Some Reasons Why People Are Protesting Against the WTO

A Few of the Reasons That People Protest Against the Agricultural Policies of the WTO
Commentary #301 (September 11, 2003)

We keep hearing about people protesting in the streets of whatever city hosts meetings of the Word Trade Organization (or WTO). Typically, WTO Ministers from over 150 nations meet behind closed doors, neither inviting nor allowing comment from anyone outside their group.

For the last few years, thousands of protestors turn out for these events. Why are people protesting about the WTO? Some accuse protestors of being superficial; of doing it just for fun; just for the simple thrill of challenging the police and of being tear-gassed and arrested. TV news shows rarely cover these protests, except to show video clips of strange, large puppets, traffic disruption, and police encounters. A citizen would be hard-pressed to form an intelligent opinion about these protests from the meager offerings they see and hear on most broadcast news.

Globalization has led to some very positive changes in our world; such as the ability of people, around the world, to communicate cheaply and easily via the Internet. But there are also many reasons to be worried about what the World Trade Organization (or WTO), the International Monetary Fund (or IMF), and the World Bank are doing in the name of globalization and free trade. This commentary will discuss some of the agricultural issues involved, although there are many other reasons to object to the WTO.

The WTO, along with the World Bank, has been responsible for devastating the economies of poor nations around the world. By making loans to developing countries on the condition that they adhere to certain limitations to allow free-trade, they are no longer allowed to protect their local markets with import tariffs. The U.S. then dumps government-subsidized food on them at prices that prevent the small farmers in these countries from making any money. It forces them into bankruptcy. If the countries don’t want to allow artificially cheap U.S. foods to be imported, to the detriment of the countries’ native foods, they must first repay the debt, which they cannot do.

The WTO expects the countries’ corporate farmers to give up growing native foods in favor of growing export crops. WTO policies actually increase poverty and hunger.

The WTO promotes its agenda as a way to “feed the world.” In truth, they help feed only those with enough money to buy food. The WTO causes many small, family farmers to lose farms in countries around the world and in the United States. Farmers who are thrown off their land can no longer grow their own food, and have no money to buy any of the WTO’s bounty.

Large agricultural corporations have literally changed the way seeds have worked since the beginning of time. Farmers buy seed, but the seeds produced from this year’s crops literally can’t be planted for the next year’s crop. This is very profitable for seed producers, because farmers are forced to buy seed every year. Around the world, and according to plan, the numbers of varieties of each sort of crop are diminishing at an alarming pace.

This practice makes our food supply vulnerable, though. Once our supply of seeds is tied to just a few seed producers and a few varieties of seeds, deliberate attacks on just a few locations could trigger a word-wide food crisis. Diversity in the gene pool allows species of plants and animals to survive encounters with new strains of diseases or especially destructive insects. In a democracy, you might think there would be some dialogue in the media about the wisdom of proceeding on this course. There is almost no public discussion of these issues, though.

For the first time in history, life forms can now be patented. Once a company makes a single innovation, seeds that have been carefully developed and passed down among human farmers since the dawn of time are now becoming the patented property of corporations,. For the first time in history, farmers can’t trade or sell seeds from their best crops.

Genetically modified organisms (or GMOs) get an occasional mention in the news. Biotech companies say that GMOs are not a big deal; that this is not new technology. People have been modifying genes for many years, they say. Selective breeding has indeed been practiced for years; millennia. Modern scientific methods have allowed more sophisticated gene modifications to be accomplished. However, we’re not talking about some minor gene adjustments here. One well-known GMO was a tomato containing a fish gene.

These genetic modifications have nothing to do with food safety, flavor, nutrition, or anything that consumers benefit from directly. Their primary purposes are to allow foods to be shipped farther, to make them more tolerant of herbicides and insecticides, to breed the insecticide into the chemistry of the plant itself, and to force farmers to buy their pesticides from specific companies. These modifications are designed to make the world’s farmers ever more dependent on the largest corporations for their seeds and chemicals.

