WTO Who Cares?

The WTO is meeting in its long anticipated Hong Kong round to talk about agribusiness subsidies. But despite the long anticipated meeting it is going nowhere. Nor can it. Despite the anti-WTO protests, despite last summers G8 meeting pledging Trade Not Aid, despite Bono and Geldoff, the very fabric of capitalism is the industrialization of agriculture, and this is the contradiction that belies this round of trade talks. Capitalism developed out of large scale farming production with the end of the commons in England.

Today the modern form of agribusiness destroys the family farm here in the industrialized world as much as it has declared war on subsistence farming in the developing world. The subsidies given out to Agribusiness are being equated with cooperatives and producer marketing boards. Hence the attack on the Canadian Wheat Board and the Quebec Dairy boards by Americans and by our own comprador farmers from the Reform/Alliance/Conservative party. And they are no more equivalent than the subsidies given to Agribusinesses that market bananas from Ecuador, like Dole, and the farm cooperatives that grow the bananas and are paid below market price by Dole.

Ever since the GATT Uruguay talks ended, more and more subsistence farming in the Third world and the newly Industrialized nations has been replaced by large scale export farming controlled by Agribusiness Giants like ADM,Cargill, Nestles, etc..

And where export products such as sugar, rice, soya, and dairy products, are in competition with the G8 they have no fair trade market. Even in their particular unique export markets such as bananas and cocoa and coffee, the internecine trade zones between the EU and the USA punitively punish these producing countries, and do not pay a fair price for their products.

Nor are the farmers encouraged to develop subsistence farming, some for export with varied crops for their own survival. When agribusiness gets involved, farmers in the developing world become wage slaves on large scale corporate plantations.

The village farming cooperatives are a real market alternative to rapacious capitalism and its agribusiness operations, but these folks are forgotten at the WTO. They have neither local representatives nor state representatives. Nor has the Libertarian movement taken up their cause with few exceptions such as those of us on the Libertarian Left; Kevin Carson, Larry Gambone, and the Knappster, voices in the wilderness on this issue.

Think of the power that these small villages would have if rich American Libertarians who have oodles of cash were to champion their cause. But it won't happen because they aren't really Libertarians, just Republican hanger ons, more interested in privatizing public services than supporting real free markets in the real world. Because these markets are run by cooperatives and collectives, which runs counter to their individualist consumerist ideology.

The WTO talks stalled again today, and will not get anywhere because the issue to agribusiness is not the issue of sustainable farming, but of transforming the world into its supermarket as ADM brags.

And until we have fair trade that promotes open markets to farmer cooperatives in the developing world, Africa in particular, we will continue to have to feed them, and fund them, as they suffer the famines of Imperialism.