Harry Pollard wrote on Wed, 28 Nov 2001:
The protection of human rights, labour or the environment is a joke. If
it were not, the various international bodies involved in these things
could disband and go home. What happens when the WTO threatens the fat
cats' tariff protected monopolies, is they scream environment! labor!
rights!or anything else that will divert attention from their real
purpose - to maintain their privileges at the expense of the people.
The claim that tariffs and subsidies protect fatcats is a half-truth --
it's true in some cases/places but not in others. In America, farming
subsidies are mostly for fatcats, whereas in Switzerland, most farming
subsidies actually go to environmentally and socially useful purposes:
We have the highest percentage of organic farming and the strictest
animal welfare regulations in Europe. Farming also has other functions
such as landscape maintenance, biodiversity protection, consumer-protection
(e.g. against antibiotics-resistance) and even jobs in rural areas.
These important functions cost money that has to provided by subsidies.
So the problem is not subsidies per se, as Harry claims, but the right
distribution of subsidies: for environmental social purposes instead of
fatcats (factory farms which pollute and destroy jobs animal welfare).
Chris
America has the best politicians that money can buy.
