The pernicious effects of rich-country agricultural subsidies on
poor-country farmers are evident throughout the world, speakers said at
a two-day conference sponsored by the Canadian Food Security Policy
Group.
The problem, they said, is that trade rules agreed to at the last World
Trade Organization negotiation in 1994 favoured the rich over the poor.
That deal allowed rich countries to keep their subsidies while forcing
poor countries to open their markets, said Geneva-based trade
consultant Luisa Bernal.
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“Domestic support has increased rather than decreased (in
industrialized countries) since 1994,” she said. “The anticipated
benefits for developing countries have not materialized.”
Speakers at the conference, which featured development advocates,
Canadian government ministers and developing country representatives,
offered examples of the impact of subsidies and trade in subsidized
food products:
- Mark Fried of Oxfam Canada said the United States’ $3.9 billion in
annual subsidies to the domestic cotton industry is greater than the
value of the crop and allow U.S. product to swamp foreign markets.
- Rice from the U.S., given as food aid and targeted to countries that
could some day be commercial markets, has put farmers in Jamaica and
Guyana out of business.
- In Zambia, according to national university agriculture dean Obed
Lungu, help from Canadian researchers in the 1980s created wheat
varieties that could grow in the country and when small farmers adopted
the crop, production rose to 70 percent of national needs. Then cheap
European Union and South African wheat came in, prices dropped and
wheat production fell.
“We’re back where we were,” he said. “We’re at less than 50 percent and
it is all the large commercial farmers. The impact of that development
has been wiped out.”
- Ali Lamont from the Canadian Wheat Board said American misuse of food
aid or concessional export credit arrangements regularly undermine
board sales.
“Subsidized products from developed counties are creating huge
problems,” said Rieky Stuart of Oxfam Canada. She said 50,000 rice
farmers in Haiti have been put off the land by competition from cheap
subsidized American rice.
“It’s not a theoretical problem,” she said.
It is why chief Canadian WTO agriculture negotiator Suzanne Vinet told
the meeting that reducing high rich-country domestic farm subsidies is
a Canadian priority at the current round of World Trade Organization
talks.
“We need real and meaningful reductions in production and trade
distorting subsidies so farmers everywhere can benefit from a more
level trade playing field,” added agriculture minister Lyle Vanclief.
