“Food is a weapon. It is now one of the principal tools in our negotiating kit” ( US Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, Business Week, 15/12/ 75).

“Trade liberalisation – the move toward global free trade policies – poses a grave threat to the continued existence of small farms throughout the world. Over the past couple of decades Third World countries have been encouraged, cajoled, threatened, and generally pressured into unilaterally reducing the level of protection offered to their domestic food producers in the face of well-financed foreign competitors. Through participation in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, North American Free Trade Agreement, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation, they have reduced or in some cases eliminated tariffs, quotas and other barriers to unlimited imports of food products . . . food security is placed in jeopardy” (“The Multiple Functions and Benefits of Small Farm Agriculture in the Context of Global Trade Negotiations” by Peter Rosset, Policy Brief Number 4, September 1999, Food First: The Institute for Food and Development Policy, p15).

“Market forces alone will not help get farming out of the dust in Africa, any more than it got the American farmer out of the mud before the (1930s’) New Deal. Aid for the poorest farmers in Africa, and elsewhere in the Third World, may have to prove as permanent – to ensure subsistence – as aid to the world’s richest farmers has proved in Europe and the United States. And this means both a substantial and indefinite shift of resources to some of the least developed countries in the world” (“Global Challenge: From Crisis to Cooperation: Breaking the North-South Stalemate”, The Report of the Socialist International Committee on Economic Policy, Chaired by Michael Manley; President Willy Brandt, 1985, p148).

“ New Zealand also believes that free trade fosters food security. An open and well functioning international trading system is the most certain way to ensure adequate food supplies for all” (Lockwood Smith, NZ Minister of Agriculture, from his speech at the World Food Summit, Rome, 13-17/11/96: www.fao.org/docrep/003/x0736m/rep2/newzeal.htm).

“What type of agriculture works for small farmers? For most developing countries, small farmers require support, not to produce for the export market, but to convert to agro-ecological, organic or sustainable agricultural methods and produce for themselves and the local market . . . this type of small-scale farming is in fact MORE productive and therefore MORE efficient than industrial farming” (“The Agreement on Agriculture: change requires a hero’s journey”, Aileen Kwa, Focus on Trade, Number 57, December 2000, p33).

A global food crisis that has been building up for many years burst openly on to the world scene in early 2008. There were food riots in a number of countries across the globe – from Morocco to Haiti, Indonesia to Uzbekistan, and Burkino Faso to Bangladesh. World food prices rose by 39% between February 2007 and the beginning of 2008. Staples like rice, wheat and corn were priced out of reach for many poor people. The real price of rice, the staple sustenance for at least a third of the world’s population, indeed soared to a 19 year high in March 2008, including an increase of 50% in two weeks alone, while the real price of wheat hit a 28-year high ( www.oaklandinstitute.org/?q=node/view/476: this organisation is an excellent source on food security).

Capitalising On Crisis

A total of 37 nations were reported as being afflicted with food crises. Then later by mid 2008 the figure had swollen to over 60 countries seriously impacted. At the end of May, the International Committee of the Red Cross was warning that the global food crisis threatened to spark even more violence in war zones where millions of people were already vulnerable, e.g. Somalia, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Sudan ( Press, 29/5/08). Political and international institution heads voiced concerns that the crisis could dangerously unsettle the whole world economy. Since the situation could become very unsettling for foreign investment returns and prospects it is certainly getting some attention, whereas hundreds of millions of people have suffered hunger and malnutrition for all the so-called “development” decades!

Various specific causes of the global food crisis were cited in the mainstream media but, as usual, the capitalist system continues to suppress for the most part the truth on such a potentially disturbing issue. In particular, the crucial role of so-called free trade underlying the crisis has been largely hidden. More specifically, in New Zealand’s case, our part in helping create the crisis is being screened from view and scrutiny. Protectionism can certainly operate in revealing ways according to the free trade agenda! Worse, both internationally and domestically, the same people and market forces that brought on the crisis are actually seizing the opportunity to try and ram the corporate free market programme through to the maximum.

Capitalist greed and predatory power promotion are deeply inherent in the creation of world hunger. This process enforces, and also endeavours to legitimate, the subjugation of small and medium farmers worldwide. Overly excessive capitalist greed has supposedly become even a matter of some official concern in the US with an inquiry proceeding into the role of manipulative speculation as a driver of soaring oil prices. Such oil speculation is related to the global food crisis, both directly and indirectly. The G8 Finance Ministers have also asked the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to investigate “the recent wild price swings in the commodity” ( Press, 19/6/08). But: “An Italian push for regulation to snuff out speculation in oil futures ran into US and British resistance” ( Press, 16/6/08). For sure, little governmental action is being taken “to calm markets or quell protests over the cost of fuel and food” (ibid.) as certain narrow vested interests continue to rule the roost - other than to try and pressure the Organisation of Oil Producing Countries (OPEC).

