“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed,” Mahatma Gandhi.

“To sum up – in the old days there were one thousand castes and destinies in India. These days, there are just two castes: Men with Big Bellies and Men with Small Bellies. And only two destinies: eat – or get eaten up” (“The White Tiger” [Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2008] by Aravind Adiga, Atlantic Books, p64).

“And the practice of growing crops for sale to the industrialised world, to the neglect of essential food crops at home, lasted through colonial days and into independence, sometimes at great cost to the environment. Silt from deforested hillsides clogged lowland rivers, watercourses flooded with destructive regularity, while foraging cattle gave new tree cover no chance to establish itself. ‘All progress in capitalistic agriculture’, Karl Marx grimly observed, ‘is a progress in the art, not just of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil’” (“The Natural World”, Time-Life History of the World series, 1991, p148).

“In response to politicians’ elation over NAFTA (North America Free Trade Agreement), APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Community) and the conclusions of the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), the Canadian scientist [and noted environmentalist] David Suzuki says that belief in the panacea-like qualities of free trade amounts to ‘collective insanity’” (Sydney Morning Herald, 21/12/93).

“For anyone who understands the current food crisis, it is hard to listen to the head of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, without gagging . . . Zoellick waxed apocalyptic about the consequences of the global surge in prices, arguing that free trade had become a humanitarian necessity, to ensure that poor people had enough to eat . . . The reason we’re seeing such misery as a result of this spike has everything to do with Zoellick and his friends” (“A Man-Made Famine”, by Raj Patel, Guardian, 15/4/08).

Patel is the author of “Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power, and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System”, HarperCollins, 2007, showing how the “haves” feed on the “have-nots”. See his Website: www.stuffedandstarved.org. Jeremy Agar reviewed it in Watchdog 116, December 2007, online at http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/16/08.htm

In Watchdogs 118, August 2008 ( http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/18/06.htm) & 119, February 2009 ( http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/19/03.htm), I traced the background and development of the present global food crisis, including NZ’s role in the genesis of this crisis. There are a multitude of important issues involved and these articles can only cover certain significant aspects. The main continuing thread of this trilogy is an examination of the political agenda foisting the free trade agenda on world agriculture, and its deleterious consequences.

In this third article, I take a closer look at the economic theory informing free trade. Market international trade theory has long been critiqued from the Left but capitalist triumphalism has swept the field in public discourse over the last couple of decades, despite so much conceptual rubbish being peddled as hard economic fact. There have been varying interpretations of the role of trade from a critical leftist perspective (e.g. see the entry on “imperialism and the world market” in “A Dictionary of Marxist Thought”, 2 nd edited by T Bottomore et al, Blackwell, 1991, pp252-56). For this writer, emphasis is on the de facto operation of what can be considered the imperial hegemony of the Anglo-American alliance and associated client states like NZ, and how agricultural trade functions within this system.

Free Trade, Globalisation, Finance, And The Global Credit Crisis

To recap the thesis of “The Greedy Creation Of Hunger: NZ And Free Trade” in Watchdog 119, NZ joined the US-led push for complete transnational corporate (TNC) control of food and food-producing resources over the last quarter of the 20 th Century, after the Kirk/Rowling Labour government. NZ’s participation in particular came during the late 1980s with the formation of the Cairns Group and its manipulative agency in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations. By this period, the dominant international approach was “simply to stimulate economic growth through greater reliance on free markets and exports”, with the benefits of growth, “once again, expected to trickle down to the poor” (“An End To Hunger? The Social Origins Of Food Strategies” by Solon Barraclough, Zed Books, 1991, p237). But, in August 2007, corporate globalisation hit the Wall Street-induced sub-prime mortgage fiasco and ensuing credit crisis. Today, as long predicted, globalisation has run into serious trouble of its own making. To be sure, global capitalism is now floundering on the rocks. The battle for the future of the Earth and its inhabitants has reached a new stage!

Theories, Models, Conceptual Rubbish, And Ideological Crap

Right up to the global food crisis breaking out in early 2008, food dumping had disrupted or wrecked the economies of agriculturally-based “developing” countries. Indeed, this was the increasing focus of fierce debate in the WTO and the main reason for the resulting collapse of the Doha Round in mid-2008. We need to take a closer look at free trade theory in this connection. Dumping, i.e. selling goods for less than the cost of production, has meant that cheap food has been available in various countries at times, yet there has still been widespread world hunger. How then would those promoting free trade ensure food actually reaches the hungry? The triad of the WTO, World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) pushed the idea of the comprehensive dismantling of agricultural trade barriers and controls like tariffs and subsidies. By stimulating faster growth in the North (i.e. the “developed”, industrial bloc), market competition would somehow eventually enable the farmers of the South (Third World) to earn more, and so feed themselves and their families, along with the hungry too, both rural and urban. Price signals would thus both adequately motivate and ultimately reward Third World farmers to produce more. At the same time, these farmers would help feed the very poor. Food would thus be priced high enough to give farmers sufficient incentive and yet be low enough to be within monetary reach of the hungry – all through the miracle mechanism of the market. Supply and demand would balance appropriately, at least internationally.

