Agroecology and the Struggle for Food Sovereignty ... - Yale University

food security and food sovereignty: production, development, trade
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Dawkins emphasized, however, that “subsidization itself is the wrong
target” for criticism. Subsidies are not the cause of dumping; they are the
public-policy response to low prices in the private marketplace, which
benefit the agribusiness traders. The low prices are a result of gluts in the
marketplace; the better public policy solution is supply management.
Flores described the disastrous results of dumping in Mexico under the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). While Mexico’s food and agriculture
imports and exports have both grown nearly every year since NAFTA took effect in
1994, the trade imbalance has also grown yearly. Every year Mexico becomes increasingly
import-dependent, importing more food than it exports. The majority of
Mexico’s agricultural trade is with the U.S. In 1993 Mexico imported 50,000 tons of
corn. This year, as the third largest importer of corn in the world, it will buy 7 million
tons of corn from the U.S., over 40 percent of it genetically modified.The sharp rise
in imports, Flores asserted, results not from an inability to produce but from structural
economic changes brought on by dumping of U.S. corn. Mexico has the capacity
to produce 21 to 22 million tons out of the 24 million tons of corn it needs. Mexico
could be self-sufficient in bean production, but instead imports 15 percent of its beans
because the price of beans has fallen to only half the cost of producing them.
Sinclair argued that it is not only Mexican farmers who have suffered: “Free trade
has hurt farmers North and South.” He noted that the 2003 WTO talks in Cancun
broke down in a North-South conflict, as governments from the South protested that
the U.S. pushes for free trade but still protects its own markets and subsidizes its own
agricultural products for export.
But, said Sinclair, despite the appearance of conflicting interests between
Northern and Southern farmers, subsidy-driven overproduction has not
helped Northern farmers either. Instead, as U.S. agricultural policy has
increasingly promoted export-driven agriculture, it has made trading corporations
the beneficiaries rather than farmers.
The agricultural economy has become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a
few corporations that capture the value of subsidies by trading cheaply priced, subsidized
goods. Now, he noted, four firms control 80 percent of meat processing in the
U.S., and three companies control 70 percent of the global trade in corn.
yale school of forestry & environmental studies