Background To The Crisis

The current food crisis needs to be placed in context for any adequate understanding. In this article I concentrate on the background history before the advent of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), although connections of course are made with what has come after and especially with what is happening now. This history has significantly shaped the nature of the crisis in 2008. Basically, people starve because they cannot grow enough food for themselves, or they lack the money to buy enough. “Food security” instead means guaranteed access to adequate nutritional food. Even in Aotearoa/NZ, a land flowing with milk and honey - a virtual cornucopia of food production! - more and more people are turning to foodbanks which are struggling to meet the rising demand. As so vividly pictured in John Steinbeck’s great novel “The Grapes of Wrath” (1939), in a market economy people can go hungry while food gets dumped to keep up prices; or, as updated in today’s global market, food goes to the highest bidder, or even to feed the tanks of SUVs (sports utility vehicles) rather than starving children.

When formerly colonial peoples began to gain nominal political independence in the aftermath of World War II, “commodity chain” relations still kept them bound in subordinate fashion to their former Western overlords. “Commodity chains are economic networks linking firms, countries and industries. They span producers, distributors and consumers of goods, increasingly on a global scale” (“Global Sociology”, R Cohen & P Kennedy, Palgrave, 2000, p375). The oil and coffee trade networks exemplify commodity chains. The West has dominated these commodity chains right up to the present time although there has now emerged an intensifying struggle for the control of vital industrial minerals around the planet, above all fossil fuels. Today, Western interests, especially transnational corporations (TNCs), are being challenged in various ways by a range of competitor governments and anti-foreign control movements - from Russia to Venezuela, China to Nigeria, and from Bolivia to Western Sahara.

Food, Oil, And Other Commodity Challenges

Food is very much implicated in all of this given that oil in particular is critical to the success of modern industrial agriculture. As well as the agitation about food prices, protests have been mounting on the world energy crisis in a number of countries. As analyst Paul Roberts emphasises, for “the developing world, which relies on petroleum fuels not just for transport but also for cooking, lighting and irrigation”, constraints could eventually be disastrous (“Tapped Out” [“World Oil Bust?”], National Geographic, June 2008, pp86-91; quote on p91; Roberts is the author of “The End of Oil” [2004], and now “The End of Food” [2008]). From surging energy costs and the growing shortage and cost of fertilisers to the new fashion for biofuel crops, agricultural production for human food consumption faces a set of sharply biting stress factors on top of an already fragile situation. The international spread of biofuel production is a graphic illustration of Western market forces at work with the US and the European Union (EU) deliberately promoting extensive new production by both legal mandate and governmental subsidy.

Up to the 1970s, the West was very much in charge of the oil commodity chain based in the Middle East, home of about two thirds of the world’s known recoverable reserves, although there had been serious stirrings of unrest among some of the producing countries. In fact, OPEC was set up in 1960 but had so far failed to properly mobilise its potential clout. However, in 1969 the new ruler of Libya, Colonel Qadaffi, galvanised the grouping with fresh resolve by making a successful nationalist assault on the corporate oil cartel. Then, in connection with the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War in 1973, the Arab nations jointly used their producer power to punish the West for its support of Israel. Oil prices shot up fourfold. This was the first “oil shock”. As the Arab nations saw things too, they were rolling back foreign control and gaining a fairer price for the precious energy commodity, so essential for the bloated, if inevitably temporary, Western consumerist lifestyle.

Certain other commodity prices, especially wheat, had risen sharply in 1973. Inspired by the OPEC example and model of producer cooperation, many other Third World producer countries sensed that the chance had finally arrived for them to assert their rights and get fairer and higher prices for the raw material commodities, both mineral and agricultural - from copper to coffee, phosphate to aluminium bauxite, and iron ore to bananas - that the West had acquired so cheaply for so long, sometimes over several centuries of imperial rule. Yet, as the Western world became wracked with stagflation, a combination of rising prices and economic flatulence, the big guns of the prevailing global capitalist regime were systematically trained on the marshalling ranks of Third World producers.

The Threat Of International Democracy

For a variety of commodities there already existed International Commodity Agreements (ICAs) between producers and consumers. Producing countries tried to employ some of these ICAs to elicit better deals by applying more concerted action and harder bargaining. But there were lots of problems in getting these Agreements to work well, problems principally centred on the unwillingness of the industrialised countries to allow this anyway. Obviously, higher prices did not seem to be in the interests of the developed countries at all! Moreover, the ICAs severely restricted the growth and freedom of their TNCs. Consequently, the industrial countries, headed by the Atlantic Alliance of the US and UK, moved to undermine the producers as much as possible. The Western lifestyle had long been subsidised by cheap and easily accessible Third World commodities, and the reigning powers were not going to relinquish control to the majority world. Above all, the Western insider ruling cliques well knew (and know ever more acutely today!) that their own very privileged lifestyle depends on the essential surplus in income, actual physical resources extracted, and various “externalities” – especially in the form of displaced environmental costs - wrung out of a multitude of poorer countries.

