Farmers join US manufacturers rank as trade victims in WTO deal
30 Dec '05
2 min read
This is a piece written by William R. Hawkins on the American economic Alert recently and we partly reproduce the same.
For decades, the American farm lobby has been duped by the Big Business lobby and “free trade” ideologues into supporting trade agreements that have opened the U.S. market to foreign rivals and that have allowed transnational corporations to shift factories and jobs overseas.
Farmers have been content to watch their neighbors in manufacturing devastated so long as their own position was protected.
Now, it is the farmers' turn to be thrown to the wolves in the Doha Round of negotiations, which hinge on the 'liberalization' of international agricultural trade and the ending of support programs for domestic producers.
This is not the first attempt to undermine the security of the American farmer, who, with significant government support (denied to manufacturers), has built the most productive agricultural system in the world.
The Federal Agricultural Improvement and Reform (FAIR) Act of 1996 contained provisions known as the “freedom to farm” reforms.
The free trade argument then was that American farmers could increase their incomes more from trade than from continued government relief packages.
The promise was that export markets would increase steadily as a result of foreign population growth and rising standards of living overseas. Free trade “experts” predicted that by 2002 exports wouldreplace agricultural subsidies entirely.
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