(a) “…in the enthusiasm and greed for land and wealth, the sombre (warning) words of (Captain) Cook and other explorers went unheeded: that it would have been better for the land (of Aotearoa/NZ) and the (indigenous) people that they had never known white man's civilisation”.

(b) “Let NZ pause and take stock and make a supreme effort to save what is left of the beauty of her countryside and protect it from the modern poisons of conurbation, land abuse, overstocking…  while there is still the opportunity. Let her grow more gently, more slowly, learning to live not on her capital resources but on the natural increment of her good husbandry of lands, forests and seas” (“Man Against Nature”, A Survival Special On NZ Wildlife, RM  Lockley, AH & AW Reed, 1970, p208 & p17).

“Like the US model of corporate, commodity-based export agriculture, the NZ model is often politically legitimated on the grounds that expansion of world markets for food (even if it is elite foods such as spring lamb cuts or organic kiwifruit) is the key means for solving world hunger. In the case of NZ, rather than 'let them eat cake', the phrase should be recast as: 'let them eat our organic cheesecake with kiwifruit jus'!” (“Food Systems Failure: The Global Food Crisis And the Future Of Agriculture”, ed., C Rosin, P Stock, & H Campbell, Earthscan, 2012, p40: http://books.google.co.nz/books?isbn=113652942X ).

“Heat waves, droughts and other effects of climate change will also reduce the flow of many vital rivers, diminishing water supplies for irrigation, hydro-electricity power facilities and nuclear reactors [which need massive amounts of water for cooling purposes]”. (“How Resource Scarcity And Climate Change Could Produce A Global Explosion”, http://www.alternet.org/environment/resource-shock-how-resource-scarcity-and-climate-change-could-produce-global-explosion).

In my previous article I looked at the impact of NZ agriculture on the environment, especially the “cargo cult” pursuit of “white gold” in the form of dairy farming (“Agriculture, Trade, Industrialism And The Future: Contesting The Neo-Liberal Agenda”, Watchdog 140, December 2015, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/40/07.html). I examined this local experience within the context of the global economy. The current article extends and elaborates on this theme with particular reference to commodity farming in general, cash-cropping, and the cultivation of the “technical fix”, e.g. the use of synthetic nitrogen fertiliser and intensive irrigation, for humankind's agricultural problems. As well, it expands on the role of international trade and the often disastrously misconstrued commodity pursuit of “white gold” - from cotton to milk - and other such problems that act to undermine our prospects for sustainable development and viable agriculture. All this subject matter is vitally important in the new critical era of climate change. I also examine the very slippery and convoluted concept of “comparative advantage” in more detail.

We can broadly classify the natural resources that we use into two types: non-renewables and renewables. The challenge inherent in the former category of non-renewables is clear by definition. They are limited in quantity and availability in the sense that they are ultimately exhaustible in supply. The case of fossil fuels, above all oil and gas, has proved hugely contentious and vexatious for a host of reasons. Accessibility and the energy costs, let alone environmental damage, are also constraining factors given the practical realities of extraction and the law of diminishing returns (getting less and less output from increasing input), plus the fallout from waste - most dramatically demonstrated for us today in the form of greenhouse gases.  Renewable resources include agricultural products. Such renewable commodities comprise so-called “soft” commodities, which are grown, as compared with “hard” commodities (non-renewables), which are mined. Both types can be considered “raw materials”. With regard to renewables like crops and wood, limiting factors of various sorts also apply, but we can go on using such resources indefinitely if we are wise enough.  Nevertheless, a renewable resource “can actually be converted into a non-renewable resource if subject to overexploitation” (“Oxford Dictionary Of Environment And Conservation”, Chris Park, Oxford University Press [OUP], 2007/8, p378). As well, short of physical exhaustion owing to overexploitation, renewable resources can be badly managed from an environmental perspective with all kinds of accumulating deleterious downsides. As we have repeatedly stressed in previous articles, this syndrome is sadly demonstrated by the policy and practice of dairying in Aotearoa/NZ with increasing water pollution as the most obvious harmful outcome. As well, we cavalierly ignore our agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. Under the reign of the National government, the proportion of raw material soft commodities, especially unprocessed milk powder and logs, has increased within our total export tally.

