq, ruled by western overlords and serviced by US corporations. And there is the other side to the invasion of Iraq. While contracts have been guided like smart bombs into the laps of large corporations, thousands of Iraqi civilians have been terrorized, humiliated, maimed, injured, and killed through British and American bombing and gunfire in civilian areas. Communities and families have been devastated by the military invasion, rivers have been polluted, and disease and hunger are rampant in the country. Food warehouses, electrical grids, and hospitals have been ransacked and burned to the ground.
The Middle East: On the Threshold of Change?

President Bush linked war and trade in his commencement speech at the University of South Carolina on May 9. After trumpeting victory in Iraq, he unveiled his plans to create a US-Middle East Free Trade Area (MEFTA) within a decade, (17) the proposed goal being "to bring the Middle East into an expanding circle of opportunity, to provide hope for the people who live in that region. As trade expands and knowledge spreads to the Middle East... all peoples of that region will see a new day of justice and a new day of prosperity." (18)
Quite simply, imperial America needs to deliver the Middle East to free trade. The region includes many of the most closed and protected economies in the world. Half of the 22 members of the Arab League, including Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, and Algeria, remain outside the World Trade Organization (WTO). Most of the region's countries have a long-standing economic boycott against Israel, while Iran, Syria, and Libya face US economic sanctions. Further, the region's import tariffs are among the highest in the world, averaging more than 20 percent, with strict restrictions on foreign investment.
Mr. Bush is keen to help so-called "reforming" countries negotiate bilateral investment and "free" trade treaties and become members of the WTO. The US wants to conclude a trade pact with Morocco by the end of 2003, and hopes to start negotiations with Bahrain soon. Egypt was to get a trade pact as a reward for its help in the Iraq war (and in part because the US views Egypt as the heart of the Arab world). (19) However, when Egypt chose not to join the US complaint at the WTO against Europe's ban on genetically modified foods, the US retaliated by suspending trade talks -- a harsh reminder that "you are either with us or against us."
International financial institutions -- the empire's economic generals -- are also racing to bring "free" trade initiatives to the Middle East. The World Economic Forum (WEF), comprising high-profile corporate and government leaders, organized the "Global Reconciliation" summit in Amman, Jordan from June 21 to 23, 2003. President Bush dispatched Secretary of State Colin Powell and US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick to seize this "historic opportunity" to expand freedom and increase prosperity in the Middle East. European Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy emphasized the need for a roadmap to build trade in the region. "If the roadmap works, and peace returns, then Bob Zoellick and I must be the road construction workers," he said. (20)

Quite simply, imperial America
needs to deliver the Middle
East to free trade.

The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), eager to work in the region, have scheduled their next annual meeting for September 2003 in Dubai's Gulf City. (21) The IMF dedicated the March issue of its quarterly magazine, Finance and Development, to the region, (22) with article after article advising the region's countries to dismantle their social protection systems and reduce their public sectors. Finally, trade ministers from a select two dozen of the WTO's 146 members, including Zoellick and Lamy, met at a WTO mini-ministerial in Egypt on June 21 to 22, 2003, in preparation for the WTO September 2003 ministerial in Cancún, Mexico.
Open Season on the Poor: The War At Home

"Their goals may or may not coincide with the best interests of the American people. Think of the divergence of interests, for example, between the grunts who are actually fighting this war, who have been eating sand and spilling their blood in the desert, and the power brokers who fought like crazy to make the war happen and are profiteering from it every step of the way."
-- BOB HERBERT, "SPOILS OFWAR," NEW YORK TIMES, APRIL 10, 2003

Since September 11, 2001 Mr. Bush has encouraged consumers to spend beyond their means as a solution to US economic ills. He has done likewise. The federal budget surplus of $127 billion at the beginning of his term in 2001 became a deficit of $455 billion in the 2003 fiscal year, the largest ever and $150 billion higher than predicted by the administration just five months earlier. (23) Trillionplus- dollar tax cuts for the rich and an increase in government spending on military and domestic security are some of the main causes behind the deficit.

The World Bank indicates
privatization hasn't lived up
to any of its promises.

The defense industry has seen a considerable return on its $8.7 million in contributions to the Republican Party during the 2000 elections. (24) The military budget for fiscal year 2003 was increased by $45.5 billion, the largest single increase since 1966. The total annual US military budget will be $396.1 billion -- 26 times larger than the combined military budgets for the countries considered "rogue states" by the administration: Cuba, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Libya. (25) Congress also approved a $75 billion request from Bush to finance warrelated costs, which covers only the first six months in Iraq. Some estimate that the combined costs of war and reconstruction will be closer to $200 billion. (26)
The military buildup and the costs of war are being paid out of funds that could be used to address hunger, poverty, and health care needs, both at home and abroad. (27) Left behind is a nation where family farmers face foreclosure and millions go hungry every night, and where the social safety net has been dismantled. And with the rise in unemployment, the poor have few options left.
One remaining option is America's military, supposedly an "all-volunteer" force. Micah Wright, a former US Army Airborne Ranger, describes a military made up of people who "volunteer" because it's their only chance of escaping poverty. African-Americans, 12 percent of the population, make up 26 percent of the Army. The numbers are similarly skewed for Latinos and Native Americans. (28)
Then there's the "No Child Left Behind in Education" Act, which took effect on Jan. 8, 2002, (29) and which requires high schools to facilitate the military recruitment of their students as a condition of receiving federal education funding.
Large deficits created by an unjust war and a desire to privatize the world have led to lost jobs, lower wages, and fewer business opportunities in America. Fourth of July weekend had a bleak start, with unemployment rates at the highest level (6.4 percent) in more than nine years. (30) In June alone, 30,000 jobs were eliminated. May job losses, initially reported at 17,000, were revised to 70,000. (31) Unemployment claims have been trending up: in the first week of war, 445,000 people filed new claims for unemployment benefits. (32)
The budget resolution passed in March 2003 indicates cuts to programs from Medicaid to school lunches, college loans to veterans' benefits. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that reductions in mandatory programs for the elderly, veterans, and the poor will amount to $226 billion over 10 years, with another $210 billion lopped off discretionary programs. (33) This total of $475 billion is about equal to the tax reduction Mr. Bush has offered to the top 1 percent of earners in America. These reductions in the social safety net would average 4 percent over 10 years, meaning, for example, that in the worst years, the budget for Medicaid would be cut by 7 percent. This when more than 43 million Americans already have no health insurance and the US already has the highest proportion of children born into poverty in the developed world (22 percent). The government has unilaterally withdrawn from the war on poverty, choosing to redeploy its might in an altogether different war: a war on the poor.
An Open Ending

In March 2003, Mr. Bush alluded to the possibility of reprisals if Mexico didn't vote America's way in the UN Security Council on the question of Iraq. (34) In July 2003, the administration cut off military aid to 35 friendly countries in retaliation for their support of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and refusal to exempt US soldiers from the ICC's jurisdiction. (35)
Unconstrained by any system of global governance, the US has rejected human rights treaties it finds inconvenient and recklessly indulged in an illegal military occupation of Iraq, and it maintains a string of murderous embargos. And the empire makes no bones about its desire to attack and "regime-change" Syria, Iran, Libya, North Korea, possibly Saudi Arabia, and even Cuba.
The American empire's callous quest for global dominance is generating resistance. (36) A Pew poll asking 38,000 people in 44 countries what they think of America shows they don't trust or identify with American aims or leadership. Rather the opposite: Pew paints a picture of "hearts and minds being lost, of allies flaking away, of nations like Japan, Korea, and Italy beginning to cross to the other side of the street." (37)
And as Washington's foreign policy loses legitimacy and is increasingly viewed even among its allies as imperial domination, a powerful global civil society movement -- the movement for peace and justice -- is forming against US unilateralism, militarism, and economic hegemony.
Anti-war movements in both North and South are linking up and challenging the WTO, FTAA, NAFTA, and other trade agreements that constitute an economic war on the working poor around the world. Peasants, indigenous peoples, women, and workers are uniting against trade agreements that make governments cede the people's sovereignty to corporations. And a movement for political and economic sovereignty is growing in Iraq. Even in the face of occupation following a brutal invasion, tens of thousands march regularly in the streets and fields of Iraq, demanding US troops quit the country and allow the citizens to take charge of the nation-building.
Against a future of war, injustice, and permanent crisis, the vast majority of people in this planet oppose empire. They say:
Enough.
No to war.
End the tyranny of free trade and the
WTO.
No to FTAA.
Another world is possible. (38)
Notes

