OAKLAND, CA
- November 18 - With the Miami negotiations for the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) fast approaching and the ten-year anniversary of NAFTA not far behind, new reports by Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy expose how agricultural trade agreements in Brazil, Mexico, and the United States have increased rural poverty and inequality, threatened small family farmers, and hurt consumers. In the United States, the most vocal leader in free trade negotiations, economic inequality has progressed steadily with each new agreement, according to the report "Agricultural Restructuring and Concentration in the United States: Who wins, Who loses." The result has been the loss of small farms, falling rural incomes, and food insecurity, pushing rural America towards levels of poverty on par with the inner city. "One of the primary reasons for this growing inequality is because food corporations have muscled into the relationship between those who grow food and those who eat it," said Dr. Raj Patel, Food First policy analyst and editor of the reports. "While the price farmers get for their crops has fallen over the last twenty years, the retail price has risen steadily, along with the costs of farming, squeezing farmer's income and draining consumer's wallets. The considerable difference profits large agribusinesses." The Mexican experience under NAFTA has been similar. Small maize farmers in Mexico cannot compete against the dumping of heavily subsidized corn from corporate farms in the United States. According to the report, "Agricultural Trade Liberalization and Mexico," this has resulted in an increase of rural poverty from 54 percent in 1989 to 64 percent in 1998. Meanwhile, the price of tortillas, a staple of the Mexican diet, shot up by 279 percent over the first five years following NAFTA. In Brazil, the 10th largest economy in the world, rural poverty has stagnated at about 41 percent, according to "Agricultural Trade Liberalization and Brazil's Rural Poor: Consolidating Inequality," with the poorest ten percent of the population receiving less than one percent of income while the richest ten percent receive almost half the total income. Brazil's export crop of choice, soybeans, provides fewer jobs than the local food crops it is displacing because of the highly mechanized nature of soy farming. "In the Third World, trade is often accompanied by structural adjustment policies," said Dr. Patel. "This means that levels of government spending on health, education, and social support are dramatically reduced, and stable agricultural pricing policies abandoned in favor of the market. But it's a two tier system--while support for family farms decreases worldwide, support for industrial agriculture has increased--this means that governments are redistributing resources from the poorest to the wealthiest producers." The reports conclude that agricultural policies are being set not in accordance with the needs of farming communities nor by consumers, but written instead to serve the interests of corporate agri-businesses. "Whether countries are rich or poor, food exporters or importers, the trends have been strikingly similar," said Dr. Patel. "Agricultural exports have concentrated land and resources in the hands of the wealthiest corporations, while we, as growers and consumers, have less say over what goes into our mouths than at any other time in history." Reports are available at: http://www.foodfirst.org/pubs/policy ### |