A host of problematic questions and issues arise here. NZ government policy and hypocrisy on the price problem was reviewed in some detail in my previous article. Even in theory, the actual economic nuts and bolts for improving food security were, for the most part, unspecified by the free marketers, other than the baited carrot of higher prices for agricultural commodities, open market access, and increased economic growth. But markets cannot be left alone to feed the poor. Governmental intervention and regulation is necessary, indeed absolutely vital. As indicated in more detail below, governmental support is basic to the American agricultural system. It is also coupled with “food stamps” for the poor in a form of rudimentary social welfare. Obviously enough too, since governmental support has made agriculture so hugely productive and successful in rich countries like the US, the European Union (EU) bloc, and Japan, why should the countries of the South not follow this model as much as they can – at least in the sense of State support for family farmers and food security?!

Hypocritical Hype

As well as being grossly vague and incoherent in theory, the free market agricultural approach was hypocritically conflicted in both policy and practice. Massively disadvantaged Third World peasant farmers were pitted against modern industrial farmers, TNC power and technocracy, let alone an array of other formidable vested interests. Many of the realities of the international marketplace were just ignored. This was market theory gone mad.

Yet in some quarters, especially “ivory-tower” academia, there has been a genuine, if illusionary, belief in free market efficacy and its ability to feed the hungry. In response to an article by CAFCA’s Dr Bill Rosenberg describing “Free Trade’s Toll on the Poor” ( Press, 11/1/06), a couple of Canterbury University economists, Dr Laura Meriluoto and Stephen Hickson, claimed that “Free Trade Aids Poor” ( Press, 20/1/06). In essence, their central argument is simply that economic growth aids a lot more of the poor than it harms. They quoted World Bank projections on the gains from greater liberalisation (ibid.). Driving the neo-liberal programme, however, under the protective screen of trade theory, was a toxic mixture of cynical political calculation, foreign policy strategic planning, and commercial greed. It all came together in a mutually reinforcing ideological complex of attitude, belief, and obvious self-interest.

The expectation that the tide of TNC-driven growth would “lift all boats” as it were, and so happily increase the number of consumers able to afford more and better quality food, pervades the WTO/World Bank/IMF approach. Their economists have extrapolated past growth trends optimistically and endlessly into the future, like most of their profession (see the World Bank report, “The World Food Outlook” by Donald Mitchell, et al, Cambridge University Press, 1997). After all, as the Economist viewpoint would have it: “Growth” is: “What economic activity is all about . . .” (“Pocket Economist”, by Matthew Bishop, Economist Books, 2000, p107).

In contradistinction, Professor Barraclough rightly and contemptuously dismisses the notion that increased incomes from trade would eliminate poverty and hunger. As he emphasises, many analysts had already demonstrated – and repeatedly since - that such gains “can, and frequently are, squandered by an underdeveloped country’s wealthiest residents on luxury consumption, or are badly invested, or dissipated through capital flight” (“An End To Hunger?”, op. cit, p225). This is not even taking into account the resulting commercial concentration of capital, land, and other resources in the pursuit of cash cropping for export agriculture, or catering to the consumer wants of the domestic wealthy. “Livestock already consumes over 36% of the world’s grain” (“101 Facts You Should Know About Food”, by John Farndon, Icon Books, 2007, p50). The latest phase of such “development” is constituted by the cultivation of biofuels, with growing horrendous consequences for many Third World peoples (Pacific Ecologist, “Full Tanks, Empty Stomachs: Bio/Agro-fuels Devastate 3 rd World Countries For 1 st World’s Cars”, no. 17, Summer 2009). The rich are feeding on the poor more than ever while the environment suffers further damage.

Agriculture And The Corporate State

Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Louis Dreyfus, Nestle, Unilever, Heinz, and other big agribusiness and food TNCs have bulldozed the international agricultural “reform” agenda in the GATT, and then the WTO, along US-mandated lines. In free trade, the present so often mirrors the past. For instance, Dan Amstutz, a former Cargill executive and foremost American Administration advocate of the original US agricultural free trade proposal in the GATT, later headed the so-called “agriculture reconstruction” programme in Iraq following the 2003 US-led illegal invasion. Disaster capitalism in action!