1 John Bellamy Foster, "Imperial America and War," Monthly Review, May 2003.
2 Peter Rosset, "A Weak Empire Is a Dangerous Empire: War and Free Trade," www.foodfirst.org/media/opeds/2003/warandfreetrade.html
3 http://www.defenselink.mil/speeches/2003/sp20030522-depsecdef0223.html
4 http://uk.news.yahoo.com/030612/323/e25kb.html
5 Joshua Kurlantzick, "Iraq Construction Spells Opportunity," April 14, 2003, http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/0,4621,307806,00.html
6 http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0403/041103nj1.htm
7 http://www.opensecrets.org/news/rebuilding_iraq/index.asp
8 Ibid.
9 Mark Gongloff, "Iraq Rebuilding Contracts Awarded," March 25, 2003, http://money.cnn.com/2003/03/25/news/companies/war_contracts/
10 http://www.opensecrets.org/news/rebuilding_iraq/index.asp
11 Ibid.
12 http://abcnews.go.com/sections/business/US/iraqreconstruction_030422.html
13 Sandy Tolan and Jason Felch, "Beyond Regime Change," Los Angeles Times, December 1, 2002, http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/2002/1201beyond.htm
14 Robert McFarlane and Michael Bleyzer, "Taking Iraq Private," Wall Street Journal, March 27, 2003.
15 Ariel Kohn and Gerald Driscoll, "The Road to Economic Prosperity for a Post-Saddam Iraq," Backgrounder 1633, the Heritage Foundation, March 5, 2003.
16 Michael M. Phillips, "The World Bank Wonders about Utility Privatizations," Wall Street Journal, July 21, 2003.
17 http://uscnews.sc.edu/comm129f.html
18 Ibid.
19 Edward Alden, "US Beats Egypt with Trade Stick," Financial Times, June 29, 2003.
20 "EU/Trade/Middle East: Mr. Lamy Speaks of Prospects for Iraq, Amman," Agence Europe, June 23, 2003.
21 http://www.imf.org/external/am/2003/
22 "The Middle East on the Threshold of Change," Finance and Development, March 2003, www.imf.org/fandd
23 David Rosenbaum, "White House Sees a $455 Billion Gap in '03 Budget," New York Times, July 16, 2003.
24 www.opensecrets.org/industries/Indus.asp?Ind=D
25 www.armscontrolcenter.org/budget/glance03/html
26 Rick Montgomery, "War With Iraq: Its Aftermath Might Be Quite Costly," Kansas City Star, March 1, 2003.
27 See www.costofwar.com for quantifiable effects of war.
28 Micah Ian Wright, You Back the Attack! We'll Bomb Who We Want, New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003.
29 P.L. 107-110; 20 USC.S. 6301 et.seq. (2002)
30 Kenneth Gilpin, "Jobless Rate Rises to 6.4 Per Cent, Highest in More Than 9 Years," New York Times, July 3, 2003.
31 Ibid.
32 David Bacon, "The War's Surgical Strike on Students," April 7, 2003.
33 http://www.cbpp.org/7-15-03bud2.htm
34 Paul Krugman, "Let Them Hate as Long as They Fear," New York Times, March 7, 2003
35 Jim Lobe, "US Punishes 35 Countries for Signing onto International Court," IPS, July 1, 2003. The ICC was set up to investigate and prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in cases where countries with direct ties to such crimes are unable or unwilling to prosecute the crimes themselves. With tens of thousands of troops in scores of countries across Eurasia and in and around the Gulf, the US worries that it might become a target for the ICC.
36 Walden Bello, "Pax Romana Versus Pax Americana: Contrasting Strategies for Imperial Management," http://www.focusweb.org/popups/articleswindow.php?id=311.
37 Peter Preston, "A New US Poll Shows that the World Is Falling Out of Love with America," The Guardian, December 9, 2002.
38 "Derail the 5th Ministerial of the WTO," call of the Hemispheric and Global Assembly Against the FTAA and the WTO, Mexico City, May 11--12, 2003.
Originally published as a Food First Backgrounder Summer 2003 Vol 9. No. 3
# # #

Giving Away the Farm: The 2002 Farm Bill

Wed, 06 Oct 2004 21:30:34 -0400

By Anuradha Mittal
June 2002
After about 14 months of hearings, conferences, and deliberations, President Bush signed the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002 on May 13. The $248.6 billion bill increases taxpayer spending on agriculture by more than 80 percent over the 1996 farm bill, the Freedom to Farm Act, which made a tentative attempt to wean farmers from the system of price supports and commodity payments, as the U.S. was bound to do under its World Trade Organization (WTO) obligations. While the theme six years ago was freedom, the new farm bill will force American taxpayers to cough up at least $190 billion over the next 10 years, about $83 billion more than under current programs. The bill proposes a complex program. And the bill focuses mainly on eight "program" crops (cotton, wheat, corn, soybeans, rice, barley, oats, and sorghum), and thus will largely benefit bread-basket states - which also happen to be swing states in the midterm elections. Representative Larry Combest, the House Agriculture Committee Chairman, hailed American farmers as the bill's winners.
The new farm bill does have some potentially good provisions, including the Farmers' Market Nutrition Program, help for beginning farmers and ranchers, mandatory country-of-origin labeling for all meats and produce, the creation of an Under-Secretary for Civil Rights at the USDA, and a doubling of the annual funding for the Community Food Projects (from $2.5 million to $5 million). The bill covers food stamps, and it reinstates some benefits for adult legal immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for at least five years, with no residency requirement for their children and the disabled. It also increases farm conservation spending, which pays farmers to keep their land out of development, to reduce runoff that pollutes drinking water supplies, and to preserve wetlands and wildlife habitats. However, more than 50 percent ($9 billion of the $17.1 billion) of the conservation funds are for the Environmental Quality Incentive Program (EQIP), which, to the chagrin of grassroots farm organizations, allows individual operators, including the nation's corporate factory farms, to receive $450,000 over six years.
But the bill's potential for good pales in comparison to the damage it will do. Overall, the new bill fails the nation's family farmers, consumers, taxpayers, and environment. It robs the poor to pay the rich. It further destabilizes family farmers and rural communities around the world. And it fails to strengthen food security. This backgrounder explores these faults.
Welfare for Corporate Agribusiness

President Bush asserted on signing the bill that -- it will promote farmer independence, and preserve the farm way of life for generations. It helps America's farmers, and therefore, it helps Americans.-- However, a comparison between the 1930s and today hardly supports President Bush's words.(1) Then, 25 percent of the population lived on the nation's 6 million farms; today, our 2 million farms are home to 2 percent of the population. Small family farms have been overwhelmingly replaced by large commercial farms, with 8 percent of farms accounting for 72 percent of sales, thanks in large part to policies similar to those being deepened with this latest farm bill.(2)
The 2002 farm bill can be best described as agribusiness welfare. The federal crop subsidies will go not to farmers who resemble John Steinbeck's Joad family, but to rich recipients, such as fourteen members of the Congress that crafted the law; wealthy American corporations like Westvaco (a paper products conglomerate), Chevron, and the John Hancock Insurance Company; and top Time-Warner entertainment executive Ted Turner, ABC correspondent San Donaldson, and billionaire David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan Bank.(3) Most family farms will get nothing but a tax bill. The farm bill only further tilts the playing field against them.(4)
Down on the Farm

