The Ecologist: Local Food, Global Solution
Increased international trade in food is putting the livelihoods of
small producers across the world at risk. The time has come for a return to
a more localised agricultural model.
For Anjamma, who had never before stepped outside her home
village, the constant flash from the cameras must have come as quite a
shock. But her surprise was nothing compared to the looks on the faces of
the reporters as she answered one of their questions. One of them asked what
she would do if the UK government's current plan for Indian agriculture went
ahead. There was a pause as the translator spoke to Anjamma in her language.
Anjamma thought for a second before giving the interpreter her answer. The
interpreter then turned back to the crowd of journalists and said: 'There
will be nothing for us to do other than to drink pesticide and die.'
Back home in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, Anjamma works
four acres of land with her seven children, two bullocks and eight buffalo.
She has no machines. This March Anjamma left her home for the first time,
and came to the UK with a delegation of farmers in the same situation as
her. The reason for the trip? To protest against UK development minister
Clare Short's plans to spend �65 million of UK taxpayers' money to turn
Andhra Pradesh into a massive food export zone. If Short's plan goes ahead,
then over the next two decades it is likely to destroy the livelihoods of
around 20 million farmers like Anjamma.
Speaking to the press conference, Anjamma made it quite clear
what Indian farmers really want. 'If Britain wants to give money,' she said,
'it should come to the farmers directly. That way we can keep our land, make
farms more fertile, buy more seed and become completely self-sufficient.
Instead, this is being denied to us in the name of modernisation.'
Anjamma's is a message that an increasing number of British
consumers are echoing each week in the ways they choose to buy their food.
In direct contrast to the way the UK government wishes to spend �65 million
of its taxpayers' money, British consumers now spend the same sum at local
farmers markets each year. Every penny of their money makes a clear
statement that, like Anjamma, more and more people in the UK want to know
that the food they put on the table was produced locally, and in ways that
they can trust.
UNFAIR TRADE
This growing call for the emphasis to be put back on local food
production, rather than international trade, is likely to form a contentious
backdrop to the debates at a Food and Agricultural Organisation of the
United Nations conference in Rome this month. In typically noble style, the
meeting has the stated aspiration of wishing 'to alleviate poverty and
hunger by supporting sustainable agricultural development'. Yet countless
similar meetings have happened before, and they all tend to articulate the
solution to world poverty as an increase in the international trade in food.
The idea that farmers can make more money by growing food for
export might, on the surface, seem a very sensible one. Unfortunately, it
just doesn't work. With more and more countries fighting for the same
markets, producers are forced to drop their prices in order to compete. The
result is not more money for farmers, but less. This can be vividly seen in
the coffee trade. Coffee is, after oil, the world's most valuable export.
Between 1995 and 2000, Vietnam used World Bank loans to triple its coffee
output. This made Vietnam the world's second largest producer of coffee
after Brazil. All well and good for the Vietnamese economy, one might think,
but what about the farmers in the other 49 Third World countries that
produce coffee? Well, world coffee prices have collapsed and 20 million
farmers worldwide now see their livelihoods at risk.
A similar story is unfolding in the case of tea. China already
provides 80 per cent of the green tea traded on the international market.
With growing Western interest in green and organic teas' health-giving
properties, China is now gearing up to meet an upsurge in demand. This is
even if it means flooding the market with tea at rock bottom prices so as to
ward off competitors like Sri Lanka and India.
It is not as if India doesn't have any other problems to worry
about. Following a complaint by the US, the WTO decided in 2000 that India
would have to remove trade barriers that previously protected its own, local
producers. Ever since, Indian farmers have found it harder and harder to
survive. Products that they once produced for the home market are now
undercut by cheaper imported alternatives. The country now ships in
Indonesian coconuts. The prices of coconuts in India have fallen by 80 per
cent as a result. Likewise coffee prices have collapsed by over 60 per cent,
and the price of pepper has plummeted by 45 per cent.
But this is nothing in comparison with the market for edible
oil: the Indian industry has effectively been wiped out. Low import duties
have led to highly subsidised US soya and palm oil from Malaysia flooding
the market. Imports now account for 70 per cent of India's domestic
consumption of edible oil.
In response, activists from all over India have been at the
forefront of demands regarded by most of the world's economists as the
ultimate heresy: the reintroduction of protective trade barriers.