The Soft Power Of Free Trade And Its Militarist Underbelly

Official Western doctrine about the world in its avowedly “peaceful” globalist version, so far as it is articulated and expressed by controlling capitalist interests like the World Economic Forum (WEF), is centred on modernisation, progress, perpetual economic growth, “free trade”, and constant technological innovation. “Market globalism is without question the dominant ideology of our time” (“Globalisation: A Very Short Introduction”, Manfred Steger, OUP, 2013, p106). Transnational corporations (TNCs) rule! This cultural creed is thus determinedly profit-driven, technocratic, exploitative and consumerist. An Oxfam report has pointed to rapidly deepening inequalities (“62 People As Rich As Half The World”, Press, 19/1/16). Of themselves, and by their very nature, economic growth, industrialisation, and consumerism must eventually be unsustainable anyway; and, of course, this is all happening within a very compressed span of time. Within the globalist corporate bloc, there is some nice sounding public relations (PR) spin from the Bill Gates set, along with a variety of benign (especially on disease control), or seemingly benign, projects from this same set, including some on environmental matters. But most of the development supported by the Gates Foundation, for instance, is actually tailored to American foreign policy and TNC objectives. A lot of it is ultimately very harmful to poor people and the environment. For instance, a particularly pernicious example relates to Foundation support for the work of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in fostering the interests of DuPont and Monsanto and related agribusiness. Their promotion of hybrid and genetically-engineered (GE) seeds in Africa, India, and elsewhere is a corporate-driven programme linked to the deliberate subversion of peasant and small farmer co-operatives. Capitalist privatisation of agriculture and market development is being cultivated at the expense of egalitarian and long-term collective and community interests. Indeed, the struggle for democracy against corporate forces goes on everywhere. SumOfUs is currently campaigning to counter Monsanto's law suit against the State of California where Monsanto is trying to stop this American state adding glyphosate (the active ingredient in the weedkiller Roundup) to its list of banned carcinogens.

As intimated, the agenda at bottom for capitalists like Bill Gates is geared to generate ever growing production and consumption, subverting any hope for achieving genuine sustainability.  For all his fine words and some deeds, Gates is still the world's richest man. To be sure, some might say that he has been the very exemplar of a greedy, self-seeking, materialist entrepreneur from his school days (“Super-Rich – How To Get Some Of That”, Press, 15/7/15; “The 20 Richest Americans Are Greedy Takers – Not Inspirational”, 26/1/14: http://www.alternet.org/economy/20-richest-americans-are-greedy-takers-not-inspirational-makers). Has anything much really changed these days for Gates?! How much of the philanthropic hype just amounts to self-serving PR and power manipulation? His international role, when closely examined, seems to be primarily as an agent of American soft power as contrasted with openly militarist imperialism. Certainly, the corporate-oriented dimension is plain enough. It even has some very disturbing militarist links as well. Soft power can have a very ugly underside. For example, the Gates Foundation is a big funder of outfits like the New America Foundation and the nice-sounding Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies, which embrace a wide range of American capitalist initiatives and ideological programmes on both the domestic and international fronts. Take the Aspen Institute: its Board members include such notorious figures as Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, and David Koch*. Aspen runs projects like the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs geared for so-called “emerging markets” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspen_Network_of_Development_Entrepreneurs), carefully seeding the ground for American investment and exploitation overseas; and generally inculcating capitalist values and motivation, especially the code and practice of “entrepreneurship” – the buzzword that is so emblematic of greedy neo-liberalism.  *Albright and Rice were senior Cabinet members under Presidents Clinton and Bush respectively; David Koch and his brother Charles, both billionaires, are leading financiers of, and activists in, the climate change denial movement. Ed.