American State support for agriculture is fundamentally expressed through the combination of Deficiency Payments and the Loan Rate. In corn, wheat, soybeans, and certain other crops, the US Loan Rate is generally the largest single influence on world price levels. The Loan Rate provides minimum prices for American farmers with Deficiency Payments making up the difference between the Loan Rate prices and designated Target Prices. As World Bank economists freely acknowledge: “The US is the dominant exporter and sets price bounds by its Government programme allowing prices to fall as low as the loan rate, after which grain is bid into the Government storage programmes” (“The World Food Outlook”, op. cit, p195).

The biggest beneficiaries of the system are the largest farmers and, above all, TNCs like Cargill and ADM. “The Government in the US has become responsible for farmers’ income, leaving the big (transnational) buyers in the market free to exploit their oligopolistic position” (“Market Power In Agricultural Markets: Some Issues For Developing Countries” by Sophia Murphy, South Centre, T.R.A.D.E. working paper, no. 6, November 1999, p21). This, then, is the foundation of the global agricultural free market at work with surpluses used over many years to erode food sovereignty in the Third World and create longterm, captive commercial markets, often by the use of foreign aid. Right up to the present, the US government exercises the dominant influence on international food prices, most spectacularly displayed in recent years by its subsidisation of biofuel corn, with great new gains for ADM and Cargill (“Growing Food The Wrong Way, The Right Way”, National Geographic, October 2007, p41).

The Struggle For Food Sovereignty

Governmental control can yet - and most assuredly should - be decentralised as much as possible. Participatory producer power is the key here, whether via cooperatives, producer/marketing boards, and/or similar democratic structures. “Improved food security on a longterm basis requires popular participation in the sense of organised efforts to increase control over resources and regulatory institutions” (”An End To Hunger”, op. cit, p245). Peasant and union popular-based movements are often fundamental to achieving this. But these movements and producer power in general are an anathema to free market forces and incorporation in the world economy (ibid, pp249/50). Economic democracy is diametrically opposed to the so-called free market and corporate control.

Over the years, NZ has paraded on the world stage several special trade envoys preaching the virtues of free trade. One was a former President of Federated Farmers, Brian Chamberlin. In correspondence with an NZ aid agency, Chamberlin claimed that the GATT Uruguay Round negotiations were “much more about opening up the wealthy countries to developing countries than they are about opening poor countries’ markets to subsidised dumped products from the wealthy nations” (letter, 16/9/91). He was strongly critical of non-government organisation (NGO) opposition to the free trade agenda (ibid.). Chamberlin articulated the “Cairns Group’s War On Subsidies” (Food Matters Worldwide, October 1991, no. 13, pp26-28). While he saw the US agricultural proposal as “sincere”, he acknowledged that “the farming structure” in Third World countries like the Philippines, Malaysia, Colombia and other Cairns Group members was not “something that GATT, as such”, could “deliver on” (ibid, p27). He also acknowledged that he wasn’t “really competent to comment on whether corporates would take over the land from subsistence farmers” (ibid, p28).

I was once rung up at work by a very prominent farming leader and harangued about being on the wrong track. In fact, I was warned that even aid organisations might become the “enemy”. Aotearoa/NZ certainly has legitimate agricultural trade interests, and CAFCA and other NZ groups opposed to free trade have long worked to help defend family farmers here against corporate takeover and foreign control. But in no way should our interests undermine food sovereignty for other peoples. Later on, another farming leader made his criticism public. Owen Jennings, when President of Federated Farmers, accused groups like Trade Aid of “misguided and unprofessional propaganda” (Ashburton Guardian, 1/2/92). He contended we were wrong in saying that free trade would “lead to further deforestation and decimation of land in countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia” (ibid.).

The International Sociology Of Hunger And Its Causes

Professor Barraclough wrote the book, “An End to Hunger?” which I have quoted already several times, as a report for the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) and the South Commission. As he so aptly stressed, there “are no simple causes or remedies” for hunger and we have to take constantly into account the varying differences in “agrarian structure” across countries, “associated with other features of their broader social systems”, i.e. acknowledge “the crucial role of socio-economic structures” (ibid, pp239/40). Actual conditions and situations can often be complex and the route to equitable and sustainable agriculture very challenging (see also e.g., “After The Green Revolution: Sustainable Agriculture For Development”, by G Conway & E Barbier, Earthscan Pubs, 1990).

Barraclough included in his conclusion as one of his recommendations that: “Highly unfavourable relationships with international markets and with foreign powers more generally, inherited from a colonial or neo-colonial past, have to be modified” (op. cit, p236). This, to say the least, is not exactly music to the ears of the pundits and planners of corporate globalisation! As intimated above, it has, of course, proved immensely difficult to confront, let alone overcome.