Most threatening to the de facto Anglo-American empire and Western rule in general was the prospect of the gathering international movement spearheaded in the United Nations (UN) to give Third World producers a fair deal, to deliver justice to the world’s peasants and toilers. The former Soviet Union could give some lip service to this at the time too, compounding Western worries. In the early 1970s I was a member of Corso’s Christchurch-based food issues committee, and then later in 1976/77 the secretary of Corso’s Wellington region. Corso was Aotearoa/NZ’s home-grown overseas aid movement. It was then in the process of transforming itself into a more justice-oriented organisation. This social change was just part of a wider international movement to try and assure Third World peoples, particularly the poor, their fair share of the planet’s wealth and resources.

At the UN, this movement took the form of a call for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) by the Group of 77 (G-77) developing countries. “The NIEO is a Third World manifesto for revision of the global system of economic relations. It was first mooted by the leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement at their Algiers summit in the autumn of 1973. Subsequently the issue was taken up by a Special Session of the General Assembly of the UN in May 1974. The Assembly adopted a Programme of Action for the establishment of a NIEO. At the autumn meeting of the regular Assembly, Resolution 3281 on the Economic Rights and Duties of States was passed by 120 votes to six (the opposition including the UK and the US) with ten abstentions. Both the Action Programme and the Charter on Economic Rights reiterated ideas about revision and restructuring which had been under discussion in the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) since its inception in 1964” (“Dictionary of International Relations”, G Evans & J Newnham, Penguin, 1998, pp368/9).

Ripping Off Raw Material Producers

All 16 opposing and abstaining countries were industrialised. Yet included in the handful of Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries supporting Resolution 3281 were NZ and Australia! This was the period in both countries of fairly idealistic Leftwing Labour Party governments. It all certainly seems so very nostalgic in memory these days! As well, both countries shared much in common with the Third World experience, being heavily dependent on primary exports which had generally shown a steady decline in price over the years in contrast to the rising trend for prices in manufactured goods. Meanwhile, the main body of OECD countries was locked in a feud with UNCTAD and UNCTAD-inspired policies.

The Australian government in particular wanted to gain more benefits for its people out of the country’s natural resources by wresting back control from big TNCs and the US and other powerful interests that backed them. Unfortunately, that Labor government headed by Gough Whitlam suffered a US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) -backed and evidently manipulated constitutional coup, in 1975, while NZ’s Labour Prime Minister, Norman Kirk, died in 1974, a psychologically harassed man, convinced he could be even a target of assassination. As well, just to name one other associated leader, the late Michael Manley suffered a programme of CIA-inspired destabilisation when he was Prime Minister of bauxite-rich Jamaica in the 1970s (e.g., see chapter 43 in “The CIA: A Forgotten History, US Global Interventions since World War 2” by William Blum, Zed Books, 1986; & “US Intervention in Jamaica: How Washington Toppled the Manley Government” by Ernest Harsch, Pathfinder Press, 1981). Manley was later chair of the Socialist International Committee on Economic Policy, whose report, “Global Challenge”, is cited in one of the opening quotes to the present article (a decade later Manley was returned to power for a further term as Jamaican Prime Minister, but this time as a proponent of free market policies, exactly paralleling the transformation of New Zealand and Australian “socialist” parties of the 1980s and 90s. Ed.). The US ruling class has always had plenty of opponents to target! As a footnote to this particular paragraph, it is worth noting that the present Australian Labor government is nervous about “Chinese State-owned firms” investing in Australian companies while China meantime appeals to the free trade principles of the WTO ( Press, 19/6/08).

Washington Weighs In

All sorts of difficulties arose for those Third World countries working for constructive change in international economic relations and a NIEO. Suffice it here to say for the sake of the theme of this article, that agricultural commodities – and even mineral resources at the time - clearly lacked the leverage of a highly strategic and vital commodity like oil. Next to oil, coffee was then the biggest commodity in world trade. But not only is coffee what can be termed a soft commodity, the coffee commodity chain was firmly controlled by TNCs. A similar pattern of foreign corporate control presided over crops from cocoa to sugar. Furthermore, the cereal grain crops eaten by Western consumers could continue to be comfortably grown in the OECD countries for adequate domestic supply, whereas tropical export products like coffee, cocoa and cane sugar were subject to nationally damaging fluctuations in quantity and price due to economic and natural factors, e.g. frost or drought in Brazil. Certain tropical products also became subject to other threats, or intimated threats, like substitute products, e.g. high fructose corn syrup sweeteners for sugar, and polypropylene plastic sacks instead of jute woolsacks, along with the usual arm twisting from foreign aid/investment and debt burden pressures. Most importantly, whereas the closely integrated OECD countries had interwoven and reinforcing economic sectors – agriculture, manufacturing, services – the so-called developing countries were often highly dependent on just one or two export crops stemming from their colonial history.