Included among Aspen's other programmes are a national security one, the Aspen Strategy Group. What it does can be chilling to say the very least. Its’ Co-chairs are Brent Scowcroft, a long-time pivotal player in America's global power games, and Harvard University political scientist Professor Joseph Nye Junior, an academic hugely influential in shaping the style and nature of US foreign policy.  Professor Nye is said to be "the co-founder, along with Robert Keohane of the international relations theory of neo-liberalism (my emphasis), developed in their 1977 book 'Power and Interdependence'" (ibid.). Nye is also credited with being the “pioneer of the theory of soft power”, and also of “smart power” in the ongoing bid by the US to retain as much as possible of its former world hegemony, given the new era of more diffuse power relations (ibid). American neo-imperialism embraces a wide spectrum of strategies and tactics. “Soft power” is defined by Professor Nye as “the ability to attract and co-opt rather than coerce, use force, or give money as a means of persuasion” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_power). However, as in real life, US foreign policy is so often subtly coercive even in its mildest diplomacy, trade negotiations, etc., I shall use the term “soft power” in this article to refer to all international relations other than those directly military in nature.  A key Orwellian term applied in the context of “soft power” is “American leadership”, which is a euphemism for, say, “hegemony”, or even “imperialism” and “neo-colonialism”. As analyst Max Blumenthal has so graphically revealed the Aspen Institute can yet constitute a forum for the blatant celebration of the worst of American foreign policy, the militarist market, and imperial reach. Many US decision-makers, strategists, and media obviously exult in terrorism, mass murder, torture, and other such neo-fascist policies and practices (“Shocking Extermination Fantasies by the People Running America's Empire on Full Display at Aspen Summit”, 25/7/13; http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/shocking-extermination-fantasies-people-running-americas-empire-full-display). Meanwhile, the current focus of Western propaganda is on the “death cult” of Islamic State (IS), along with rivals or opponents like Russia's President Putin, the Chavistas of Venezuela, and any other villains wanting to impede the progressive advance of neo-liberal capitalism in exploiting the peoples and resources of the planet.  

Costing The Earth Versus Growing For Good

In terms of our specific NZ national environment, which is subject at least nominally to internal governance, the costs of current development include - among other negative outcomes - the especial, accumulating impact of dairying on NZ's ecology, particularly our freshwaters (e.g., http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/farming/agribusiness/68504638/scientist-mike-joy-ruffles-dairying-feathers-again; & the Government's own report “Environment Aotearoa 2015”). As indicated, I have stressed this particular outcome in my previous article (“Agriculture, Trade, Industrialism And the Future”, op. cit.).  Intensive use of both irrigation and nitrogen fertiliser continue to fuel this environmental fallout in pursuit of greater productivity and profits, driven primarily by Chinese demand, or anticipated demand. A report by the Parliamentary Commissioner in 2004 warned in vain against this very outcome (“Growing For Good: Intensive Farming, Sustainability, & NZ's Environment”: Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, http://www.pce.parliament.nz/media/pdfs/Growing-for-Good.pdf). At the same time, China is continuing to gain greater control over our primary industries and exports courtesy of our comprador capitalists. For China itself, the mounting long-term costs on land, water, air, and other dimensions of its own ecology are both enormous and pervasive and, indeed, already quite horrendous in impact (.e.g., “China's Environmental Crisis”, Council on Foreign Relations, 18/1/16, http://www.cfr.org/china/chinas-environmental-crisis/p12608; “Pollution Crisis Is Choking The Chinese Economy”, http://www.cnbc.com/2016/02/11/pollution-crisis-is-choking-the-chinese-economy.html). Consequently, China's globalist freebooting policies and practices - from the Sudan and Zimbabwe in Africa to little old “Godzone” here in the Antipodes - will freely feed off the rampant abuse of our environment as well. 

The NZ dairy industry is already deeply integrated in Asia's trashing of its biosphere, being highly dependent on palm kernel extract (PKE). This product derives from deforestation for palm oil plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia, destroying whole ecosystems and putting endangered wildlife, e.g., orangutans, at even more acute risk. Fonterra is making an effort to wean farmers off such PKE dependence, prodded along by non-government organisations (NGOs) like Greenpeace, while there are some initiatives in the Asian region for forest conservation. But illegal logging, commercial greed, and political corruption remain rife at the expense of the environment and economic sustainability; and NZ is still a prime importer of PKE. So much for our touted comparative advantage in farming pasture-fed livestock! The SumOfUs NGO is campaigning (with a online petition, etc.) against the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement's (TPPA) threat to rainforests from this Free Trade Agreement's (FTA's) facilitation of more palm oil plantations. This threat is just one of the TPPA's many threats to our ultimate well-being (“TPPA: Every Bit As Bad As We Said It Would Be”, Watchdog 140, December 2015, Jane Kelsey, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/40/01.html). 