Abstract ideological formulations have been marketed as practical economics by the free traders. As an example, take a paper presented at a joint Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)/World Bank symposium on agricultural trade and developing countries in October 1989. This quite surrealist paper was actually recommended to me by Mike Moore, when NZ’s Trade Minister (Moore went on to be, very briefly, Prime Minister in 1990, and, later, the 1999-2001 Director General of the World Trade Organisation. Ed.). It was written by Kym Anderson, then Director of the Centre for International Economic Studies at the University of Adelaide, and Rod Tyers. First, to quote from their summary: “The common presumption that food-importing developing countries would be harmed by a liberalisation of food trade as a result of the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations is questioned in this paper” (“How Developing Countries Could Gain From Food Trade Liberalisation In The Uruguay Round”). Instead, they claimed that: “Both theory and empirical modeling evidence lead to the distinct possibility of the opposite conclusion” (ibid.). But, while their proposal is put forward in rather tentative academic fashion as only a “distinct possibility”, this type of theorising actually became the rationalising source and mandate for the Cairns Group and free trade in general, as Mike Moore’s recommendation revealed.

Professor Anderson’s specialty is using computer modeling and simulations for analysing the effects of liberalising trade, especially agricultural trade. Australia, in fact, has provided the prime logistical, service, and information base for the operation of the Cairns Group, and has done much the same for APEC. Over the years, Anderson has been an economic expert for the World Bank, the Australian government, the GATT/WTO, and other enforcers of capitalist market orthodoxy. It is therefore important to get some sense of his line of argument. In the paper he wrote with Tyers as cited above, the two authors contend that comprehensive liberalisation across all countries and economic sectors would generally benefit everybody worldwide. Their approach is founded in general equilibrium theory, i.e. the working assumption “that markets always tend towards equilibrium”, and keep returning to it after disruptions (“Pocket Economist” op. cit, p80). “General equilibrium is when supply and demand are balanced simultaneously in all the markets in an economy. Keynes questioned whether the economy always moved to equilibrium, for instance, to ensure full employment” (ibid.).

General equilibrium theory is central to both classical economics and neo-classical economics (ibid, pp44 & 166). Extreme free marketeers like Milton Friedman have called for complete deregulation and opposed any governmental intervention to curb the excess of speculation (“The International Monetary System”, 4 th ed., by Herbert Grubel, Penguin, 1984, p113). Friedman’s monetarism, as expounded by his Chicago University School, was very influential in rehabilitating equilibrium theory as the reigning mainstream doctrine in capitalist economics over Keynesian theory, and thus promoting market liberalisation (”Pocket Economist”, op. cit., pp43/4 & p166). Nowadays, we are continually seeing more of the pernicious results with the multi-billion dollar scams of crooked financiers like Bernard Madoff and Allen Stanford unraveling from the very heart of global capitalism.

As part of American foreign policy strategy, the Chicago School got its free market doctrines applied by various Third World regimes. In particular, the Chilean Pinochet dictatorship became a showcase model of the School’s version of freedom, a darling of development for the World Bank and the IMF (“Chile: The Pinochet Decade: The Rise And Fall Of The Chicago Boys”, Latin American Bureau, 1983). “The open economy meant, in Chile, the destruction of most of the country’s local industries and a reversion to the typical profile of a ‘banana economy’, dependent on exports of primary products processed by cheap labour” (ibid, p107). Food security, of course, was adversely affected. The Chilean case highlights again the many instances of the close working combination of the free market and military force.

Viewed more closely, the principle of “comparative advantage” is the specific theory - within general equilibrium theory - that “underpins the economic case for free trade” (“Pocket Economist, op. cit., p46). “Comparative advantage” means that countries should specialise in economic activities that they are most efficient at doing. This leads to an “international division of labour” that supposedly benefits everyone. At this point, noted economist Joan Robinson can be pertinently quoted with regard to three vital points:

• the supposed “international division of labour,” so beloved by the “free traders” and based on general equilibrium theory, “has no relevance to actual conditions” (“Aspects Of Development And Underdevelopment”, Cambridge University Press, 1979, p143);
• comparative advantage has been overridden by the activities of TNCs. “The ‘international division of labour’ . . . is now managed almost entirely by the great corporations. Competing amongst themselves, they are driven by the need to make profits, without regard to any interests but their own” (ibid.). Comparative advantage has thus been displaced by corporate competitive advantage. This includes all the varieties of oligopolistic collaboration amongst TNCs and other market manipulations that need to be taken into account;
• and, most importantly, since agriculture is the economic foundation: “From every point of view – political, economic and humane – the first necessity for the Third World is to increase production of basic foodstuffs” (ibid., p132).