A US-led attack on the NIEO programme relentlessly wore down Third World resistance and replaced it with “market-friendly policies enforced by the institutions (World Bank and IMF) they dominated”, emphasising the reduction of social welfare, privatisation, an open door for imports and foreign investment, and a corresponding concentration on export-led growth (“The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought”, editors A Bullock & S Trombley, 3 rd edition., HarperCollins, 1999, p584; see my review of John Madeley’s “Trade And The Poor: The Impact of International Trade On Developing Countries” in Watchdog 99, April 2002, for further elaboration. This can be read online at http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/99/07.htm). These Washington Consensus-imposed policies became notorious as “structural adjustment”, a programme that even came to be foisted upon a developed country in the de facto sense – viz., NZ’s subjection to Rogernomics under the fourth Labour government in the 1980s.

Subverting State Support

Previously in the 1970s - and continuing on into the following decades - a whole range of tactics had come into play in the battle over commodities. Producing countries in potential competition could be played off against one another, divided according to differing concerns, and subjected to debilitating conditions on production, marketing and trade as dictated by Western agencies. The conditions imposed were directed at dismantling and preventing as much as possible any effective collectivist protection and support for farmers. Key targets were producer, trade and marketing boards and other such barriers to TNC operations. Any State and cooperative functions impeding private companies, particularly the foreign corporates, were strongly castigated and eventually eliminated, weakened, or put under continual pressure. Not that all forms of State support actually functioned well for small and medium farmers by any means but the path to improvement was participatory democracy and State support for genuinely cooperative enterprise. In particular, food first for local consumption should have been the main priority. Such grass/rice-roots producer empowerment was anathema to the presiding mostly white men in suits in their far-off glass towers. Above all, anything that seemed suggestive of beneficial “socialism” had to be squashed by the Washington Consensus.

One African example is very pertinent in 2008. While the terrible state of Zimbabwe is primarily due to President Mugabe’s iniquity, the IMF/World Bank cabal can also take much responsibility, especially in forcing the Grain Marketing Board in the early 1990s “to sell off its huge stockpile of maize and stop building grain silos in outlying areas”, and for generally reducing food security through a very grim structural adjustment regime (“Zimbabwe: A Land Divided” by R Palmer & I Birch, Oxfam, 1992, pp44/5). While subsidies for farmers in the USA and Europe were acceptable to the IMF and World Bank, similar subsidies were evidently inappropriate for farmers in Zimbabwe and elsewhere in Africa (ibid.; see also Watchdog 99, op. cit.). Ironically, later on, at the WTO negotiations, Zimbabwe became an active member of a group of developing countries concerned with food security and opposed to the American-led agricultural free trade agenda.

Zimbabwe’s proclaimed fall from being the breadbasket of Africa to the continent’s basket case owes much to the contrivances of those two powers, the US and UK, which are now angling to regain full control of this minerally rich and strategically placed country. Democratic concern for Zimbabwe as expressed by the Anglo-American imperial axis can be nicely offset against the recent revelations of British mercenary Simon Mann on Equatorial Guinea. Britain, “the Pentagon, the CIA, and the US oil companies who have invested in Equatorial Guinea” backed a coup attempt (involving Sir Mark Thatcher) on this west central African country in 2004 ( Press, 20/6/08; see also “Mercenaries: A Peculiarly British Disease”, by Murray Horton, Peace Researcher 30, March 2005, which can be read online at http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr30-114.html. Ed). Free trade and free elections can have all sorts of interesting connections and dimensions of meaning!

In practice then, privatised, competitive, atomised, and so vulnerable and powerless peasant farmers and rural workers have represented the ideal types for the capitalist planners, whatever might be the otherwise reassuring rhetoric. In stark contrast, in recent years the African countries of Malawi and Uganda have spurned the West’s free trade prescriptions and have been successfully feeding their peoples, although today they too are being adversely affected by higher prices like so many other poor countries. A shining model of what positive policies for food self-sufficiency can achieve is provided by Cuba (see articles on Cuba in Pacific Ecologist, “Food and agricultural security for the long emergency”, Number 14, Winter 2007 http://pacificecologist.org/archive/14/). Again, however, the parlous international situation is also hurting Cuba too. To be sure, improved self-sufficiency needs to be become a much greater goal for most of the world’s countries.

The NIEO, Trade Wars, And Resource Conflict

As the years went by, the World Bank and the IMF pushed more and more developing countries into growing ever greater quantities of a limited line of tropical crops, coffee being a prominent example marked by Vietnam’s dramatic rise as a leading producer. This oversupply ensured low prices and economic weakness. The main overall objective of the US and its allies was to sabotage ICAs like the coffee, cocoa, phosphate, bauxite and copper Agreements in favour of the TNCs, and stamp out producer power as much as possible as they did for instance in the case of the tin ICA in 1985 (“The Great Tin Crash: Bolivia and the World Tin Market”, by John Crabtree, et al., Latin America Bureau, 1987, particularly chapter 3).

Another prime Western objective was to further open up markets for the American and European grain trade by beating down barriers to imports and undercutting peasant farmers through the influx of subsidised wheat, corn, and other foods. Indeed, the EU competed in this with the US, both powers consequently causing great distress. Given that the proposed linchpin of the NIEO was intended to be an integrated set of commodity stabilisation agreements within what was called the Common Fund, the US-led opposition to ICAs was remorseless and very corrosive of cooperation between producing and consuming countries. The oil producing countries, at least in the form of their grossly greedy rulers, were largely bought off from the rest. In 1976 the very conservative and closely US/UK-linked Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates (UAE) even actually broke ranks within OPEC, adjusting oil prices to Western expectations by operating a dual price system and so keeping oil price rises to the minimum.

