Union Farmer Spring 2001

Trade Trade-Offs - Corporations Versus People

It has been said that Canada today has no agriculture or food policy, only a trade policy which determines everything else. Indeed, this seems to be increasingly the case, not only in regard to food production but also for other sectors; not only for Canada but for other countries as well.

So when the heads of state of the nations of this hemisphere (except Cuba) were planning to meet in Quebec City this spring to pursue yet another "free trade" agreement, farmers knew it was a matter of serious concern for them. Farm and peasant groups involved in the international Via Campesina movement had already been to Seattle to protest the WTO negotiations on agriculture (see Seattle Declaration sidebar). Now we were ready to come together again to make our voices heard on the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

As the Canadian member of Via Campesina, the NFU agreed to be the host organization for the Agriculture Forum that would form part of the week-long People's Summit (not to be confused with the official "Summit of the Americas", otherwise known as the Bush-Chretien Comedy Show.) We worked with other Via Campesina organizations on the planning, particularly with the Coordinadora Latinoamericana de Organizaciones Campesinas (CLOC), based in Mexico and representing most of our sister groups in Latin America. To enable its involvement, CLOC had funding from a group of European and Canadian Catholic non-government organizations, CIDSE, through Development and Peace in Montreal, who actively supported the Agriculture Forum in numerous other ways as well.

Planning and carrying out this event was a mammoth task for the NFU, and we had almost no material resources to work with. Nonetheless, we took it on. Why?

Because the issues on the table at Quebec, at Seattle, in Qatar next fall, in Ottawa a year from now, are the NFU's core issues: farm gate prices, food safety, marketing systems, transportation, environmental sustainability, social programs, viable rural communities. The forces at play are the very same forces we are dealing with every day as individuals and as a union: greed versus need, corporate power against human beings and the planet. The code word for what is happening is "globablization", the policy approach it requires is "neo-liberalism", and it is imposed through a vast and complex variety of mechanisms.

The NFU is all too familiar with these mechanisms as they affect farmers. When NFU Locals pass resolutions against the deregulation of railway transportation, or the licensing of Bovine Growth Hormone, or US interference in Canadian potato marketing, they are challenging globalization. When individual farmers vote to support the Wheat Board or other single-desk selling mechanisms, when a farm family decides to kick the chemical habit and switch to low-input agriculture, when another rural community organizes to fight yet another hog mega-barn - they are confronting the same thing. When the NFU nationally calls for a moratorium on GM foods, or joins with others to oppose water privatization and exports, or demands an end to patents on life and a ban on the trading of "carbon credits", we are engaging in the same struggle.

These are the things we have been battling against, and these things are exactly what the trade agreements are all about.

Along with international financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, these agreements - NAFTA, the WTO, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI, which appears to be temporarily dormant), APEC, and now the proposed FTAA, are the vehicles the corporations and their puppet governments have developed to impose these policies on a continental and global scale.