Thus the set of working assumptions routinely made by the free traders excludes or elides a host of vital awkward qualitative factors - political, economic, social, ethical and environmental. Anderson and Tyers used what is called a “partial equilibrium” approach in their 1989 paper cited above since even free trade economists recognise that perfect market equilibrium is a myth in the real world. Then there are all the artificially contrived assumptions endemic to computer economic modeling. In the kind of theoretical simulations practised by Anderson and co, a plethora of specific operative assumptions are liberally made, e.g., about how price signals are transmitted into productive activities; the rate of technological growth, and how techniques are applied, and with what outputs across a range of sectors; let alone the land and biological resources available for sustaining such activities. Given all this, their theoretical projections must be considered rather ethereal to put it kindly. Indeed, econometric models on liberalising agricultural trade can give extremely contradictory predictions.

Even in terms of market economics, the very bland and abstract model of free trade is absolutely blinkered in its absurd imposition of a “one model fits all” prescription. Not only are econometric models suspect and often highly misleading, but “countries and groups of countries may very well benefit from protectionism according to economic theory” (Ceres, Food and Agriculture Organisation [FAO], no. 128, March-April 1991, pp45-48).

Pertinently enough, Anderson and Tyers’ 1989 paper observed that most of the protection for Third World agriculture was indirect rather than direct. Drawing on an earlier World Bank study, Anderson and Tyers remarked that this protection was being maintained by protection policies for the manufacturing sector and over-valued exchange rates. By eliminating these latter forms of protection as well, “many food-importing poor countries” in the South could be turned into food exporters (“How Developing Countries Could Gain”, op. cit, p10).

Such airy theoretical speculations became Western-prescribed policy by informing pressures for poor countries to open up to virtually total TNC control. Most significantly, Anderson and Tyers even acknowledged that direct protection for Third World agriculture was already weak. And yet the aim was to weaken it much more. The already fragile situation of net food-importing countries would be hugely aggravated.

Free trade formulations and prescriptions still roll along the same lines these days. In a paper written in 2005 with two other World Bank economists, “Doha Merchandise Trade Reform: What’s At Stake For Developing Countries”, Anderson continues to push the same sort of analysis and its free market message). Professor Anderson was then actually the lead economist in the World Bank’s International Trade Unit at the Bank’s Research Group in Washington DC. This particular paper suggests that free trade would especially benefit Africa, boosting “real incomes” and also substantially lifting net farm incomes “in that, and other developing country regions, thereby alleviating rural poverty” (ibid.). Moreover, developing countries would be better off the more they “themselves cut applied tariffs, particularly on agricultural imports” (ibid.). In the 21 st Century, even some development/aid agencies like Oxfam have been swallowing this sort of stuff!

For the grim and sobering reality we can refer to “Looting Africa: The Economics Of Exploitation” (Zed Books, 2006), by Professor Patrick Bond, who cites a draft mid-2005 World Bank report (“Where Is The Wealth Of Nations?”) that calculated much of Africa is now worse off through development “than it would have been had the wealth stayed put” (p.47: read Bond’s book at www.civicus.org/new/media/PatrickBond-LootingAfrica.doc). Resource depletion and pollution damage need to be included in any proper accounting. Bond presents a detailed and damning examination of Africa’s exploitation by the North, especially the West, whose wealth and freedoms have long been rooted in such pillage.

The World Bank, of course, has been heavily instrumental in looting Africa. “The World Food Outlook”’s concluding chapter is on Africa as a “special challenge”, pushing the usual toxic brew of commercialisation, privatisation, and removal of State support. Again, in 2008, the Bank’s “World Development Report” reinforced the same line on Africa (“How To Manufacture A Global Food Crisis: Lessons From The World Bank, IMF, And WTO” by Walden Bello, The Nation, 2/6/08 ).

A continuing key element of the US/World Bank approach has been the working assumption that the US is best placed, in the present and the future, to be the principal grain and general food supplier to poor countries. Currently, it controls almost half of the world’s grain exports. This clearly underpins US hegemony and strategic control of the world grain market and its use of the World Bank/IMF for this purpose. So much then for the market distortions lamented by free trade economists!

But the World Bank also looks to more exporters and ever increasing world exports to meet rising demand. In particular, the former Soviet Union and East European “centrally planned economies” have been tipped to play a far greater role after their anticipated transition to market-driven economies (“The World Food Outlook”, op. cit, pp13-14 & pp118-119). In the early 21 st Century some of these countries have in fact moved to significant exporting with a larger share of global grain exports. However, in 2008 drought hit many countries throughout Europe and throttled back exports quite dramatically from lands like Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

Bad weather in the form of floods and droughts has affected many countries in recent years. In early 2009 China is suffering drought in its arid northern region where most of its wheat is grown. Owing to water shortages, China has been experiencing serious declines in grain production and this is just the latest episode. In recent years, too, both China and India have been increasing grain imports. Half the world’s population now live in countries where water tables are falling and this includes the big three grain producers – China, India, and the US – which together account for nearly one half of the Earth’s grain harvest. Meantime, Australia has had over a decade of drought and in 2009 has been suffering its worst ever bush fires (National Geographic, April 2009, “Australia Goes Dry”). Here in Aotearoa/NZ, drought conditions may be getting more persistent. Antarctica is showing signs of instability while the Arctic is in meltdown, with increased methane emissions likely ( Press, 27/2/09). Climate change means each one degree Centigrade rise in temperature above the optimum leads to a 10% decline in grain yields.