Corso was one of the many Western non-government organisations (NGOs) that appealed for justice and reform of the international trading system. It put out a range of information materials on food, tea, jute, coffee, etc., including an excellent, detailed information pack on the NIEO. Networking with other NGOs, our campaigning focused on fair trade and ending Western exploitation of Third World peoples and resources. However, with the demise in the 1970s of the NZ and Australian Labour governments, Australasian policies changed much for the worse with regard to the cause of global justice. The NZ government, now under National and Sir Robert Muldoon, was very hostile to justice in general and to activist groups like Corso in particular. Corso eventually faded away and a significant reason for its decline was the Government’s openly declared opposition to what it saw as a radically disturbing message.

Liberalising Food Markets?

The West pretty well buried the NIEO in the 1970s. One major game was to play out negotiations on the Common Fund in time consuming technical sparring. The ICAs fell apart as the Washington Consensus coordinated market forces. “Since the 1970s, there have been two NIEO visions: that of the Group of 77 (G-77) developing countries (adopted by the UN General Assembly, 1974) and the economic liberalism of the rich countries” (“The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought”, op. cit., p. 584; Watchdog 99, op. cit.). In the late 1970s, however, an international commission chaired by former West German Chancellor, Willy Brandt, took up the issues between the industrialised North and the Third World South in a couple of important studies, starting with “North-South: A Programme for Survival”, Report of the Independent Commission on International Development Issues (Pan Books, 1980).

Wisely enough, the North-South Commission called for an intensified “programme of international food security” (“North-South”, ibid., p. 280). It saw the need for urgent changes. “To reduce rural poverty and increase food production, agrarian reform (redistribution of land to the poor) and the promotion of farmers’ and workers’ organisations are priority issues. Such reforms are also necessary to enable large masses of people to participate more fully in society” (ibid., p130). It called for “greater support” to make ICAs work more effectively, including adequate funding for the Common Fund to “stabilise prices at remunerative levels” (ibid., pp152 & 286). Unfortunately, however, in the years to come, agricultural investment for food security was to lapse markedly.

Et Tu, Brandt Commission?!

In its purview, the Brandt Commission looked at the possibilities of more liberalised markets between North and South. Here we can detect the beginnings of an ominous line of thinking towards the endorsement of free trade. Eventually, even a big respected aid/development agency like Oxfam, sadly enough, was to buy into this line to some extent in the 21 st Century as the corporate international cooptation of a number of NGOs proceeded. The key issue regarding liberalisation is always what exactly is to be liberalised and how. For many poor country farmers by far the most important form of liberalisation would be an end to the subsidies in rich countries that have enabled the dumping of artificially low cost products on the world market and in their backyards. As indicated, this has happened for decades with severe effects on the viability of food security. In the clinching deal of the GATT Uruguay Round in 1994, as expressed in the Blair House arrangement, etc., the US and EU arranged to share the exploitation of food dumping on the world’s peasant farmers.(see “Food Security and the Free Market”, Pacific World [now Pacific Ecologist], November 1995: www.converge.org.nz/pirm/foodscfm.htm). In 2008, given the current scene with cereals priced at such high world levels, the issue of subsidies is rather more complicated.

The Brandt Commission recommended that: “Liberalisation of trade in food and other agricultural products within and between North and South would contribute to the stabilisation of food supplies” (op. cit., p104). Easier access to developed country markets has certainly been another longstanding objective for developing countries, indeed the carrot that has been dangled in front of them for many years right up to the current WTO Doha Round negotiations. But just how liberalisation as recommended by the Brandt Commission would relate to the effective working of ICAs was not at all evident. Again, the question of food security in relation to liberalisation is raised here in acute form. An emphasis on export agriculture can be very much at the expense of such security. This typifies the contradictions and lack of clarity that can be inherent in this sort of top-level recommendation making, however well meaning the basic intentions might be. Later too, the 1987 World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission) report, “Our Common Future” (Oxford University Press), expressed similarly conflicting policy recommendations.

Enter Stage Right – GATT!

Yet it is still very important to note that the Brandt Commission made the following comprehensive proposal on the issue of food security: “In a broader perspective, self-sufficiency in food . . . does not exclude trade . . . But a reliance on trade must not allow the world market in food to be a dominant factor. The market should have a regulatory and corrective role; but within an overall system governed by international measures for security of food volumes and prices, assistance for increased domestic production, and reliable food aid”(“North-South”, ibid., p 93).

In addition, the Commission specifically called for an International Grains Arrangement to ensure sufficient reserves in storage. So far the proposal had been blocked by the developed countries which were not prepared to provide sufficient financial funding for it (ibid., p 99). As noted in 1983 by the Brandt Commission’s second report, “Common Crisis : North-South : Cooperation for World Recovery”, continuing US objections to a new International Wheat Agreement and an improved system of grain reserves in general were based on American opposition “to internationally managed stocks, and holding to the view that a reserve system should be ‘market-oriented’” (Pan Books, pp128/9).