As well as PKE, NZ cows have been fed genetically modified soy and cottonseed meal (Sue Kedgley, “Clean Green Image Hides A Dark Reality”, New Zealand Herald 14/11/12, http://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=10847195).Such imports again make a mockery of NZ's claims to its free trade achievements, which are supposedly due to its comparative advantages in climate, water resources, clever pasture management, etc. Many of our grain farmers have evidently been undercut in price by these imports and gone out of business. It can be well argued, of course, that there should be a direct human food application for grain farmers, not the indirect one of feeding livestock. The regular and abundant provision of grain feed for livestock reflects another highly undesirable symptom of the American-led worldwide intensification of meat and dairy farming (“Farmageddon: The True Costs Of Cheap Meat”, Philip Lymberg & Isabel Oakeshott, Bloomsbury, 2014). Besides the problem of palm oil, it should also be noted here that a largely neglected but looming major danger to Southeast Asia's rainforests stems from the increased inroads of rubber plantations to provide tyres for the rapidly increasing number of cars on planet Earth (“Demand For Rubber Puts Wildlife And Forests At Risk”, Press, 18/4/15; see “Rubber Boom” article in National Geographic [NG], “Why We Need Wild” January 2016).

Globalisation And Farm Commodities

Western political parties today, ironically enough, look to the continuing enhancement of economic growth prospects in the Asia/Pacific region (“Britain Took More Out Of India Than It Put In – Could China Do The Same To Britain?”, 20/6/14, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/20/britain-took-more-out-of-india). During 2015 Britain hitched its fortunes to both China and India in lavishly financed economic deals accompanied by plenty of fanfare and hype. Most ironically, Beijing, the touted capital engine of world economic growth, was virtually closed down for a few days during the Paris climate change conference due to acute air pollution. This was surely a most symbolic portent indeed. China has said its carbon dioxide emissions will only “start falling from around 2030” (Sunday Star Times, 13/12/15), and this view is likely to reflect its stance in the years to come unless there is a lot more concerted activist campaigning both internally and externally. Even countries like Iran are hooking on to the Chinese bandwagon. India has similarly signalled its determination - in even blunter terms - to keep on with coal power in pursuit of its development goals. Under the Modi government, India has now embraced a very Rightwing capitalist agenda, a militarist market approach driven by industrial technology and fostered over the years by the US and other Western countries. NZ, of course, is eager to cut a FTA deal with India. As father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi, if he hadn't been cremated, would be spinning in his grave about all this. Gandhi's vision of a cooperative, egalitarian and environmentally sustainable Indian society is sadly a fading relic of the past as India charges blindly into overshoot mode. The challenge of global warming, while so pervasive and tremendous in import and highlighted here again, is simply speeding up a process of eventual ecological disaster on which global industrial civilisation in its current capitalist mode was already embarked (https://www.redanalysis.org/2016/01/25/the-planetary-crisis-and-its-rule-part-1/).     

Picking up on some of the themes of my December 2015 Watchdog article (“Agriculture, Industrialism, Trade, & The Future”, op. cit.), the continuing thread of cotton production, consumption, and trade is used to some extent to illustrate and elaborate on the workings of the global economy in relation to natural resources. This helps in setting the wider context for so many of the challenges that we face today in Aotearoa/NZ, and that we share with the rest of humankind. The themes and issues go to the heart of so much of the debate over the outlook for world agriculture. Given that cotton is a natural fibre that serves a basic human need, i.e. clothing, its long-time cultivation and important role in human culture provide plenty of insights for developing improved policies and practices for other products in the future. There are indeed lots of lessons, which we should take on board with regard to our very own pursuit of “white gold”, i.e. our cargo cult enterprise of dairying and, by association, meat production. Dairy constitutes yet another form of primary production, another “renewable resource” industry, that requires far more rational and informed assessment, coupled with close monitoring, in order to achieve better and balanced farming outcomes for the future. It must be stressed here that the phrase “renewable resource” is being used only for comparative purposes in a highly qualified sense. In no way should living, sentient animals such as cows be considered just in terms of natural resources. Traditional India has something to teach us here. Indeed, the problem of a callous industrial, technocratic attitude lies at the heart of so many animal welfare issues, in particular factory farming, as well as the general abuse of the environment (“Farmageddon”, op. cit.). Capitalism, of course, even openly downgrades human beings and their labour by its use of the business/economic terms of “human resources” or ''human capital”. 