Dr Lester Brown, agronomist and founder of both the WorldWatch Institute and the Earth Policy Institute, has been identifying, monitoring, analysing, and warning about such trends for many years, as indicators of compounding limits to the planet’s carrying capacity (e.g., www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/worldbalance/voic-brow.html). But World Bank doctrine has routinely dismissed Brown’s projections and those of similar environmentalists (“The World Food Outlook”, op. cit, pp11/13 & 154). The Bank’s own understanding of environmental factors is superficial to say the least.

In “The World Food Outlook”, Donald Mitchell & co maintained that: “The potential effects of global warming on world agriculture are not yet properly understood, but at this time [i.e. 1997] they do not appear to constitute a short-term threat” (p9). Later in their study, and most ironically, they had this to say about climate change and global warming: “The probable effects on global temperatures can only be estimated by climatological computer models, which to date have not been able to predict accurately” (ibid, p70). Our World Bank economists were quite happy to toss any precautionary principles to the wind. Moreover, they blithely asserted: “If, as most scientists who study the subject suggest, the temperature changes are gradual then the effects on agriculture would probably be small” (ibid, p71).

Yet, in an earlier important study, “Climate Change And World Agriculture” (Earthscan Publications, 1990), climate change expert, Professor Martin Parry, warned that while some countries may be better off in the years to come, a lot will not be if climatic changes occur in line with most scientific predictions. Parry was the lead author of the assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of potential impacts on agriculture, and also director of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) research project (1983-86) on climate change and agriculture. He also warned that the US may eventually no longer have the food surpluses to feed many of the world’s poor. “There are indications that warming could lead to an overall reduction of cereal production potential in North America . . .” (ibid, p130).

A report, “The Effects Of Climate Change On Agriculture, Land Resources, Water Resources, And Biodiversity in the US”, was put out in 2008 by the US Climate Change Science Programme ( www.peopleandplanet.net/doc.php?id=3297). It stated that climate change is already affecting US ecosystems and that the western and southwestern areas are likely to become drier. Increasing temperatures will increase the risk of crop failures for grain and oilseed crops. Indeed: “Some economic models predict that agricultural disruption from global warming could cut world food production by a sixth by 2020” ( Press, 16/2/08). The British government’s chief scientific adviser, Professor John Beddington, has warned about “a shortage of water in many regions”, among other looming threats to food security ( Press, 8/3/08).

These days, Tim Groser, former GATT/WTO trade negotiator for NZ, and now the National government’s Minister of Trade, and also Conservation (ironies abound!), has worries about, the costs of climate change, the downturn in trade, and even the return of European and US dairy export subsidies (prompted perhaps by Fonterra’s auction system lowering prices! - Press, 24-5/1/09). Free trade is certainly very deeply conflicted.

“The World Food Outlook” used for its simulation analysis of future trends what the authors call “The World Grains Model”. Mitchell & co predicted that: “Only an extreme break with past trends in cereal production or consumption would reverse the trend of declining cereal prices over the next 15 to 20 years” (ibid, p162). They treated the conjunction of factors that sparked the global food crisis of the early 1970s as a “very unusual” event most unlikely to recur again (ibid. pp9-11). According to their model: “Price projections assume a decline in real crude oil and fertiliser prices up to 2010” (ibid. p114). Rocketing oil and fertiliser prices contributing to the huge spike in food prices in 2008 knocked these predictions badly awry. Truly, this World Bank study is riddled with faulty assumptions and predictions.

Instead of the competitive allocation of resources being channeled by market forces into constructive and positive outcomes with widespread benefits across the societies of the South, the results have instead been those as illustrated in my observations on liberalising India in “The Greedy Creation Of Hunger” (Watchdog 119, op. cit.). Former NZ Minister of Agriculture, Jim Anderton, was recorded promoting the benefits of selling expensive bottles of NZ wine in posh Indian hotels. In Mumbai in November 2008, Pakistani-based terrorists blew some holes in the cultivation of this very elitist “trickle-down” approach, once again nearly triggering a nuclear-armed confrontation between India and Pakistan.