In their own country at least, these voices are slowly beginning
to be heard. In September 2001, two former Indian prime ministers - Shri VP
Singh and Deve Gowda - joined with political parties, peoples' movements,
trade unions and farmers' organisations to launch the Indian People's
Movement Against the WTO. The aim of the movement is to push for more
protective controls on imports.While these demands for a return of tariffs
are currently being made mainly in poorer countries, it is unlikely they
will stop there. For just as in India, the livelihoods of smaller farmers in
the US and Europe are also at risk.
CAP IN HAND
EU plans to reform the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) may
contain a welcome shift away from subsidising overproduction and towards
supporting greener farming methods. But on its own this fails to address the
central flaw of the CAP - an issue which is never adequately discussed, let
alone addressed, in official circles. Namely, that enforced global
competitiveness is a curse. European farmers are being asked to perform two
mutually exclusive tasks at the same time. First, they have to achieve ever
greater levels of international competitiveness by increasing efficiency
through larger scale, more intensive farming. But at the same time, they are
being asked to maintain higher standards of social, environmental and animal
welfare. The two objectives simply cannot go together.
Furthermore, this model of competitive, predominantly intensive
agriculture is also being promoted in the eastern European countries which
are currently seeking to join the EU. Polish farmers, for example, are being
forced into competition with the more 'efficient', large-scale farmers of
western Europe. The result is that Poland will probably see the collapse of
up to two million agricultural livelihoods.
STOP GLOBAL, SHOP LOCAL
As more consumers, farmers and workers world-wide are
experiencing the downside of rampant globalisation, the time has come to
consider replacing this failing system with a sustainable localised
alternative. A 'local food, global solution' policy (see box 2 below) would
aim to keep production much closer to the point of consumption. This would
help protect small farmers and rebuild local economies around the world.
It is this approach that will be at the heart of a report the
authors will be taking to the UN's Rome conference. To see a copy of the
report, visit Caroline Lucas' website at: www.carolinelucasmep.org.uk. The
point of the report is to help start a debate about the need for a radically
different 'localist' agricultural model. Such a model should ensure that
small farmers from the UK to Poland and Vietnam to India, will have a secure
future providing healthy, predominantly local food in a way that protects
the environment. Imports will be controlled by governments, and exports
should consist only of genuine surpluses once food security needs have been
met by domestic production. Our response to the omnipresent free traders
will be: 'Let the world food trade deal only in the leftovers.'
BOX 1The global food trade - the vital numbers
- For every calorie of carrot flown into the UK from South
Africa, we use 66 calories of fuel.
- Of every 100 fruits consumed in the UK, only five will now
have been produced domestically.
- One shopping basket of organic products could have travelled
241,000 kilometres and released as much CO2 into the atmosphere as an
average four-bedroom house does through cooking meals over eight months.
- In 1998 the UK imported 61,400 tonnes of poultry meat from the
Netherlands. In the same year it exported 33,100 tonnes of poultry meat back
to the Netherlands.
- In 1997 126 million litres of milk were imported into the UK,
while 270 million litres were exported at the same time.
- In 1999 the EU imported 44,000 tonnes of live bovines from
Argentina, 11,000 tonnes from Botswana, 40,000 tonnes from Poland and over
70,000 from Brazil. In the same year the EU exported 874,211 tonnes of live
bovines to the rest of the world.
BOX 2 'Local food, global solution' policies will require:
- Import controls to be gradually re-introduced to protect those
goods which can be produced domestically from imports which could otherwise
threaten the rediversification of national agricultural systems;
- Mechanisms to ensure that the real costs of environmental
damage, unsustainable production methods and long-distance trade are
included in the cost of food;
- Greater support for farmers to enable them to prosper and
produce healthy food using environmentally sustainable farming methods;
- The ending of long-distance transport and live exports of
animals;
- Restriction of the concentration and market power of the major
food corporations and retailers through new competition laws, a fair pricing
system for farmers and consumers alike (rather than the current system of
low prices for farmers and high prices for consumers), and the encouragement
of rural regeneration and jobs;
- Residual long-distance trade in foods which cannot be produced
domestically (eg, coffee, tea and bananas in the UK) to follow the principle
of 'fair trade miles'; this would combine the requirements of FairTrade with
'food miles', with a guaranteed quantity of goods to be purchased by each
buying country within a guaranteed range of prices.
- A reorientation of the end goals of international trade and
aid rules, so that they contribute to the rebuilding of more sustainable
local and national economies.
...............................................
Be the change
you want to see in the world.
-- Mahatma Gandhi
