[CTC] Recent human rights, labor and humanitarian cases in Colombia

[Arthur Stamoulis]

http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/foreign-policy/294179-free-trade-versus-food-democracy


The Hill’s Congress Blog

Free trade versus food democracy
By Jim Harkness, president, Institute for Agriculture and Trade  
Policy, Minneapolis, Minn. - 04/16/13 01:20 PM ET

There has been a quiet revolution going around the world, as  
communities and nations retake control of their food systems. In the  
U.S., more people are taking a look at processed foods at the  
supermarket and opting instead for healthier choices, grown locally  
with fewer pesticides. People in Cambodia have taken a hard look at  
what’s happening to their climate, soil and seeds, and figured out a  
new, low-cost way to produce rice, increasing production and putting  
farmers in charge. Brazilians are favoring local farmers growing  
sustainable foods for school lunch programs, lowering hunger rates  
dramatically as a result.
This trend is larger than individual choice: people are using their  
rights as citizens to make sure governments, from local to national,  
support these innovations. Unfortunately, U.S. trade policy seems  
wedded to a discredited notion of how we should get our food and who  
should benefit.

These local shifts involve choices, and in many cases choices that  
favor local producers over transnational corporations, local markets  
over imports; it seems that the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) has a  
problem with that. In its latest report, the agency highlights what it  
calls the growing problems of “localization barriers to trade,” and  
vows renewed vigilance against these barriers to the free flow of  
goods and services. A free flow to where? And for whose benefit?

In the U.S., local food is sometimes dismissed as an elite niche  
market, but in the rest of the world it has another meaning entirely.  
For decades, Western aid and trade officials have told poor countries  
to rely on international markets to feed their people; governments  
were forced to cut support for “inefficient” things like local food  
production and emergency grain reserves; domestic farming was  
undermined as cheap imports flooded in. When the price of  
internationally traded food spiked in 2007-08, and again in 2011, the  
poorest couldn’t afford staples like wheat and rice, and global hunger  
soared. The developing countries that fared best were those that built  
domestic production and insulated themselves from volatile global  
markets. So while the USTR attack on all things local may be great for  
the U.S. food giants, it pushes an economic model that has been  
discredited by actual events.

Talks for a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that would unite markets  
of 11 countries have been going on for several years. Japan just  
announced it will enter the talks, despite the vigorous opposition of  
local farmers concerned about what such an agreement could mean for  
cherished local rice varieties and rural livelihoods. U.S. dairy  
farmers, already weakened by rising feed prices, worry that opening  
the U.S. market to imports from New Zealand will devastate local farms  
and cooperatives in favor of processed milk solids imports.

Now, President Obama has announced that he will launch new talks for a  
Transatlantic trade deal uniting the troubled economies of the EU and  
the United States. As we’ve seen before, instead of creating new  
opportunities for growth, this further “competition” will only serve  
to drive standards down to the lowest common denominator to the  
benefit of multinational corporations.

For years, the U.S. government has acted on behalf of agribusiness and  
large pharmaceutical companies to challenge EU bans on GMO foods and  
limits on the use of antibiotics and dubious drugs like ractopamine  
and bovine growth hormone in meat and dairy production. Those limits  
are the result of hard-fought battles by European farmers, scientists  
and consumers to slow the advance of questionable technologies and  
instead embrace the precautionary principle, which compels governments  
to make sure food additives are safe before putting them in our crops  
and on our plates. Instead, the U.S. government continues with  
recklessly lax regulation of such emerging technologies as  
nanomaterial coatings on fruits and vegetables, and synthetically  
engineered food flavorings.

Lowered standards like these could wipe out local efforts to rein in  
corporate power and rebuild food systems along more democratic lines,  
setting a poor precedent — and that’s the point. As Vice President  
Biden said of these trade deals earlier this month, “What we're  
talking about is shaping a new standard that then becomes the metric  
by which all future trade agreements are measured."

Let’s not start down that path. Instead of doubling down on bad ideas  
of the past, we must insist on a 21st-century trade system designed to  
improve food security and affirm democratic control of our food system.

Harkness is the president of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade  
Policy in Minneapolis, Minn.


  
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