Indeed, “globalisation is paradoxical. The same forces that seem to unite also divide. Those with great promise may also present dire threat. Take Bangalore, South India . . . In the ‘new economy’ world of globalisation, Bangalore is the ‘Silicon Plateau’ of shiny, high-tech offices, a booming software industry and affluent consumers in new shopping-malls. But the surrounding state of Karnataka, including Bangalore, is 76% rural, with high poverty rates. Landless labourers are forced to seek work in the city, so that the proportion of poor people living in huts with no services is growing faster than in other Indian cities. In fact, fewer services are available precisely because they’re over-used by the sprawling science and technology parks” (‘Religion And Globalisation’ by David Lyons, in “The New Lion Handbook: The World’s Religions”, ed. C. Partridge, 3 rd ed., Lion Hudson, 2005, p450). Obscenely and bizarrely enough, “the Indian outsourcing capital of the world is leading the shift towards telemedicine” ( Press, 23/10/08). Radiologists in Bangalore examine and diagnose “hundreds of scans sent by hospitals across the US” (ibid.). Meanwhile, “ironically, India faces an acute shortage of radiologists even as teleradiology clinics sprout up in Bangalore” (ibid.).

Aravind Adiga in his brilliant 2008 Man Booker Prize winning novel, “The White Tiger”, evokes the rising sentiments of anger, frustration, and even revolution among many of India’s poor people. He set his satire of capitalist enterprise in the entrepreneurial linchpin of India, Bangalore, this lucrative outsourcing locale for foreign corporates in the midst of so much dire poverty and malnutrition. In Bangalore, it is all about enriching “development” for the few at the expense of the many excluded from the call centres, shopping malls (which NZ wants to help develop in India!), and swank office and apartment blocks, let alone five star hotels. Jim Anderton might well take note how the “White Tiger” himself, hero/anti-hero of the story, murders his boss with a piece broken from an expensive imported whisky bottle. Tim Groser, as NZ’s Trade Minister, is still pursuing his free trade fantasies and stepping up negotiations for a free trade agreement with India.

Among the developing country members of the Cairns Group, Brazil has stood out in particular for its glaring socio-economic inequalities, the depth and extent of hunger and malnutrition, the environmental damage, and the enormous scale and diversity of its agricultural exporting. By the early 1980s, about two thirds of Brazilians suffered food shortages and subsistence crops like rice and black beans were in decline. Soybeans were the leading export, going to feed Japanese and European livestock. In 1992, among other points, I raised these concerns in writing to the Prime Minister, drawing on an unusually good press item (“Export-led Starvation”, Press, 8/2/92). In reply, Acting Prime Minister Don McKinnon commented that Brazil was apparently exercising its choice to “reduce its debt load by the export of food rather than subsidise its domestic distribution” (letter, 23/6/92). So, in McKinnon’s opinion, “the fact that the food export option is open to Brazil” should not in itself be “a ground for complaint”. Obviously, this is a nice rationalisation for the way poor people can be exploited within the world economic system. McKinnon went on to head the Commonwealth.

A letter of mine to the editor, critical of free trade and food security, once elicited an interesting comment from Lincoln University economist Ralph Lattimore ( Press, 11/7/90). According to Lattimore: “The GATT policies target the poor by virtue of the fact that in less developed countries (LDCs) poverty tends to be greatest in the export-oriented sectors of the economy, e.g., rural north-east Brazil and industrial South Korea. The reduction of trade barriers by all countries is a positive step towards reducing poverty in most LDCs” (ibid.).

There are a number of issues implicit even in this brief statement. But take the example of rural northeast Brazil and the question of liberalising trade and its implications. This particular part of Brazil has long been recognised as very challenging for its poverty, inequities, and environment. Let’s put it in some political perspective. “An incipient peasant movement in northeast Brazil was violently repressed following the military coup in 1964. Brazil’s agricultural modernisation led by commercial farmers proceeded very rapidly, however, with increased marginalisation of the peasantry. Attempts at land reform were frustrated. Brazil still has one of the most latifundia [large estate]-dominated agrarian structures and associated widespread rural poverty anywhere in the region” (“An End To Hunger?”, op. cit, p110).

The 1964 Brazilian military coup was orchestrated by the US Central Intelligence Agency, partly in reaction to the “strike by 200,000 farm workers and peasants in the northeast”, arising within a wider government-supported movement for the poor (ibid, p152; “The CIA: A Forgotten History” by William Blum, Zed Books, 1986, Chapter 27, ‘Brazil 1961 To 1964: Introducing The Marvelous New World Of Death Squads’). This Brazilian example, deplorably enough, pointed to a lot more of the same in the future, both in Brazil and elsewhere.

And Then Along Came Biofuels . . .