The Western capitalist momentum for TNC-driven dominance of the grain commodity chain has prevailed right up to the present with three American-owned and/or oriented TNCs – Cargill, Louis Dreyfus, and Arthur Daniels Midland – controlling 80% of the world’s grain (see Watchdog 116, December 2007, for my article on the current gold and coal rush on the West Coast, which includes material on Cargill and coal-mining in NZ. It can be read online at http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/16/04.htm).Third World development economists, along with some Western confreres, continued in the 1980s to argue the case for a NIEO and for justice in the commodity trade (see e.g. “Commodities and the Third World” by GK Sarkar, Oxford University Press, 1983, & “Economic Theory and New World Order”, editors H Singer et al, Ashish Publishers, 1987). But such ideas lacked any real politico-economic clout to back them.

On the other hand, Western politico-economic and trade warfare and manipulation set the stage for the deus ex machina entry of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in the latter 1980s. GATT was another organisation dominated by the OECD and charged with the TNC vision of trade liberalisation. So-called “free trade” was now being brazenly touted as the solution for the woes of the Third World – the panacea for escaping the shackles of poverty, food insecurity, and general development malaise. GATT, of course, had been in operation since 1948 but it was wheeled out in the second half of the 1980s as the supreme answer to world poverty and hunger, a solution which just so happened to correspond to the capitalist imperatives of growth and wealth accumulation for the ruling classes. Hence the initiation of the GATT Uruguay Round in 1986 and the subsequent transformation of GATT into the WTO in 1994 as a few rich countries, including NZ, laid down the terms of trade to the majority of the planet’s peoples.

Butchering Bangladesh

It was most ironic that Washington Consensus-inspired Rogernomic policies in Aotearoa/NZ were recycled back to the developing countries by members of NZ’s Rogernome clan on the World Bank/IMF advisory gravy/junket circuit. One example has been former Labour Cabinet Minister David Butcher’s missions as an economic consultant for the World Bank to grossly impoverished and subjugated Bangladesh. In 1993, Butcher reported that Bangladesh, an overwhelmingly rural country, had “begun a cautious, hesitant but increasingly effective programme reminiscent of that introduced in NZ” ( Press, 23/12/93). This programme, as described by Butcher (billed, by the way, as often working for the World Bank), involved cutting the State sector and its expenditure, forcing unions to shed workers from the jute and railway industries, imposing a value-added tax, reducing import controls and tariffs, and promoting export-led growth (ibid.; for NZ’s role in benefiting from World Bank consultancy contracts see the information from Multinational Monitor, July/August, 1994, as quoted in my article “More GATT News”, in Watchdog 77, December 1994).

Bizarrely enough, Butcher suggested that Bangladesh could even be an “Asian Tiger” in the making. In a 1991 article, Butcher had argued against tariffs and controls in Aotearoa/NZ for stifling growth ( Press, 25/9/91). According to him: “The NZ motor manufacturing plants now have an advantage over their Australian counterparts” owing to the NZ policy of freer trade. His arguments were the stuff of neo-classical economics and Treasury-speak. Remember those motor manufacturing plants?! (long since closed down, by the 1990-99 National Government. Ed.). Aotearoa/NZ had one representative on the Socialist International Committee on Economic Policy which produced the “Global Challenge” report (op. cit.). His name? – Labour Party member David Butcher!

Peasant Producing Power

In 2008: “It might appreciated anew in the West that the peasant life – and especially the Bengali rice-growing peasant life – is a remarkable achievement in terms of human history . . . Because of the enduring potential of this lifestyle, it might be conceded to be more successful in the long run than societies which over-exploit the world’s limited mineral and energy resources for industrialisation. Bengali peasant life can support the greatest population density on the land, without destroying the resource base”. This was the considered judgement of anthropologist Professor Clarence Maloney back in 1988 (“Behaviour and Poverty in Bangladesh”, University Press Ltd., pp 84/5).

Historically, the stereotypical hopeless “basket case” country has in fact been the exceptional food-producer. Bangladesh has had the potential for even greater sustainable food production being “blessed with exceptional agricultural endowments”, having “rich alluvial soils and plentiful water” (“World Hunger : Twelve Myths”, 2 nd edition, by FM Lappe et al, Food First, Institute for Food and Development Policy [IFDP], Grove Press, 1998, p10). Yet for a whole raft of reasons, including Western control, Bangladesh has at times lagged significantly in effecting increases, e.g. “its 1995 rice yields fell significantly below the all-Asia average” [after a recent record crop in 1993] (ibid.). However, it apparently managed to achieve near self-sufficiency in rice in the early 21 st Century before steeply rising oil prices hit the nation hard.