While the farm bill is a big bonanza for large producers of favored crops such as corn, soybeans, and cotton, small family farms are shortchanged. It is no exaggeration to say the new farm bill gives away the farm.
The bill ignores issues lobbied for by family farmers and grassroots farm organizations, such as a ban on meatpacker ownership of livestock , a family farmer-focused EQIP, and increases in farm income through higher loan rates or support prices. Instead of a commonsense annual cap on payments, it allows a ridiculously large cap: only farmers with adjusted gross incomes of $2.5 million or more cannot receive subsidy payments.(5) Also, under a compromise agreement the Senate made with the House, top payments are set at $360,000 instead of $250,000. The problem with this cap is that it is easily circumvented: rich, corporate farmers simply use generic commodity certificates that permit unlimited price-support payments.
The new bill only compounds the existing inequities. The top 10 percent of farm-subsidy recipients collect two-thirds of the money, and the bottom 80 percent get just one-sixth.(6) Forty-seven percent of commodity payments will go to large farms with average household incomes of $135,000. Moreover, most crops are not eligible for subsidy payments. For example, in California, only 9 percent of California's 74,000 farms actually received subsidy payments since 1996; $1.8 billion have gone to fewer than 3,500 farms.
Most of the specialty crops that fuel the state's $29 billion farm machine-such as grapes, peaches, plums, nectarines, strawberries, almonds, walnuts, and vegetables -don't get a penny of aid. The bulk of the money goes to support cotton, rice, wheat, and barley. Of the top 20 recipients in California, 7 are big cotton growers and 11 are big rice growers who take in an average of $596,000 in crop subsidies a year.(7) It costs $700 to $800 to produce an acre of California rice that fetches just $650 in the world market!
Iowa, home of Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin, wins the biggest chunk of subsidy money, $1.7 billion. And Texas, home of the House Committee's ranking Republican, Larry Combest, who wrote the farm bill, and Democrat Charles Stenholm, who also sits on the House Agriculture Committee, would receive the largest increase, an additional $582 million a year, double the amount in the 1996 law. Over the past five years in Texas, 36,200 farms got $6.6 billion in subsidies while the remaining $1.1 billion was divided among 181,000 small farmers.(8)
The current level of subsidies has already led to overproduction, which lowers prices. Today more than 40 percent of net farm income comes from the federal government, inviting those aiming for the largest possible federal payments to plant the highest-yielding crops, fence post to fence post, with as much fertilizer as the ground will hold. Shoveling on higher subsidies will only worsen matters.
Further subsidizing well-heeled agribusiness interests will also ensure the continued exodus of independent family farmers from the land. Taxpayer money will bankroll the nation's largest farmers, helping them buy up struggling neighboring family farms and creating a "plantation effect" that turns independent farmers into sharecroppers. According to Bill Christison, President of the National Family Farm Coalition and the Missouri Rural Crisis Center, losers in the new farm bill are the nation's independent family farmers who are struggling to stay on their farms and the taxpayers who will be footing the bill for record high payment levels.(9)
New World Markets for American Corporations

Americans cannot eat all that America's farmers and ranchers produce. And therefore, it makes sense to sell more food abroad. Today, 25 percent of U.S. farm income is generated by exports, which means that access to foreign markets is crucial to the livelihood of our farmers and ranchers. Let me put it as plainly as I can: we want to be selling our beef and our corn and our beans to people around the world who need to eat. -President Bush(10)
With American markets already saturated, the U.S. is aggressively pushing to open up foreign markets-with great success. Already, one out of three acres planted in the United States produces food or fiber destined for export, and one quarter of American farm sales are now exports.(11) Under the 2002 Farm Bill Market Access Program, a total of $100 million has already been distributed to 67 U.S. trade groups for the purpose of promoting U.S. agricultural products in overseas markets. An additional $1.34 million in federal funds from the Quality Samples Program has been allocated to 17 trade groups to increase export sales by expanding into new agricultural markets.(12) The entire farm bill is based on the myth that trade will save the American farmer. Yet evidence from the last two decades shows that exports have not delivered on that promise.(13) Low farm commodity prices have only increased the profits of processors, exporters, and seed and chemical companies while destroying the livelihoods of family farmers.
Robin Hood in Reverse

Not only does the 2002 farm bill act as a welfare program for agribusiness, with U.S. taxpayers footing the bill, it also robs the world's poor. Wielding the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and international trade agreements, the U.S. is opening up foreign markets for exports by forcing poor countries to remove subsidies and lower tariffs. However, the U.S. shields itself from foreign competition by increasing its subsidies and maintaining tariffs. These measures have allowed the U.S. to dump its farm surplus on world markets. For example, the U.S. exports corn at prices 20 percent below the cost of production, and wheat at 46 percent below cost.(14) This has resulted in Mexican corn farmers being put out of business. More than 80 percent of Mexico's extreme poor live in rural areas, and more than 2 million are corn farmers. There is no way they can compete with subsidized American agribusiness.
A dramatic increase in U.S. agricultural subsidies will further jeopardize the livelihoods of Third World farmers. The new bill will stimulate an even greater domestic farm surplus, which the U.S. will then dump at prices even farther below the cost on world markets, depressing the global commodity prices of crops that developing countries count on while wiping out even more poor farmers. The result is a reverse Robin Hood effect-robbing the world's poor to enrich American agribusiness.
An example of this effect is trade in cotton, a principle commodity crop. New subsidies mean that many U.S. cotton growers-whose average net worth is $800,000-will receive half of their income from the government this year, though only a relatively small share of the farm population, just 25,000 of America's 2 million farmers, actually raise cotton.(15)
While subsidies will protect cotton growers in America from falling world prices, they will further depress prices by encouraging continued production, and thus cripple growers in Third World countries with no subsidies. U.S. farmers last year harvested a record crop of 9.74 billion pounds of cotton, aggravating a U.S. glut and pushing prices far below the breakeven price of most growers around the world. This costs African countries $250 million each year, according to a World Bank study published last February. The report estimates that the removal of U.S. subsidies would produce a drop in U.S. production that would lead to a shortterm rise in the world price of cotton and in turn would increase revenue to west and central African countries by about $250 million.(16)
These skewed economics are evident in the gap between cotton growers in the U.S.'s Mississippi Delta and in Africa's Niger Delta. America is the world's largest exporter of cotton-even though it is an inefficient and high-cost producer-and West Africa is the third largest, with both subject to market forces that have slashed prices by 66 percent since 1995, to 35 to 40 cents a pound. Armed with roughly $3.4 billion in subsidy checks that make up for any shortfall in the market, U.S. farmers reap about 70 to 75 cents a pound for cotton. The new farm bill will increase the amount of money a U.S. cotton farmer can count on making this year by at least 16 percent. At the same time, in Mali, where cotton makes up nearly half the nation's export revenue, the government is telling cotton farmers they will be getting about 10 percent less this year.
Even the World Bank President, James Wolfensohn, acknowledges that "these subsidies are crippling Africa's chance to export its way out of poverty."(17) Mark Malloch Brown, the head of the United Nations Development Program, estimates that U.S. farm subsidies cost poor countries about $50 billion a year in lost agricultural exports. By coincidence, that's about the same as the total of rich countries' aid to poor countries.
Free Trade Takes a Pounding

