The Union Farmer Quarterly/Spring 2001

Since these trade deals are explicitly designed to override national policies and legislation, they are already having a devastating effect on our national sovereignty. In the few long years since we were tricked into accepting NAFTA, Canadians have been forced to acknowledge a massive loss of control over our own destiny. NAFTA's infamous "Chapter 11", which would also be incorporated into the FTAA, gives corporations the "right" to sue a government that refuses to do their bidding, and the corporations have no hesitation whatever in using that "right". The shameless surrender by the Chretien government in the case of the toxic gasoline additive MMT is only one blatant example of what this means for our well-being and our democracy.

The continuing negotiations for an FTAA, the corporate-driven beefing up of the WTO and the G-8, and the parallel processes towards other regional trade agreements, all threaten to wipe out whatever gains farmers and other citizens have managed to win in our on-going struggles, and to prevent any other such gains in the future. Specifically at risk for Canadian farmers are supply management, farm subsidies and assistance programs (such as they are), cooperative and single-desk marketing structures, safeguards for organic production, equitable transporta-tion policies, food and water safety measures, and public services like education, sanitation and health care.

What we have learned from our Latin American and Caribbean sisters and brothers at the Agriculture Forum and in other Via Campesina gatherings, is that our problems reflect theirs, and that the problems they face are even more extreme.

Ernesto Ladrón of the Mexican Via Campesina organization UNORCA described how NAFTA has devastated the economic base for campesinos growing corn, the main staple of the Mexican diet, and has fatally undermined the "ejido" system of collective land-holding which was a hard-won prize of the Mexican Revolution almost a century ago. Terrence Cover of Trinityville, Jamaica, who represents a broad rural coalition, told how neo-liberal government policies favour the large foreign corporations which hold huge tracts of the island's rich agricultural land, forcing thousands of Jamaican peasants to leave the country. Humberto Mella, a Chilean inshore fisherman who has been imprisoned for protesting his government's pro-corporate fish quota system, highlighted the commonalities between farming and fishing communities and their struggles to survive the onslaught of the globalized industrial model of food production.

There was much nodding of heads and sympathetic comment from the Southern participants when NFU Executive member Jan Slomp described the current crisis facing Canadian farmers, and when Bill Christison, Presi-dent of the National Family Farm Coalition in the United States, outlined his analysis of who benefits and who pays in such a situation. And when NFU Women'President Shannon Storey gave her testimonial about the acution sale being held on her farm in Saskatchewan that very day, there was no one in the room whose heart did not go out to her and her family.