Bangladesh has long had good gas prospects. US oil giant Unocal signed a deal in November 2004 to develop the country's largest gas field. Most recently, in June 2008, the US's Chevron Corp and Britain's Cairn Energy signed a deal with Bangladesh to undertake further gas exploration and seismic survey works. Chevron is currently producing more than one third of Bangladesh's total gas from its three fields ( www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idUSDHA13657620080624).

Bangladesh – The Contradictions Of “Development”

“In the most general sense, the main objective of foreign assistance, as of many other tools of foreign policy, is to produce the kind of political and economic environment in the world in which the US can best pursue its own social goals” (“Needless Hunger: Voices from a Bangladesh Village” by B Hartmann & . Boyce, IFDP, 1979, 1982 {revised], .53). The quote here is from American economist Hollis Chenery in 1964. Later, in 1974, Chenery was Vice-President, Development Policy, at the World Bank, after having held a chair in Economics at Harvard University and a post as Assistant Administrator for the Program of the US Agency for International Development (AID), being a long-time AID collaborator. In their study, “Needless Hunger”, Betsy Hartmann and James Boyce showed how AID and the World Bank were working in the 1970/80s - as they have done ever since - to entrench the position of Bangladesh’s urban and rural elites, whether by design or “accident” (ibid., especially chapter 7). As an aside here, one of the worst cases of bullying undergone by Bangladesh - given its significance for the poor - was pressure exerted by the US and UK against Bangladesh’s efforts to use generic medicines instead of the drugs pushed by the big pharmaceutical TNCs. Such pressure has carried on under the WTO regime.

Having visited Bangladesh in 1989 when I was Trade Aid’s Education Officer, I have kept a personal interest in this country - and its travails and prospects. Butcher’s Rogernomic vision of the future is eminently ironic for its myopia. As Professor Maloney presciently remarked:“ . . . the pace of industrialisation in the world will end before India and China come anywhere near to the industrialised level of Europe, and in Europe itself the present rate of consumption of resources cannot at all continue beyond just a few decades. The two chief threats to the world are industrialisation of the rich countries, and population growth in the poor countries, and their effect will almost certainly come together in a major and exceedingly painful worldwide adjustment of the human species to the land” (“Behaviour and Poverty in Bangladesh”, op. cit., p82). As Maloney further aptly comments: “The rapidly homogenising world civilisation is losing its variability, that is, its long-term capacity to adjust and evolve in relation to the environment” (ibid., p83). Whatever the exact timelines might prove to be, Professor Maloney’s projections are on track unless humankind can take unprecedented collective action for its mutual salvation.

So Professor Maloney well foresaw the future threat presented to globalisation by environmental limiting factors - and to Bangladesh (and similar countries) in particular. He even spoke from his long experience of Bangladesh about how global warming caused by the industrial countries had already induced the continuing process of ocean flooding of the country’s low-level lands (ibid.). Pertinently too, Maloney predicted how China and India - the high-flying so-called “emerging market economies” of the early 21 st Century - would be fated to blaze a brief if spectacularly celebrated course. Bangladesh, meantime, has suffered significant environmental damage from misdirected development efforts, besides being subject to ocean flooding, along with cyclones, massive river flooding, water disputes with India over the Ganges, and other problems. Rogernome David Butcher’s vision of global free trade is ultimately a tragic fantasy.

Food Fight

The triumvirate of the World Bank, IMF and the WTO have been very influential in distorting and adversely affecting food security in very many lands. In 2008, Bangladesh provides a most disturbing example. Back in 1993, Butcher enthusiastically wrote how: “A $US3 billion export clothing industry has grown up outside the State sector and is setting a path that other sectors are trying to follow” ( Press, op. cit.). But on December 31, 2004, the Bangladeshi sweated textile sector received a severe blow when “the WTO scrapped the quota system – known as the Multi-Fibre Agreement (MFA) – that governed the global clothing and textile trade. This Agreement itself was unjust and instigated in 1974 by rich countries to protect themselves against cheaper imports”.

The commentary just cited on Bangladesh, the WTO, and the MFA comes from Farhad Mazhar’s speech to the Trade Justice Movement in Westminister Abbey on 15/4/05 ( www.tjm.org.uk/wakeup/speech_r2.shtml). Farhad was speaking in his role as Director of Ubinig, a Bangladeshi alternative development policy research agency. He cited Christian Aid as warning that a million Bangladeshi garment workers would lose their jobs. In recent times, “British supermarket chains stand accused of profiting from the poverty of Bangladeshi workers”, who struggle to earn their living in conditions of semi-slavery – i.e. a de facto free trade export zone (“Threadbare Lives of Ragtrade Poor”, Sunday Star Times, 22/7/07). On Saturday April 12th, 2008, up to 20,000 desperate textile workers rioted near Dhaka in protest at rising food prices. Some 30 million Bangladeshi people are now at risk of hunger.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) indicated in June 2008 that 21 countries were especially vulnerable to the global food crisis, including Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, India, Myanmar, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sudan and Yemen. Meantime, the worldwide struggle over food security - now redefined as “food sovereignty” by international activist groups to clearly indicate the need for democratic control - is being spearheaded by peasant and small farmer organisations like the Asian Peasant Coalition, the Latin American Coordination of Rural Movements, and Via Campesina, which coordinates farmer organisations from Asia, Africa, America and Europe. A recent focus for action has been the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Conference on World Food Security at Rome in June 2008.