For decades, the United States has been the champion of free trade, pushing others to open their markets for manufactured goods and to stop subsidizing their farmers. Back in the 1990s, the U.S. pushed hard for reduced agricultural subsidies in the Uruguay Round of the World Trade Agreement. In September 2001, the U.S. backed a call issued by the Cairns Group, comprising 18 agricultural countries, for reform of the international trade system and elimination of all forms of trade-distorting subsidies. At the WTO ministerial in the Qatari capital of Doha in November 2001, the U.S. renewed its antisubsidy commitment. Only six months later, the U.S. has lavished an 80 percent aid increase on its own farm sector, making even the Europeans blush.
President Bush and Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman claim that the new bill does not violate U.S. commitments under the WTO. The new farm bill tries to make it appear that the boost to farm support is technically within the limits set by the WTO Agreement on Agriculture (AOA) by asking the USDA to keep the subsidies within the limit of $19.1 billion set in the AOA for the U.S. schedule of payments. The bill also increases by 80 percent support to farmers via so-called soil conservation programs that will benefit livestock and fruit and vegetable farms, which fall under the "green box" type of nonactionable subsidies in the AOA. But the U.S. Nobel Prize winner in Economics, Joseph Stiglitz, describes the new bill as "the perfect illustration of the Bush administration's hypocrisy on trade liberalization."(18)
The "peace clause" of the AOA (Article 13) provides that during the implementation period of the AOA, which lasts until the end of 2003, support and subsidies that don't conform to the provisions of the AOA may be challenged for violations of the WTO Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures. Theoretically, this provision could be used by other countries in raising a dispute against the United States at the WTO. In such a dispute process, the complainant would have to establish the case that U.S. spending has exceeded the 1992 level. However, WTO members were never required to report the levels of support they provided in 1992, and industrialized countries like the E.U. and the U.S. have not provided these figures. So the provision whereby other countries could pursue a WTO dispute with the U.S. is potentially toothless.
These double standards in the administration that professes allegiance to market economics and fiscal probity have unleashed a wave of indignation among countries whose development prospects largely depend on farm exports. These countries are appealing to the WTO for sanctions, threatening retaliation, and charging the U.S. with hypocrisy in taking a protectionist turn even as it urges other nations to open up further. The U.S. Trade Representative, Robert Zoellick, has acknowledged that "we deserve the criticism we have received."(19)
With the passage of the U.S. bill, the European Union, which spends more of its budget on its farm programs than on any other single program, is no longer the stand-out sinner. The Japanese, too, have reason to feel relieved. (Forty percent of European farm income comes from subsidies, as does 63 percent of Japanese farm income.)(20) However, the bill has infuriated America's trading partners. Canada is concentrating on fighting the U.S. farm bill at the WTO and through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Saskatchewan Premier Lorne Calvert has warned that if the Canadian federal government doesn't take serious action on the U.S. bill now, Canada's farm economy will deteriorate to the point where the country may no longer be able to feed itself.(21) Franz Fischler, the European Union's Commissioner for Agriculture, Rural Development, and Fisheries has said, "this legislation marks a blow for the credibility of U.S. policy in the WTO where the U.S. has presented a trade-oriented agenda wholly inconsistent with the new bill. We cannot negotiate on the basis of 'do as I say, not as I do.' "(22)
The Europeans are not alone in their criticism. Developing countries are up in arms as well. President Museveni of Uganda, speaking at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington, charged that government subsidies of farmers in rich countries contradict the Bush administration's own policy of "trade, not aid" by shutting out the products of poorer nations. South Africa, which has routinely obeyed the liberalizing edicts of the World Bank and the IMF and has removed state support for agriculture, is likely to join the European Union and other countries in objecting to the U.S. action.
The Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Lafer has threatened that Brazil will not hesitate to use all possible options of commercial defense to nullify the harmful effects of subsidized products and that it will file a complaint against the farm bill in the WTO, due to the harm the bill will inflict on Brazil's exports, especially soybeans. Brazil estimates it will lose $9.6 billion over the next four years as the new law drastically boosts U.S. exports, leading to the loss of market share for Brazil while driving down commodity prices. Argentina has joined forces with Brazil to seek the creation by the WTO Dispute Settlement Body of a panel to determine the legality of the bill under the rules of the multilateral trade system.(23) Chinese officials too have threatened retaliation.
The Cairns Group has declared that the bill is damaging to the international economy. Uruguay is analyzing the effects of the bill on its farm exports, while Caribbean governments are also examining the bill's effect on regional economies, especially its impact on Caribbean rice and sugar exports. In short, the bill throws a monkey wrench into the U.S. trade works and has instead started trade wars.
But Free Trade Is Not the Answer

One of the great myths perpetuated by the U.S. and E.U. governments for the past few decades is that free trade helps farmers and the poor. It does not! Attempts to leave farmers at the mercy of the free market only hasten their demise.
The focus on export crops for trade has meant increasing yields, with farmers pouring on pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. Many have stopped rotating their crops, instead devoting every acre to corn, wheat, or some other commodity crop and creating vast monocultures that require still more chemicals to be sustained. This has destroyed our biodiversity. Vast industrial farms require costly equipment for planting and harvesting, increasing the capital intensity of agriculture. As costs rise, prices fall in markets flush with surplus. As prices fall, farmers need subsidies, which are available to big growers and agribusiness only. Land values and cash rents increase. This encourages heavy borrowing. Rich landowners get richer and young farmers cannot afford to get started. An agricultural bubble economy is created. Inevitably it crashes as subsidies fail to keep pace with falling crop prices. Farms go bankrupt. Free trade in agriculture starves our farmers.
Who will pay the farm bill when it comes due? American taxpayers have some surprises coming. But the ultimate cost of the bill will be the tragic demise of small family farms around the world.
An Opportunity for Change

The 2002 bill provides international civil society with a new opportunity to demolish the hypocritical -- development agenda-- myth of free trade. The bill should galvanize civil society to take up the call of Via Campesina, an international farmers movement that has denounced the liberalization of farm products promoted by the WTO as well as the dumping policies of the large export countries on Third World countries. Instead of trade, the small farmers movement prioritizes healthy, good quality, and culturally appropriate subsistence production for the domestic market and for the subregional or regional markets. These farmers' priority is to produce for their families and communities, then to seek access to the domestic market before seeking to export.(24)
Agriculture and food are fundamental to the well-being of all people, both in terms of access to safe and nutritious food and as foundations of healthy communities, cultures, and environment. All of these have been undermined by dependence on the vagaries of the free market promoted by the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO. Instead of ensuring the right to food for all, these institutions have created a system that prioritizes exportoriented production and has increased global hunger and poverty while alienating millions from productive assets and resources such as land, water, and seeds. The "world market" of agricultural products simply does not exist. What exists is an international trade of surpluses of grain, cereals, and meat dumped primarily by the E.U., the U.S., and other members of the Cairns Group. Behind the faces of trade negotiators are powerful transnational corporations such as Cargill and Monsanto, which are the real beneficiaries of domestic subsidies and international trade agreements. Fundamental change to this repressive trade regime is essential.
The farm bill may be a done deal, but we should use it to challenge the free trade regime and to renew our call for the WTO to get out of agriculture. Governments have to uphold the rights of all people to food sovereignty. It is time that we insist on trade policies out ofWashington based on sound policy and reason, rather than on the supposed necessity of maintaining political and market dominance.
Negotiations on agriculture are happening now for the next WTO Ministerial, in September 2003. Contact Food First to join us in the struggle to keep agriculture out of the harmful trade regime.
Notes

1. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, stats.bls.gov/opub/ted/htm.
2. Mike Allen, "Bush Signs Bill Providing Big Farm Subsidy Increase," Washington Post, May 14, 2002.
3. George Archibald, "Wealthy to Reap Bounty of Farm Bill," Washington Times, May 21, 2002.
4. For information on how subsidies evade family farmers, see Anuradha Mittal, "Freedom to Trade? Trading Away American Family Farms," Food First Backgrounder, Fall 2001.
5. "Rich Will Get Richer at Federal Farm Bill Trough," Pantagraph, May 19, 2002.
6. George Archibald, "Wealthy to Reap Bounty of Farm Bill."
7. Mark Arax and Eric Bailey, "Some Farmers Growing Rich on Government Crop Subsidies," Los Angeles Times, June 10, 2002.
8. Chuck Lindell, "Farm Bill Boosts Funding for Texas," Cox News Service, May 15, 2002.
9. "Family Farmers Express Strong Opposition to 2002 Farm Bill," statement issued by the National Family Farm Coalition, June 5, 2002.
10. "Remarks by the President upon Signing the Farm Bill," PR Newswire, May 13, 2002.
11. Elizabeth Becker, "U.S. Defends Its Farm Subsidies Against Rising Foreign Criticism," New York Times, June 27, 2002.
12. "Feds Want to Promote U.S. Agriculture Overseas," United Press International, June 28, 2002.
13. For information on how family farms have been exported to death, see A. Mittal, "Trading Away American Family Farms."
14. Douglass Cassel Jr., "The Great Trade Robbery," Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, May 16, 2002.
15. Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman, "U.S. Subsidies Create Cotton Glut That Hurts Foreign Cotton Farms," Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2002.
16. Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman, "U.S. Subsidies Create Cotton Glut That Hurts Foreign Cotton Farms."
17. Nicholas Kristof, "Farm Subsidies That Kill," New York Times, July 5, 2002.
18. Quoted in Chakravarthi Raghavan, "U.S. Farm Bill Gives One More Blow to New Round," www.twnside.org.sg/title/twe280c.htm.
19. Quoted in Chakravarthi Raghavan, "U.S. Farm Bill Gives One More Blow to New Round."
20. Douglass W. Cassel, "The Great Trade Robbery," Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, May 16, 2002.
21. John Cotter, "Canadians to Meet About U.S. Farm Bill," Grand Forks Herald, May 13, 2002.
22. Hellen Dale, "Government Pork for Farmers Will Undercut Trade Relations," Washington Times, May 15, 2002.
23. Argentine Agriculture Secretary Rafael Delpch quoted in Chakravarthi Raghavan, "U.S. Farm Bill Gives One More Blow to New Round."
24. Via Campesina and Network of Farmers Organizations and Agricultural Producers from Western Africa (ROPPA), "Access to Export Markets or Access to Its Domestic Market? Trade Regulation, World Prices, or Food Sovereignty?" joint press release, May 17, 2001.