Animal Welfare Abuse Adds To Dairy Woes

In late November 2015 the long simmering problem of animal abuse in the NZ dairy industry finally broke out into the public arena thanks to some activist groups and TVNZ's exposure.  Animal welfare is one important issue, it must be said in all fairness, that TV1 sometimes treats with due consideration. A Sunday documentary revealed “Dairy's Dark Secrets”, showing Farmwatch film footage tracking the fate of bobby calves and shocking scenes of the brutal mistreatment of these helpless creatures (TV1, 29/11/15). Farmwatch's critical stance was strongly backed by Save Animals From Exploitation (SAFE). This investigative TV documentary also drew on the critical evaluation of Queensland University Professor Clive Phillips, a world expert on cow behaviour and farm management. Professor Phillips confirmed that the film footage shot by Farmwatch shows reprehensible animal neglect and abuse. Farming industry and Government spokespeople, including PM John Key, were quick to play down the charges of animal cruelty. They spun a story of remedial action already in train for these particular instances of abuse, which had supposedly been out of the ordinary for the dairy industry. Key himself and others were also bitterly critical of SAFE for running an advert about the abuse documented by Farmwatch in the British Guardian newspaper (“Is There A ‘Dark Side' To NZ Dairy?”, 11/12/15, http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/on-the-inside/291852/is-there-a-'dark-side'-to-nz-dairy). PM Key even called it “economic sabotage”. But both the Government and the farming/dairy industry, who so often work closely hand in hand, are habitually disingenuous on animal welfare, the environment, and other vital matters.

If we look at the economic theory of comparative advantage in terms of countries, certain trends relating to dairy and meat need urgent attention. For my purposes: “comparative advantage (can be defined as) the advantage possessed by a country engaged in international trade if it can produce a given good at a lower resource input cost than other countries” (“Collins Dictionary Of Economics”, 2nd ed., 1993, HarperCollins, p79). A major assumption here is that the “factor endowments” of a country like land are “fixed” (although I shall come back to this). “The best dairy farmlands are those in cool temperate regions where the rainfall is sufficient to produce ample grass. Examples include western and central Europe, NZ and parts of the US” (“The Collins Concise Encyclopaedia Of Knowledge: Facts From A To Z”, ed. M Dempsey, Collins, 1986/88, p61). As earlier observed, NZ's comparative advantage in farming has long been considered its specific factor endowments for pastoral farming, i.e. temperate climate, adequate rainfall, lush pasture growth, and plenty of freshwater. Instead, these days we have compacted soils and polluted waters, along with an increasingly unstable and warming climate, let alone unstable international demand! Over the last decade, dairy farmers have trebled their debt to more than $34 billion with an average per capita debt of $7 million. It is estimated that around 10% of dairy farmers account for half this debt and these farmers are now under increasing pressure from the Australian banks (e.g., “Farmers Feel Dairy Squeeze”, Press, 18/2/16). 

Yet we now export more low-value raw materials than previously. Furthermore, some in our farming industry have been involved in gross labour exploitation, including of migrant workers. The outlook is worsening (“Farm Workers' Pay Slipping Below Minimum”, Press, 12/1/16). There is increasing concern about farmer stress and even the suicide rate. Meantime, there are some incipient ominous trends in dairy towards American-style factory farming. This sort of farming is brutal for animals. It is also environmentally damaging. In the long run, it is very inefficient on all counts. SAFE, Farmwatch and other NGOs have been campaigning commendably hard in Aotearoa/NZ against factory farming for pigs and chickens with some success, although there is still a long way to go. However, as intimated, enter stage right for cow factory farms as the intensification of dairying increases – unless we also act to effectively counter this trend. This subject requires some special treatment in a future article. Instead, we further explore certain implications of how flexibly free trade doctrine construes the notion of comparative advantage.

