CAFTA and Farming

(from www.NoCAFTA.org)

Close to half of all Central Americans work in agriculture. CAFTA will eliminate (one-by-one) all tariffs on heavily subsidized and “dumped” agricultural products from the US. It won’t help Central Americans, since they mostly already export food to the US without tariffs.

President Bush has in recent years almost doubled subsidies for agricultural goods geared for foreign export. The US govt. encourages the use of dumping as a way to “penetrate” foreign markets and thus destroy local agriculture before ultimately raising prices after a poor nation no longer has enough farmers to feed itself. Dumping, for example through the use of “food aid” to Colombia, led to the bankrupting of wheat farmers and the rise of cocaine production, and it’s really bumming out Costa Rican cows!

The US business interests who wrote CAFTA allowed the US to keep its own strict antidumping laws and high agricultural subsidies, whereby the US govt. pays the corporate agriculture for up to half of the value of the product, creating artificially low prices that are unbeatable by local producers. (Currently over 80% of corn exports from the US are controlled by only three companies.)

The irony is that small farmers are actually MUCH MORE EFFICIENT at producing food than are large-scale monocroppings grown for export. This is especially true when government gives enough financial credit to small farmers and insulates them against bad growing years (as the CR govt. has done in the past).

 

Small farmers plant agronomically symbiotic crops together and in rotation much more than large-scale export growers. They can plant their fields closer together since they don’t use large machinery, and most importantly, they are much more likely to build up the soil through composting and erosion prevention. Even though in the short-term the heavy use of chemicals and synthetic fertilizer make things seem alright for huge growers, the small farmers use of traditional methods (combined with the best of up-to-date technology) ensures that food production will be sustainable throughout coming generations.

Finally, small farming is based on land reforms (the breaking up of large estates to be redistributed to poor families). Protected land reforms have been a successful path to development for the US (think prairie farmers), Europe, and more recently Japan, S. Korea, and Taiwan. Once the rural population makes enough money to buy locally-produced goods, then domestically-owned industry can grow strong before it has to compete with more established foreign firms.

11 million Mexicans from farming families have had to leave their land since the implementation of NAFTA (the agreement between the US and Mexico). Many have immigrated illegally to the US, where a difficult and precarious life awaits them and their Central American cousins.

CAFTA will not only bring in unfair and wasteful competition, but it will also penalize with heavy fines any Central American government that shows “favoritism” to small, local farmers, through special access to credit or markets. And any attempts to redistribute unused land belonging to wealthy individuals or corporations will almost certainly result in heavy sanctions under CAFTA law, much as it brought CIA-backed dictatorships and death squads in the not-so-distant past.

 

Anyone want to explain to her why she’ll be going hungry starting next year?

CAFTA = “Time for Farmers’ Tears.”