Originally published as a Food First Backgrounder Summer 2002 Vol 8. No. 3

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Anuradha Mittal on the True Cause of World Hunger

Mon, 05 Jul 2004 20:02:25 -0400

Derrick Jensen
Published in "The Sun"
February 2002
As I write this, as many as 7.5 million Afghans are facing starvation this winter. An estimated fifty thousand tons of food a month is needed to feed them. Meanwhile, the U.S. war against Afghanistan's Taliban regime continues to interfere with relief efforts. Every day the war goes on increases the risk of humanitarian disaster.
But is it fair to blame the U.S.? Don't we send food to hungry people all over the world, saving millions from starvation? Not according to Anuradha Mittal, codirector of the Institute for Food and Development Policy -- better known as Food First. She claims the U.S. contributes far more to world hunger than it does to feeding the world.
Food First (www.foodfirst.org) was started more than twenty-five years ago by Joseph Collins and Frances Moore Lappe, author of Diet for a Small Planet. Designed to be a people's think tank -- more than half of its funding comes from individual donors -- the organization seeks to establish access to food as a basic human right.
By now, we're all familiar with the images of hungry people in Ethiopia, Somalia, India, Bangladesh. But how has it come to pass that so many people are without food? Is it because there simply is not enough food to go around? Food First works to answer these questions, educating the public about the root causes of hunger and debunking the myths put forward by corporations and the governments that serve them.
Mittal, a native of India, once believed those myths. "When I was a little girl," she says, "I was taught in school that India had become independent through a long struggle, and that if we wanted to maintain our independence, the country had to move forward with development: building dams, investing in high technology. I remember how, before movies, we'd see a newsreel about the prime minister christening a new dam, after which they'd play the national anthem. I would get tears in my eyes."
When she went to college at the University of Delhi and became involved in student activism, she realized that she hadn't been taught the whole truth: "The dams were actually death centers that displaced millions from their land with no restitution, and those in power didn't care about the thousands of people they dispossessed or killed. I suddenly realized that human beings have a great capacity for making decisions that intentionally starve others. I wanted to know why." Mittal set out to reeducate herself.
As Mittal is quick to point out, the problem of hunger is not restricted to India and other Third World nations. "The forces that are oppressing and colonizing people overseas," she says, "are the same forces that are oppressing working Americans in this country."
Trained as a political scientist, Mittal has extensive ex-perience in food-related activism here in the U.S. and in the Third World. She's editor of two books, America Needs Human Rights and The Future in the Balance: Essays on Globalization and Resistance(both Food First Books), and has written numerous articles on global trade and human rights for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other publications. Prior to coming to the U.S. in 1994, she worked with the Society for Participatory Research in Asia on issues of people's access to land and natural resources.
I spoke with Mittal on a warm day in January at the offices of Food First, in Oakland, California. She was remarkably gracious, articulate, and passionate. When I thanked her for her extraordinary work, she insisted that she merely plays a small part in a growing community of resistance.
Jensen: What is the scope of world hunger?
Mittal: The United Nations estimates that around 830 million people in the world do not have adequate access to food. Numbers, though, distance us from the real pain felt by the hungry. Hunger is a form of torture that takes away your ability to think, to perform normal physical actions, to be a rational human being. There are people in my own country, India, who for months have not had a full stomach, who have never had adequate nutrition. This sort of hunger causes some to resort to eating anything to numb the pain: cats, monkeys, even poisonous roots.
When we think about hunger, we often picture dark brown faces, black faces, naked children with thin legs and bloated stomachs. This is the image of hunger the media have given us, but it is crucial to remember that hunger exists not only in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, but right here in the United States, the richest nation on earth. Thirty-six million Americans do not have enough to eat, and that number is growing. Nearly half of those lining up outside soup kitchens have one or more family members employed, but most of them are simply too poor to buy food. They are the people who scavenge in dumpsters outside restaurants. They're the schoolchildren who cannot pay attention in class because they did not have dinner or breakfast. They're people like Katherine Engels, a grandmother who testified at a Con-gressional hearing on hunger that she often drinks a cup of tea for dinner, then rolls up some white bread and eats it, because that gives her the sense that her stomach is full.
Hunger is a social disease linked to poverty, and thus any discussion of hunger is incomplete without a discussion of economics. Often, when we see a person asking for money for food, we think, Why don't you get a job? How many of us realize that, of the people removed from the welfare rolls by welfare reform in 1996, only one out of ninety-seven will ever get a job that pays a living wage? At the minimum wage of $5.15 per hour, even if you work fifty hours a week, you earn little more than thirteen thousand dollars per year. There's no way a family living in a city could survive on that. They couldn't pay rent and put food on the table, to say nothing of clothes and other necessities.
If we're going to speak meaningfully about hunger, we need to understand the true causes of hunger. For example, hunger is not caused by shortage of food. According to our research over the last twenty-six years at Food First, the world's farmers produce 4.3 pounds of food per person, per day. This includes vegetables, cereals, fish, meat, and grains.
Jensen: If there is enough food, then why is there hunger?
Mittal: People are hungry because they are too poor to buy food. There is a shortage of purchasing power, not a shortage of food.
Of the 830 million hungry people worldwide, a third of them live in India. Yet in 1999, the Indian government had 10 million tons of surplus food grains: rice, wheat, and so on. In the year 2000, that surplus increased to almost 60 million tons -- most of it left in the granaries to rot. Instead of giving the surplus food to the hungry, the Indian government was hoping to export the grain to make money. It also stopped buying grain from its own farmers, leaving them destitute. The farmers, who had gone into debt to purchase expensive chemical fertilizers and pesticides on the advice of the government, were now forced to burn their crops in their fields.
At the same time, the government of India was buying grain from Cargill and other American corporations, because the aid India receives from the World Bank stipulates that the government must do so. This means that today India is the largest importer of the same grain it exports. It doesn't make sense -- economic or otherwise.
This situation is not unique to India. In 1985, Indonesia received the gold medal from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization for achieving food self-sufficiency. Yet by 1998, it had become the largest recipient of food aid in the world. I participated in a fact-finding mission to investigate Indonesia's reversal of fortune. Had the rains stopped? Were there no more crops in Indonesia? No, the cause of the food insecurity in Indonesia was the Asian financial crisis. Banks and industries were closing down. In the capital of Jakarta alone, fifteen thousand people lost their jobs in just one day. Then, as I traveled to rural areas, I saw rice plants dancing in field after field, and I saw casava and all kinds of fruits. There was no shortage of food, but the people were too poor to buy it. So what did the U.S. and other countries, like Australia, do? Smelling an opportunity to unload their own surplus wheat in the name of "food aid," they gave loans to Indonesia upon the condition that it buy wheat from them. And Indonesians don't even eat wheat.
Jensen: In some South American countries, the governments grow and export coffee while their citizens starve. Have India and Indonesia begun converting agri-cultural lands to growing cash crops for export?
Mittal: Yes, as in other developing countries, we have seen an emphasis on export agriculture. Around three-quarters of the countries that report child malnutrition are exporting food. Remember the much-publicized famine in Ethiopia during the 1980s? Many of us don't realize that, during that famine, Ethiopia was exporting green beans to Europe.
In 1999, a UN Population Fund report predicted that India would soon become one of the world's largest recipients of food aid. The report went on to blame the increasing population for the problem. What it did not mention is that the state of Punjab, also known as "the granary of India," grows abundant food even today, but most of it is being converted into dog and cat food for Europe. Nor did the report mention that the neighboring state of Haryana, also traditionally a fertile agricultural state, is today one of the world leaders in growing tulips for export. Increasingly, countries like India are polluting their air, earth, and water to grow products for the Western market instead of growing food to feed their own people. Prime agricultural lands are being poisoned to meet the needs of the consumers in the West, and the money the consumers spend does not reach themajority of the working poor in the Third World.
Jensen: I'm not sure it's Westerners' needs that are being met. More like their desires.
Mittal: Yes, luxuries are being construed as necessities, and freedom has come to mean the ability to choose from twenty different brands of toothpaste.
Jensen: You've mentioned U.S. aid a few times. What's wrong with U.S. aid? I mean, isn't it commendable that we're willing to help out?
Mittal: I hear that a lot. I've been on radio talk shows where people have called in to accuse me of being arrogant and ungrateful: "Here we are, sending your people food aid, and you just complain!" I wish it were true that U.S. aid came from a generosity of spirit, but it has always been a political tool used to control the behavior of Third World countries, to forge dubious alliances, and to buy cooperation during the Cold War. With the end of the Cold War, aid turned into a scheme for finding new markets for U.S. agribusiness, and now for dumping foods containing genetically modified organisms (gmos), which are being rejected by consumers in the West because we know so little about their long-term effects on humans and the environment.
But the deeper issue here has to do with the fact that food aid is not usually free. It is often loaned, albeit at a low interest rate. When the U.S. sent wheat to Indonesia during the 1999 crisis, it was a loan to be paid back over a twenty-five-year period. In this manner, food aid has helped the U.S. take over grain markets in India, Nigeria, Korea, and elsewhere.
I don't entirely reject the notion of food aid. Although I think that most countries can be food self-sufficient, there might be a few that need assistance. But aid has to follow certain principles. First, the food should be deliveredwhen the people need it: i.e., right away. Second, it should not be used as a political tool, as in North Korea, where famine was allowed to bring the country to its knees before food assistance was provided. Third, the food should be procured locally or regionally, insofar as possible. And fourth, it should be culturally sensitive: the aid should consist of food that the people actually eat, and not just what a donor country wants to dump.
Having said this, let's look at the case of Somalia and Ethiopia in the 1980s. In this case, the food aid arrived very late, after the rains had already settled in and crops were ready in the fields. And the food was procured from big transnational agribusinesses in Canada and America. Local Ethiopian farmers were deprived of their livelihoods as cheap food was dumped onto the market at prices far below what the farmers could afford to match. In this instance, the food aid should have been sent earlier, and it should have been procured from neighboring countries, thereby supporting regional economies. That would have been realassistance.
I don't think it's too much to say that destroying local agri-cultural infrastructures is a cen-tral function of food aid. Once these local farmers have been driven out of business, the people of the region are dependent on the West for survival.
Jensen: You mentioned gmos. How does biotechnology fit into all of this?