Costing Out Comparative Advantage

As signalled earlier, I return to the idea that factor endowments are “fixed”. The “Collins Dictionary of Economics” quoted above notes in its exposition that: “Dynamically, however, comparative advantage may well change.  It may do so in response to a number of influences” (op. cit.). Such influences can include “resource redeployment” according to new governmental goals. “For example, a country which seemingly has a comparative advantage in the supply of primary products such as cotton and wheat may nevertheless abandon or de-emphasise it in favour of a drive towards industrialisation and the establishment of comparative advantage in higher value-added manufactured goods” (ibid.). Or, as can happen we might well add, a basic type of primary production can itself industrialise. For instance, in the US from the 1950s to the 1970s, a very pervasive process of labour reduction took place in the cotton industry with the: “Displacement of hands through the spread of mechanical cotton-picking” (“Global Sociology”, Robin Cohen & Paul Kennedy, Palgrave, 2000, p270). This particular phenomenon was part of the complex of causes behind African-American migration from the South to the more urban North (ibid.). Earlier in the 20th Century, this complex gave rise to the socio-economic misery ultimately stemming from the boll weevil infestation of cotton plants, and the deep “agricultural depression due to overproduction of cotton worldwide” (ibid.).    

Another example also applies to American agriculture. Interpreted in the narrow economic sense, a change within a country's comparative advantage is illustrated by American dairying, and how this kind of agriculture has turned to industrialisation as much as possible. Especially relevant to NZ's prospects in this context is how much dairying has now taken the form of factory farming instead of open field pasturing. In recent decades, as described by the NGO Food & Water Watch, “small-and-medium-scale livestock farms have given way to factory farms that confine thousands of cows, hogs, and chickens in tightly packed facilities” at the behest of profit-driven agribusiness corporates (“How America Turned Its Livestock Farms Into Factories”; http://www.factoryfarmmap.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/FactoryFarmNation-web.pdf). “These intensive methods come with a host of environmental and public health costs that are borne by consumers and communities: none of the costs are paid for by the agribusiness industry” (ibid. see also “The Industrialization Of Animal Agriculture”, http://www.hsi.org/assets/pdfs/hsi-fa-white-papers/the_industrialization_of.pdf). Comparative advantage in favour of factory farming is thus very artificially and temporarily contrived. It is dominated by short-term economic goals and consumption.   

So, comparative advantage in commodity production may shift from one industry to another, or shape shift as it were within the overall structure of a particular industry itself. Again, in NZ's case, more value-added processing of milk is often promoted as the way to improved export gains. A critical power factor relates to a country's role in the international trading system. With regard to so many commodities produced by poorer countries, the Western industrialised nations have called the shots for centuries. They have built their so-called “developed” and “free world” on the backs of oppressed peoples and cheap commodities, let alone ravaged ecologies. Consumer power has mostly prevailed over producer power as determined by the dynamics of market forces. My article further documents some of the ways in which the strongest politico-economic powers have succeeded in working things out in their own vested interests right up to the present. Comparative advantage in agriculture is so often very much a moveable feast and a most contestable concept indeed. The ultimate determining criterion should be the environment. Yet climate change is even going to make the application of the idea of “fixed factor endowments” unstable, shifting, and parlous in an increasing number of cases unless humankind can unite in pre-emptive action. For sure, economic advantage can be adaptive according to knowledge and/or technology, e.g. more drought tolerant crops for certain regions. But once again, too, we need to note the often inherent contestability of comparative advantage according to politico-economic values and interests. For instance, Monsanto has been researching “drought-tolerant varieties of crops” in a special farm facility since 2009 (“The Big Thirst: The Secret Life And Turbulent Future Of Water”, Charles Fishman, Free Press, 2011, p119). Private profit and monopolistic/oligopolistic power versus public accountability and democratic control are obviously huge issues at stake here. Indeed, the future of humankind could well be at stake.    