In replying to Lattimore in the Letters to the Editor column, I remarked - with appropriate citation - how TNCs overwhelmingly controlled world export agriculture ( Press, 17/7/90). Northeast Brazil is now cursed with the latest wave of neo-colonialism – “bio”, or rather “agro-fuels” (Pacific Ecologist, op. cit, pp4/5). Landless peasants in Brazil have even been torching new plantings of “green” fuel crops like sugar cane used for ethanol production ( Press, 15/4/07). Small farmers and food crops are being squeezed by the agrofuel boom. “Millions live in poverty in Brazil, but half the arable land is owned by 1% of the population” (ibid). Latin America in general is being ravaged by agro-fuels, along with Southeast Asia, and even some of the poorest African countries like Tanzania and Ethiopia (Pacific Ecologist, op. cit: see various articles).

The January 2007 edition of National Geographic (“Amazon: Forest To Farms – Battle To Stop The Land Grab”) showed how “the market forces of globalisation are invading the Amazon”, and how industrial-scale soybean producers are joining loggers and cattle ranchers in destroying the “lungs” of the planet. Soybean, beef and timber exports flow to the EU, the US, and other countries (ibid, p60). TNCs like Cargill, ADM, Bunge and John Deere are benefiting greatly from this harsh exploitation of environment and people (ibid, pp68/9). Unfortunately, this predatory capitalist model grossly outweighs the alternative model of social environmentalism as expressed in small scale community and collective agroforestry.

In his 1993 inaugural lecture (“NZ’s Place In The World: International Trade And All That”) at Lincoln University as Professor of International Trade, Ralph Lattimore again took up the cudgels in defence of Mike Moore and free trade (5/10/93). He asserted that, “there are groups, even in NZ, who are opposed to a positive GATT outcome on the grounds that TNCs would be the only beneficiaries. It is not clear whether TNCs overall will gain or lose from the proposed GATT outcome but the hard evidence is that any gain in their prosperity would take place in the countries with the comparative advantage in food production and such gains would be in the same direction as that of the world’s poor. In an important sense, the more the TNCs gain from a positive GATT outcome, the more the poor will gain” (ibid, p14). It would be hard to get sillier than this about the likelihood of free trade creating “global prosperity to reduce hunger and other forms of human deprivation” (ibid, p5).

Free trade weaves a very tangled web. Donald Mitchell, World Bank economist and lead author of the “World Food Outlook”, actually authored a Bank report leaked in July 2008 indicating that: “Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75%” ( Guardian, 3/7/08; Sunday Star Times, 6/7/08; Press, 11/7/08). But Mitchell put a free trade spin on the situation. He argued that the US and EU should lower tariffs so that Brazil and other more efficient developing country producers of agrofuels could export to the rich nations. One way or another, World Bank economists seek to make the poor pay! The UN had warned about the ominously growing trend to agrofuels back in the previous July (Sunday Star Times, 8/7/07). Reports by UN and IMF experts say the US biofuel surge was responsible for 25% of the sharp rises in world food prices in the past two years ( Press, 11/5/09).   Commodity speculation has also been indicted as a major factor by other analysts (e.g. Press, 25/2/08; www.eurodad.org/whatsnew/articles.aspx?id=3032).

In 1996 the WorldWatch Institute had urged the World Bank and the FAO to overhaul the misleading linear extrapolations on world food supply used in “The World Food Outlook” ( www.worldwatch.org/node/1594). Lester Brown and the Institute have been hugely vindicated. The Institute’s latest annual report, “State Of The World 2009: Into A Warming World”, is on climate change and its deepening implications.

“Sustainable agriculture” may be defined as: “An agricultural system that is ecologically sound, economically viable, and socially just. Sustainable agriculture uses techniques to grow crops and raise livestock that conserve soil and water, use organic fertilisers, practise biological control of pests, and minimise the use of non-renewable fossil fuel energy” (“Oxford Dictionary of Environment and Conservation”, Chris Park, Oxford University Press, 2007, p439). There can be many paths towards this ideal but food security/sovereignty should always be imperative.

Countries need to be as self-sufficient in food as they can. At the same time, an international and interrelated set of regional trading arrangements ought to be speedily implemented, geared to guaranteeing imports wherever required to prevent hunger, and drawing on adequate, commonly held grain reserves as appropriate. This new system needs to be flexible and adaptive to the rigours of climate change. As proclaimed so well by Willy Brandt (Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, 1969-74, and Chairperson of the Independent Commission on International Development Issues [Brandt Commission], 1979/80) food security and peace should be the great human goals for a sustainable future.

Christian World Service ( CWS) has a number of videos and DVDs that look at the dramatic and detrimental changes to rural agriculture worldwide caused by the giant food corporations and the change from growing crops to biofuels, e.g. “The Global Banquet”. Contact CWS: PO Box 22652, Christchurch 8032; phone (03) 3669274; Email cws@cws.org.nz; & Website: www.cws.org.nz