Mittal: The big chemical companies want to increase their control over the world food supply by marketing genetically engineered crops, but consumers in the West are leery of gmos. So, in 2000, the U.S. Congress approved a budget that included an estimated $30 million to promote biotechnology in the Third World. Seven million dollars of this was part of a deal between the U.S. and the Philippines to promote biotechnology as a means to achieve "food security." Money has also gone to support biotech research at American universities, and some of it went to help Third World and Eastern European governments encourage their regulatory agencies to approve the use of genetically modified food products. So regulatory agencies in the U.S., which have been asleep at the wheel on the issue of gmos, will now train the regulatory agencies of the developing world.
Jensen: That presumes that the agencies' purpose really is to regulate, as opposed to providing the illusion of reg-ulation.
Mittal: Either way, the regulatory agencies have com-pletely failed to protect American consumers. One example would be the StarLink incident, where genetically modified corn not meant for human consumption found its way into food. This mistake was not discovered by government agencies, but by the Gene Food Action Alert Coalition, a civic organization that had the corn tested in a private lab. A month later, after initial denials, the fda finally acknowledged that a mistake had been made.
I could provide hundreds of examples of the incom-petence of regulatory agencies or their outright capture by the industries they purport to oversee. It's a joke to think the regulatory agencies in this country are going to train agencies in developing countries.
At the same time, the U.S. is already sending genetically modified food to Third World nations without the consent of people there. In late 1999 and early 2000, when the Indian state of Orissa was hit by floods, the U.S. sent food aid containing gmos. The Indian government was not told that the food had been modified. Mozambique, the Philippines, Bolivia, and many other nations have received similarly tainted shipments of food aid. More recently, when Sri Lanka adopted progressive legislation banning imports of genetically modified foods, it was threatened by the U.S., and pressure has since been put on the government to remove the restrictions.
The implication behind this is that hungry people in the Third World have no right to choose, or rather they have two choices: they can either die of hunger -- often the result of decisions made by multilateral agencies with their offices in D.C., Geneva, or Brussels -- or they can take the unknown health risks associated with genetically modified crops. That's disgusting and racist.
I am deeply disturbed by the way hunger has been used to promote biotechnology. Suddenly, transnational corporations like DuPont, Monsanto, Novartis, and Syngenta, which have already caused so much misery, are casting themselves as do-gooders. Monsanto gave us Agent Orange, yet it's presented by the U.S. government and the corporate media as a good corporate citizen, concerned for the poor and hungry in the Third World. The U.S. government is "combating hunger" by allocating money from development-assistance programs to promote biotechnology in the Third World. And the civic groups that are opposing the corporate takeover of our food system and challenging genetic engineering -- because we do not know its environmental and health consequences -- are portrayed as selfish people who want to deny the Third World the benefits of biotechnology.
For years, oil companies have used "greenwashing" as a public-relations strategy, professing environmental concern to cover up their environmentally destructive activities. The biotech corporations are now using "poorwashing:" faking concern for the burgeoning, hungry population of the developing world while exploiting those populations in order to reap greater profits.
Jensen: Let's talk about the debt the Third World owes to the World Bank and industrialized nations. U.S.Ðforeign-policy critic Noam Chomsky says, in essence, that the debt should be repaid, but it should be repaid by the people who actually received the loans, by which he means U.S.Ðimposed dictators, who siphoned off billions to their private bank accounts. But it should not be repaid by the citizens of the countries, who never got any of the money in the first place.
Mittal: But when the so-called aid has been given for, say, a large dam, who actually ended up with the money? It wasn't a dictator, but the German, French, or American corporation that built the dam. Its investors are the ones who got paid. And the people of the nation got a dam they neither wanted nor needed.
I've been involved in this struggle for a very long time. So much of it revolves around the notion of debt relief, which is just another version of the white man's burden. These backward people, the argument goes, just can't seem to figure out how to run their countries or their economies, and we need to keep perpetually giving them food and money.
But I'm not interested in debt relief. I'm interested in reparations. The Third World does not owe anyone anything. In fact, the industrialized nations owe usmoney.
Jensen: How so?
Mittal: Take the case of my country, India -- although any other country would provide just as good an example. Why did Columbus try to find a new route to India? Because it was a land of spices and wealth and gold, a country of grandeur. But when the Europeans came in -- the East India Company, to be precise, which soon turned into the governing body for India and its people -- my country saw the end of a golden age and the beginning of more than a hundred years of exploitation by the British. By the time India gained independence in 1947, this ancient civilization had become, at best, a "developing" country. There were many famines in India under British rule, in which millions died. And all the while, British India was being forced to export coffee, tea, rice, and wheat.
Jensen: Just like today.
Mittal: And famines and starvation continue. After India gained independence, the Western powers once again found a way to colonize the country, first through the World Bank, and now through what I call the "unholy trinity" of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization. Third World countries were -- and are -- given bad loans, loans the people did not and do not want, loans about which we have never been consulted, loans for projects, such as large dams, that we protested and continue to protest. Loans for unpopular projects have been made to U.S.Ðbacked dictators in the Philippines, Indonesia, Uganda. The World Bank gave the Philippines a loan to build a nuclear reactor in an area prone to seismic activity.
Jensen: Was Uganda's Idi Amin put in place by the United States?
Mittal: Look at it this way: Uganda incurred most of its debt during Amin's regime. Do you think if the U.S. disapproved, the World Bank would have given him those loans? And although the loans were made to a brutal dictator, the people have been forced to pay them back, thus continuing the repression Amin started.
In country after country, the money has been funneled through the puppet governments and returned to the Western transnationals, all on the bent backs of the poor. Meanwhile, the poor nations have been compelled to slash their health and education programs, privatize the service sector, and cut down on jobs traditionally filled by women. Nurses, primary teachers: who needs them? Get rid of them.
And why do we have to do this? Because we have to service a debt that did not make a damn bit of difference in the day-to-day lives of ordinary people, working-class people, middle-class people. If you calculate how much money was given as a loan and how much has flowed back out, you'll understand why I say that the colonization has continued. The extraction of resources from these countries has, if anything, increased. The flow is always toward the rich, industrialized nations. We have not only repaid the loans made to corrupt regimes; we have overpaid them. And that overpayment did not start in the 1950s. This extraction has gone on for centuries, through various forms of colonization. It's time to give people in the Third World their fair due. It's time for reparations now.
The philosophy behind demanding reparations is that it says we are no longer victims, but people demanding our basic human rights, which have been violated for too long. And it's about accountability. Increasingly, we are beginning to hear about accountability for Third World leaders, such as Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who was almost put on trial in Spain. It's time for that sort of accountability to be brought to the Western governments for what they have done to other cultures -- and to their own people. It is time to try the Kissingers and McNamaras of the U.S.
Jensen: Years ago, I asked a Tupac Amaru rebel what his group wanted for the people of Peru. His answer has haunted me ever since: "We want to be able to grow and distribute our own food. We already know how to do that. We merely need to be allowed to do so." In three sentences, he cut to the heart of colonialism, the heart of the problem we face.
Mittal: I couldn't agree more. Food is both personal and political. Food unites families and communities; across cultures, festivals based around harvest seasons are about sharing and strengthening communities. And food is political: The French Revolution wasn't driven just by the ideals of liberty, freedom, and egalitarianism. It was driven by the fact that there wasn't enough bread in Paris.
Jensen: They could always eat cake.
Mittal: Or, today, tulips.
Over the last three decades we have seen protests, rebellions, uprisings, and revolutions against this new colonialism, and these movements have often been centered around food. In the seventies, there were riots in Peru because the World Bank stipulated an increase in the price of bread. In the 1990s, the Zapatista uprising and the protests in Bolivia were spurred by food unavailability and privatization of the basic necessities of life. The same has been true in Pakistan and India. In 1995, villagers in Mexico stopped trains to loot them -- not for gold, but for corn.
When we look at the growing discontent around the world, we find that many rebels have the same demand: the basic human right to be able to feed oneself. This is what the landless people's movement in Brazil wants, and the Poor People's Assembly in Thailand, and Jose Bove -- the French farmer who drove his tractor through a McDonald's -- and the farmers in India who burned the Cargill building and Monsanto's trial fields, and the small farmers in the U.S. These groups don't want power or wealth. They only want to be able to feed themselves and their families, and to live with dignity.
Jensen: Why is it so central to Western civilization -- and, more recently, to capitalism -- to colonize and dispossess other peoples?
Mittal: I, too, wonder about this all the time. Is it intentional? Is it human nature to colonize and wreak havoc upon the poor? One thing I do know: when the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, these two things do not happen in a vacuum. The rich get richer at the expense of the poor. This mechanism is built into the capitalist system, around which our societies and our economies are organized. You know capitalism's "golden rule": whoever has the gold makes the rules. This system rewards greed and a complete lack of accountability on the part of ceos, investors, and transnational corporations.
This is not a result of human nature. Nor is it something that just happens. It is a matter of power being exercised without any social, political, or environmental concerns. It is the planned exploitation of the poor on the part of those who stand to profit from it. And it is deeply ingrained in our society, because the powerful have built an entire economic and governmental structure to support it.
Jensen: It seems pretty clear that access to land is central to everything we're talking about. Deny people that access, and you deny them self-sufficiency. Deny them self-sufficiency, and you can force them to work in your factories.
Mittal: The elites make a big mistake when they dispossess the working poor. They seem to believe that further dispossession will kill the poor people's spirit. But dispossessed people are angry people. Think about the courage of the poor who continue to occupy the land that the rich have stolen from them, even in the face of severe repression by private armies and police forces and death squads. We call them the "landless," but they are the ones who have earth in the cracks of their heels and under their fingernails. Their smell is of the land, and their blood washes the land for which they are killed. Look at them and tell me who has a right to the land.
What sustains these communities in the face of repression is the fact that they have nothing more to lose. When you have been beaten, tortured, and have seen your loved ones killed, there's only one thing to do: fight back.