The Fluctuating Fortunes Of Agriculture, Industry And Trade 

The case of cotton can certainly illustrate the workings of “free trade” right up to the present. Over the centuries, in fact, the cultivation of cotton has often represented the pursuit of “white gold” in various regions and eras, and under very different regimes. To reiterate, there are many sobering parallels for us in the repeated experiences of obsessive monoculture farming: over-specialisation; over-exploitation; excessive water use; and pollution; let alone the insidious predatory reach of foreign control! During 2015/16, our commitment to dairy has come substantially unstuck with falling demand and mounting problems in China, our main market, and other similar sales difficulties across the globe. Long-term, NZ's dairy commitment is absurdly grounded in its “gung-ho” free market optimism, especially in its delusions about the Chinese market. The fluctuating fortunes of the agricultural soft commodity farming of plants other than staple food crops - i.e. crops from coffee to cotton - serve as ongoing testimony to the risks faced by countries subject to foreign control, and/or heavily or overly dependent on certain overseas markets; let alone weather patterns, or worse, climate change. Colonialism harshly exploited both peoples and environments. Cotton has exacted a particularly heavy toll in both colonial and neo-colonial regimes, and played a most pivotal historical role in shaping Anglo-American dominance (for background see “Agriculture, Industrialism, Trade, and the Future”, op. cit.). Its legacy and tradition has carried on into the 21st Century in multiple ways that are integral and influential in the world economy, with a multitude of interconnections and interactions - some of which I shall note in passing. If sugar - yet another “white gold”! - especially in the Caribbean, and much of the Americas, was the dominant commodity crop of the 18th Century, cotton exercised a similar role in the 19th Century. To some considerable degree, cotton has played a significant role right up to the present day. Oil, of course, dominated the 20th Century. As a liquid mineral, oil is ironically enough classed in the “hard” commodity category.

Ongoing free trade negotiations and TNC manipulation of the market thus draw on a long coercive Anglo-American heritage as well as the application of soft power in the modern era. The exercise of military power has been intimately integrated with the market in Western imperial history up to the present (however disguised at times), with a marked resurgence since 9/11. Clearly, the history of the Atlantic slave trade and the associated plantation economy of the Americas - particularly cotton in its heyday - in the aftermath of European conquest constitute a major example of this politico-economic pattern. African slaves were harshly exploited in order to grow cheap cotton, sugar and other crops in order to provide a crucial platform of economic growth for both Britain and the US. More generally, military power has been applied, both directly and indirectly, in aid of keeping down the prices of “Third World” raw materials, and guaranteeing that the value-added gains from processing accrue to those with real market clout, i.e. to those in the past armed with the cannon and later the Maxim gun, and so on to those today armed with the aircraft carrier, attack jets, and cruise missiles. Control over the supply chains of a whole range of commodities - from oil to coffee, from copper to jute, and from tin to cotton - has been crucial in the enrichment of the West for centuries. In the case of cotton, the visible hand of the militarist market was first demonstrated plainly, and indeed most graphically, in British-ruled India when “the British refused or failed to modernise industry, destroying, for example, the Indian cotton industry so that it could not compete with the British” (“The Guinness Encyclopaedia”, Guinness Pub., 1990, p432). In reaction to changing market conditions, the British imperialists saw fit to impose the rules entirely in their own favour and at the expense of the Indian people. During the second half of the 17th Century, cotton goods were imported from India. But eventually, because of the competition with the wool and the linen industries, the British government banned the import of cotton goods in 1721. In the interests of the East India Company, the imperial fist behind the free market crushed the Bengali industry and its workforce of cotton textile weavers based in Dacca (Dhaka), Calcutta (Kolkata), and other sites. These places were stripped of cotton export manufacture, thus eliminating any competition to the Company's reign.