We can only guess what other gene combinations we are eating because these secret, patented modifications are not required to be on food labels. In fact, countries are prohibited from advertising products to be free of GMOs. No special testing is required before releasing these genes into the wild, and once they leave the laboratory, they can never be taken back. Without any meaningful safety standards in place, Americans are being fed foods that have some very strange genes.

The strategy seems to be, that once the world food supply is contaminated with engineered genes the question of whether to allow GMOs will become moot. In fact, a Canadian farmer is currently being sued for illegally growing patented canola plants after engineered pollens drifted onto his field and grew in a ditch there.

So, it is being made the responsibility of farmers who don’t grow GMOs, to prevent the pollen from other fields from contaminating their crops. Of course, this is impossible as corn pollen, for example, is carried for many, many miles by the winds.

The U.S. claims that GMOs are an American success story, bragging that millions of Americans have been eating GMOs for years without any documented ill effects. Of course, it could take years for such ill effects to become known and documented. And by the time any such ill effects show up, many, perhaps all, of us will have already been affected. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has no plan in place for any sort of genetic emergency if one of these endlessly creative modifications does create a disaster.

They say that this technology is completely safe. Strange then that they refuse to sign any liability clauses in the contracts with countries who are reticent to accept GMOs.

Our government vigorously opposes any labeling of GMOs, so we can’t choose to avoid eating them. In this so-called success story, we are the lab rats. It would be good to consider this before a genetic disaster occurs, rather than looking for someone to blame afterwards. The technology has already been developed, though, so corporations are focused only on justifying the research money already spent, not on studying safety.

Europe has taken a more cautious approach. They don’t allow many GMOs and certainly not the latest, most exotic ones. The U.S. is now suing these European countries over their decision to keep out genetically modified products. The suit refers to the Europeans’ "unfounded, and unscientific fears". Our president is accusing the Europeans of causing hunger in Africa. However, much of Africa is refusing GMOs as well.

Then there’s the new AIDS bill. George W. Bush has introduced this with much fanfare, and it is supposed to help those in Africa and the Caribbean who suffer from AIDS. Mr. Bush’s announcement of this program was dripping with compassion. Now we’ve found that African countries that won’t accept genetically modified seeds won’t be eligible for this assistance; so even AIDS assistance is being used as a blunt instrument to coerce countries to open their markets to GMOs.

Our local autonomy in the U.S. is also threatened by some of our recent International trade agreements. They have opened the U.S. to international lawsuits if local governments make rules to protect themselves from unwanted products. Nations can be sued for the financial losses to companies who hoped to profit from the sale of these products. This is the basis for the current U.S. lawsuit against the European countries to force them to accept GMOs. A Canadian company is suing the U.S. because Californians want to take the cancer-causing additive MBTE out of gasoline. International consequences now result from making local decisions about health, commerce, or the environment. These global consequences make it increasingly difficult for local governments to make laws to protect themselves.

Not long ago, Mendocino County, in northern California, narrowly escaped being forced to give away precious river water in enormous bags to be floated down the coast to the thirsty, irrigated desert of southern California. Now the same company is after water of nearby Humboldt County. It is not at all clear whether residents will be able to legally fend off this attack. And this is just one example of the beginnings of the loss of our local autonomy.

The protestors are trying to let people know what the WTO and its cohorts are up to. Unfortunately, most Americans haven’t heard anything about it on TV news, so they figure it’s probably not terribly important.

The news tends to feed the stereotype that it is only liberals, hippy kids, tree-hugging environmentalist, and foreigners who are protesting. But in the U.S., there are 4000 family farmers going out of business every year. Dairy farmers can’t sell milk for what it costs to produce it, even though the corporations who sell the milk to us do so for more profit than ever. And Americans are serving untested, genetically modified foods to their children every day, mostly without knowing that they are doing so.

The standard of living of most Americans has already declined substantially over the last few decades. Our trade agreements and the WTO make it likely that this trend will continue. Americans are hoping that this is just a temporary lull in the prosperity, but the single-income family is almost extinct and, as yet, there is no bottom in sight.

To learn more about the problems with the WTO and agriculture, go to www.citizen.org/trade/