Jensen: It seems the capitalists might do better to follow the Roman poet Juvenal's advice, and give the masses "bread and circuses." Handouts cost less than repression. I remember reading years ago that the U.S. spent fifty thousand dollars for every Vietnamese person killed in that war. It occurred to me, even when I was a kid, that it would have been much cheaper -- not to mention more humane -- just to hand the Vietnamese a tenth of that money an_d say, "Be our friends." A lot of this repression is not only cruel but stupid.
Mittal: Perhaps if leaders were to do as you say and make sure people have roofs over their heads and food on their tables and healthcare and opportunities for education, then we would have more peace in our communities. But today's social and political structures are built on the foundation of centuries-old exploitation. The greed for more and more led the powerful to take a different path a long time ago. The exploitation has been going on for so long that the benevolence of dictators is no longer welcome.
I think we just plain missed the boat. We have an economic system based on greed, theft, lack of accountability, exploitation, colonization, racism, homophobia, sexism. This system has done severe damage to the soul of our society. I know it sounds like a clichŽ, but revolution is the answer. And this revolution will take a thousand shapes: from the Zapatista uprising to the thousands who challenged the g-8 Summit in Genoa, Italy. It’' all revolution. Revolution takes place not only on the outside, but also in our hearts and minds, where it changes how we lead our day-to-day lives. Activists must also deal with powerful interests within their own countries. The farmers' movement in India not only challenges obvious agents of colonialism -- Monsanto, Cargill, and the rest -- but the whole of Indian society, especially the middle class and the elites. The struggles in the Philippines not only are against the Americans, but are also struggles between Filipinos. The larger struggle is not merely between the impoverished nations of the South and the wealthy, industrialized North, because there's a South that lives in the North, and vice versa. There are 44 million Americans who have no healthcare. One in five American children is growing up in poverty. Similarly, there are elites in India who have much more in common with Bill Gates than you and I ever will.
Jensen: A few years ago, a family farmer said to me, "Cargill gives me two choices: either I can cut my own throat, or they'll do it for me." The same could be said by farmers in any number of countries.
Mittal: In the south of India, you can go to village after village and not find a farmer who has both kidneys: they've all sold a kidney to feed their family. And there have been reports of farmers taking their own lives by consuming the same pesticides, the same poisons, they were told to use on their fields. They use this "gift" of industrial agriculture, which has cost them so much money and so much hope already, to end their own life.
In the U.S., farmers are killing themselves and trying to make it look like an accident so their families can get life-insurance money. Forced out of their profession and unable to make a livelihood, they see no other way out.
At the World Food Summit in 1996, Dan Glickman, then the head of the usda, claimed that U.S. farmers would feed the world. He did not tell the summit that in the last few census polls, the category of "farmer" as a profession has been removed. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, farmers are not endangered; they're extinct. When Glickman talks about farmers, he really means corporations such as Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland -- self-styled "Supermarket to the World." (Or, as I call it, Supermarkup to the World.) They aren't U.S. farmers. They're agribusinesses.
Jensen: But aren't they the ones who brought us the Green Revolution, which improved agricultural yields and thus saved millions of lives?
Mittal: This is one of the big myths. When I mention that India has a grain surplus, people often say to me that the Green Revolution -- which is based on the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides -- is responsible for that. But we need to examine this claim closely.
From 1970 to 1990, the two main decades of the Green Revolution, the total food available per person in the world rose by 11 percent. This much is true. At the same time, the estimated number of hungry people fell by more than 150 million. So you might think there's a correlation between the increase in food due to the Green Revolution and the decrease in hunger. But if you eliminate China from the analysis, the number of hungry people in the world actually increasedby 60 million. And it was not population growth that made for more hungry people. Remember, the total food available per person increased everywhere. What created more hunger was the absence of land reform and living-wage jobs. The remarkable changein China, where the number of hungry people was more than cut in half, was the result of broad-based land reforms, which improved living standards. This is the little-known truth about the Green Revolution. Yes, food production increased, but did it have an impact on hunger? No.
We also need to examine the environmental costs of the Green Revolution. Use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers has resulted in the loss of almost a quarter of the topsoil in the U.S., and farming communities around the world have been devastated by salination, waterlogging, and pests that have developed resistance to pesticides. I believe that around half the crop pests in the U.S. have developed resistance, and they cause around $2 billion worth of damage each year.
The bottom line is that the Green Revolution did not decrease hunger. It increased environmental degradation and cost of production for farmers who now depend on pesticides and fertilizers. The Green Revolution sounded the death knell for family farmers, the environment, and communities worldwide.
Jensen: And there is currentlyan attempt to start a second Green Revolution based around gmos.
Mittal: The same companies that benefited from the Green Revolution are now promoting genetic engineering. They recognize that the seed is the most important link in the food chain. Whoever controls the seed controls the food system. With genetic engineering, they can now patent the seeds. DuPont bought Pioneer Hybrid, a major seed company, for $8.5 billion; Monsanto has spent more than $7 billion on seed companies. The chemical companies are attempting to control the food system more than ever before.
Jensen: And one of the ways chemical companies are attempting to control seeds is through technologies like Terminator, right?
Mittal: Yes, Terminator seeds are those that have been genetically modified not to reproduce. Their plants are sterile and do not produce viable seeds, meaning that farmers who used them would have to purchase more seeds the next year. So the millenniums-old tradition that more than a billion farmers depend on -- saving seeds from their harvest to use for the next season -- would suddenly be denied to them. I've yet to figure out how the companies can even pretend that this could benefit farmers in the Third World. The fact that those in power can control nature to the degree that they dictate whether or not a seed is fertile is sheer arrogance. It is ethically, economically, socially, and politically wrong, and there's no way around it.
Jensen: Isn't Terminator banned right now from commercial use?
Mittal: In the face of worldwide opposition, commercial use of Terminator has been banned while further research is done on it. Recently, the usdalicensed the Terminator technology to its seed-industry partner, Delta and Pine Land. As a result of joint research, the usda and d&pl are co-owners of three patents on the controversial technology. Although many of the chemical-company giants hold patents on Terminator technology, d&pl is the only company that has publicly declared its intention to sell Terminator seeds commercially. This technology has been universally condemned by civil society, banned by international agri-cultural-research institutes, censured by un bodies, and even shunned by Monsanto -- yet the U.S. government has officially licensed it to one of the world's largest seed companies.
Genetic engineering has also produced the Traitor technology, in which special characteristics of the seed -- such as resistance topests, or drought resistance -- can be turned on and off only by certain chemicals produced, of course, by the same company that owns the seed patent. Biotech promoters claim that this technology will assist the poor and the hungry, but I wonder how it will benefit anyone but the chemical companies themselves.
Jensen: How could a farmer be compelled to use that seed? It certainly doesn't seem to be in his or her best interest.
Mittal: Farmers around the world have been seduced by the promise of increased production and lower costs. The corporate media machine has sold this idea to both the farmers and the policymakers. But many farmers have been denied any choice over whether to grow genetically modified crops. Some of them do it without even meaning to do so. Percy Schmeiser, a farmer in Canada, was served with a lawsuit by Monsanto because detectives hired by the company found evidence of their patented seed in his field. Now, how did it get there? He didn't plant it. Its presence was a result of genetic pollution from a neighboring field. Because some plants are pollinated by the wind, and others by insects, they can't be entirely contained.
Jensen: Honeybees have been known to fly a dozen miles.
Mittal: Say you want to be an organic farmer. If a neighbor, or even someone many miles away, uses genetically modified seeds, that crop can cross-pollinate with your own. And there are other concerns, as well. For example, organic farmers have long used Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), a naturally occurring insect toxin, as a pesticide, but genetic engineers have spliced Bt into cotton, potato, and other plants. This overuse will quickly result in insects resistant to Bt, forcing organic farmers to hop on the bandwagon of using toxic chemicals.
Jensen: How do we bring about this revolution that you're talking about?
Mittal: The revolution has already begun. We see it around us. It is multicultural and has the energy and passion of youth and the spirit of the working poor. Think about the protests at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. The battle there was not between the industrialized nations of the North and the so-called developing nations of the South. The youth of the Northern nations were out in the streets -- all those beautiful young faces -- while the leaders of the Southern nations were walking out of the meetings, saying, "This is not good enough."
This revolution is built on cross-border organizing, forming links between local and global issues, seeing the relationship between "structural adjustment programs" in the Third World and welfare reform -- or just plain economics -- in the U.S.
We need to nurture this revolution in our minds and souls. We need to sustain it with the determination that we will no longer ask whether we can speak. We are going to demand that our voices be heard. And we will sustain it with the knowledge that these are our fields, and the land is our inheritance.
This revolution recognizes access to food, water, health-care, education -- every basic necessity of life -- as a human right and not a need. If it were only a need, it could be serviced by a corporation. As a human right, it cannot be sold by anyone. This revolution is not dependent on the benevolence of dictators but gains its legitimacy from its soldiers: the landless and the dispossessed. This revolution is nonviolent and based on the truth: that the land belongs to the landless, the farms to the small family farmers -- who are the best stewards of the land -- and our natural resources to the local communities. And this revolution does not differentiate between civil rights and economic, social, and cultural rights. It recognizes that land and liberty, jobs and justice go together. Freedom from want is as important as freedom from fear.
The success of this people's movement depends on us. I have one message for all: get involved. It does not have to be at a policy level in Washington, D.C. You do not have to change your lifestyle or quit your job. You might choose involvement in the community, such as the local housing association, or the food bank. You might call or write your Congressional Representative. But do get involved. Change starts at the local level. If power is not taken back there, nothing will change at the national or international level.
Each human being has an incredible amount of power that comes from having human rights. So let's educate ourselves about our rights: the right to unionize, the right to have a decent job, the right to feed our families. These rights are not dependent on the whims and fancies of corporations or presidents. They are dependent on real people exercising real democracy. And that requires that we get involved. Human rights are never won without a fight.
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Strengthen and Ensure Economic and Social Human Rights