The Right To Life

The International Human Rights Organisation for the Right to Food (FIAN), CETIM, Action Aid, Habitat International Coalition, the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues (FIDH), and Via Campesina jointly declared in a press release that: ”Differently from the diagnosis that the UN presented in the creation of its Task Force on the Global Food Crisis, we recognise the present crisis as deeply rooted in decades of misguided international policies – decided and implemented under the auspices of the Bretton Woods institutions* and, more recently, the WTO – that have failed to create and maintain an enabling environment for states to respect, protect and fulfil the human right to adequate food”. Their media release called on states and the world community “to address the structural causes at the national and international levels, including by revising the global trade regime under the WTO to ensure that global agricultural trade rules promote, rather than undermine the right to adequate food and freedom from hunger, especially in developing and food-importing countries”. * Shorthand for the international trade and financial institutions, - the World Bank, IMF and GATT - created at a 1944 conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, USA. Ed.

A major reason for the difficulties of the current Doha Round of the WTO has stemmed from the growing resistance in the South/Third World to Western hypocrisy on agriculture. While the US and EU still fight over their share of subsidies, poorer countries - spurred along by grass/rice roots farmer movements like Via Campesina – have become increasingly forthright in challenging the corporate free trade agenda.

Yet on the eve of his departure for the Conference at Rome, NZ Minister of Agriculture Jim Anderton was broadcasting NZ’s industrialised, “high-tech”, free trade form of agriculture as a model for the rest of the world, ignoring of course its mounting environmental costs, growing corporatisation, concentration, and TNC-control.(e.g. Press, 29/5/08). Thankfully, his grossly short-sighted and corrupt message was somewhat outflanked at the Conference by the Green Party’s Sue Kedgley who pointed out that profit hungry global corporations have been reaping the benefits of the global food crisis at the expense of “the needs of people . . . a situation where entire countries have lost the ability to feed themselves” ( Press, 3/6/08). She appealed instead for the priority of “people’s right to food” and an end to the “ideological fixation” on the doctrine of free trade.(ibid.)

Similarly, in one of his weekly Press columns, John Minto ably condemned both Jim Anderton and Trade Minister Phil Goff for their cynical attempt at the Rome Conference to exploit the crisis according to their narrowly calculated interpretation of NZ’s self-interest (9/6/08). Both Ministers were guilty of blatantly pushing free trade and all its evils. The US and other Western countries came in for some strong criticism at the Conference from Third World nations. There were strong calls for the elimination of Western subsidies ( Press, 5&7/6/08). An Oxfam report released in June 2008 linked the spread of biofuels to rising poverty as well as hunger (Press, 26/6/08). In many countries biofuels are now consuming agricultural land and other resources that should be used for growing food for humans.

Propaganda On The Poor By The Rich And Powerful  

On completion of the GATT Uruguay Round in 1994, the NZ Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Trade (MFAT) put out some propaganda – particularly in its publication “Trading Ahead : The GATT Uruguay Round Results for NZ” – that indicated a good outcome for the “less developed countries”. However, our own warning predictions of adverse results in food security, textiles and clothing, biotechnology, etc. for poor countries like Bangladesh and for the South in general have sadly enough been amply vindicated. Similarly, we predicted the unsettling impact of an emerging capitalist China on the world economy, environment, and resources.(see my “Trade Review“ in Watchdog 80, November 1995).

Adverse projections have of course been proven true in various ways for Aotearoa/NZ too. The general warnings of the Brandt Commission, the Socialist International Committee on Economic Policy, and the Brundtland Commission have all come to pass in that the failure to ensure a cooperative and just approach to global problems has induced greater and ever more potentially dangerous instability for everyone. The whole world economy is now at a new level of precariousness. We correctly predicted the current food and fuel crises (including rising domestic prices), increasing socio-economic divisions, the deepening threat to democracy, and other such phenomena signalling the coming capitalist crunch (see also Watchdogs 77, December 1994 & 78, May 1995). Hellbent global capitalism sows dragon teeth everywhere. Significantly, in conjunction with the instability caused by rising food and oil prices, the Anglo-American axis is enjoying the fruits of an arms boom with both Britain and the US hugely dominant in global weapon sales ( Press, 19/6/08).

Towards Food Sovereignty

Competition for the planet’s resources is accelerating both painfully and dangerously. Mid-2008, the most dramatic illustration of this is the ongoing spread of biofuels at the expense of food for people with Air NZ buying into this. Such are the machinations of the highly rigged free market at work. Food has become a centrepiece of the conflict between rich and poor. To resolve it and other key issues, we need the cooperation of concerned people of goodwill across the globe - to ensure the provision of sufficient food for everyone, to humanely curb population growth (including better birth control in OECD countries!), and to implement paths to genuinely sustainable development.