Fri, 21 Jul 2006 23:02:09 -0400

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) guarantees a full range of economic human rights: the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of oneself, including the right to food, clothing, housing, medical care, and necessary social services.
Yet the international crises of growing poverty and continuing hunger amidst wealth, exemplify how governments have fallen short on their human rights commitments. The broad political program to deal with the current crisis, called the "Washington Consensus," is a philosophy espoused by international financial institutions that seeks to restructure the global economy in ways that permit greater corporate control and profit taking. A soft, liberal middle-of-the-road agenda put forth by mainstream development organizations merely puts an environmentally and socially 'friendly face' to these policies by adding social and environmental clauses and side agreements. This fails to challenge the root cause of human rights violations within the dominant model, and becomes a 'sugar coating on a bitter pill.'
The Oakland Institute is opposed both to the conservatism of the Washington Consensus and the liberalism that seeks to modify, rather than fundamentally challenge the social-economic model. Social movements around the world - Anti-Privatization Forum in South Africa; La Coordinadora: coalition to challenge water privatization in Cochabamba, Bolivia; Korean Peoples' Action Against FTA and WTO; Farmers movement in India; Poor Peoples' Assembly in Thailand; Movement of Landless Workers in Brazil; the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in the U.S. - are using the framework of human rights to organize and build national and international support for their struggles. However, the framework of human rights is still selectively applied to mostly third world countries and is focused exclusively on political rights to the exclusion of economic, social and cultural rights.
The Oakland Institute is working to strengthen and promote the human rights framework internationally as a powerful discourse to counter the economic efficiency arguments that exclude human and environmental values. We work to reshape the human rights discourse in the direction of universality (i.e. apply it to the U.S. and other rich countries as well) and indivisibility (i.e. economic and social rights cannot be separated from civil and political rights) and especially as we challenge the privatization of the commons, such as land, water, and seeds.

Related Publications

The Oakland Institute - Publications

Don't Dare Despair

Food Fight!

America AmBUSHed! Report Card on Bush’s Four Years in the White House

Poverty

BUSH ADMINISTRATION FAILS!

Wages & Unemployment

BUSH ADMINISTRATION FAILS!

Healthcare

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Corporate America vs. Average Americans

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Domestic Programs

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National Deficit

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Defense Spending

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Food Sovereignty: A New Farm Economy to Challenge Economic Globalization

The Last Plantation

The Perennial Crop of Bias: Failed Promises of Reconstruction

A Legacy of Bias: State's Response to Rural Crisis

The Legal Challenge: Pigford versus Glickman Class Action Lawsuit

What's Needed Now (27)

For more information on how to support the struggle for justice for the black farmers contact:

Notes

Voices from the South: The Third World Debunks Corporate Myths on Genetically Engineered Crops

Freedom to Trade? Trading Away American Family Farms

What is the Agreement on Agriculture?

The Bones of the Agreement

How the AOA has Affected Family Farmers in the US

The Crisis of American Agriculture

Subsidies Evade Family Farmers

Corporate Concentration of Agriculture

Falling Prices

Exported to Death

Farmer Income is Declining

The Death of the Family Farm

Opportunity for Change

References

Open Fire and Open Markets: Strategy of an Empire

Open Invasion: The Truth Behind Operation Iraqi Freedom

The Middle East: On the Threshold of Change?

Open Season on the Poor: The War At Home

An Open Ending

Notes

Giving Away the Farm: The 2002 Farm Bill

Welfare for Corporate Agribusiness

Down on the Farm

New World Markets for American Corporations

Robin Hood in Reverse

Free Trade Takes a Pounding

But Free Trade Is Not the Answer

An Opportunity for Change

Notes

Anuradha Mittal on the True Cause of World Hunger

Strengthen and Ensure Economic and Social Human Rights

The Legal Challenge:
Pigford versus Glickman Class Action Lawsuit

What's Needed Now⁽²⁷⁾