Commodities, The Market And The Military

But cotton had proved a popular cloth in Britain and a domestic industry sprang up using the raw material imported from the colonies. Some revisionist historians have played down the colonial role in favour of the principle of comparative advantage. Oxford University historian Professor Robert Allen is one such analyst. But Allen puts the cart before the horse. In his view, British and Western industrial manufacturing prevailed over the economies of the Third World because of the systematic application of superior technology. For him, comparative advantage - as illustrated by the case of India and cotton - rather than imperial power explains the general “'underdevelopment' of the Third World” (“Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction”, OUP, 2011, p56). This was due to the much higher relative cost of labour in Britain & co. as compared for example to India (ibid. pp51-63). Consequently, all the value-added processing gains from more efficient manufacturing processes went West (“The Economics Of Imperialism”, Michael Barratt Brown, Penguin, 1974)! Professor Allen does acknowledge that imperialism had a role. However, he says: “These developments were not due to a conspiracy among the rich nor simply to colonialism (although it played a role)” (“Global Economic History”, op. cit., p55). Supposedly, for Allen, the Indians chose to export agricultural commodities rather than manufactured goods. In the words of free trade guru, Milton Friedman, the Indians and other such peoples were apparently “free to choose”. Yet Allen even deliberately and misleadingly portrays the international politico-economic causes of exploitation in the ridiculous “straw man” terms of a purported “conspiracy”. In this regard, he blithely and conveniently ignores all the relevant repressive colonial history – several centuries of it in fact! He can actually state that: “Every country has a comparative advantage in something. As India lost its advantage in manufacturing, it gained an advantage in agriculture, raw cotton in particular” (ibid. p60). NZ dairy and other primary industry please take note as Chinese companies get control of value-added products! 

Overall, then, Professor Allen gives a very bowdlerised and self-serving story of “market forces” and “free trade” at work, however useful his book may be in other respects. It is certainly very ironic that Allen's thesis is even contested by a writer in the Economist, that traditional clarion British advocate of free trade. In a review of Harvard University History Professor Sven Beckert's “Empire Of Cotton: A Global History” (Penguin, 2014), the reviewer roundly condemns the “new economic order” and “War Capitalism” with its roots in “imperial expansion, expropriation of land, and slavery” (“Spinning Tales”, Economist, http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21637354-fine-account-900-years-globalisation-spinning-tales; see also: “Economy Of India Under The British Raj”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_India_under_the_British_Raj). Until 1900, cotton was the world's foremost manufacturing industry – spanning some 900 years! Its grim record demonstrates the huge human and environmental costs of globalisation.   

Starting in 1769, taking place in the 18th and 19th Centuries, the very successful British cotton industry was a major foundation industry of what has been called “the first industrial revolution”. There were other profitable dimensions as well to the international cotton trade controlled by British imperial power. Until 1834, the East India Company had a chartered monopoly on a very “lucrative triangular trade – raw cotton and opium from India to China, and silver, silks, spices and tea from China to Europe” (“The First Industrial Revolution”, Phyllis Deane, Cambridge University Press, 1967, p208). The East India Company was one of the original transnational corporations or TNCs. Taking the long view, “the metaphor of 'King Cotton' is indeed the capitalist success story” (“Africa: Slavery, King Cotton & The Industrial Revolution”, David William Pear, 24/2/14, http://therealnews.com/t2/component/content/article/170-more-blog-posts-from-david-william-pear/1984-africa-slavery-king-cotton-and-the-industrial-revolution-). A number of subsidiary European population groups benefitted as well from all this historical exploitation as Britain exported its “surplus” population of the time to lands like Australia and Aotearoa/NZ. During the mid-19th Century, China resisted the illegal import of the opium drug, which came along with the cotton and other goods imported under Western coercion. Conflict over this noxious trade resulted in British and wider Western enforcement of the entry of goods into this Asian country by gunboat diplomacy and two wars (1839-42 & 1856-60). Maybe Mao Zedong learnt much of the import of his famous dictum about political power growing out of the barrel of a gun from such history. 

Thus, the global reach of the big Western powers ensured that “the machine revolution of the early 19th Century removed garment manufacture from the (cotton) growing regions” as British journalist Richard North observed in his book “The Real Cost” (Chatto & Windus, 1986, p107). In a chapter entitled, “Jeans: Cotton And Pesticides For The Image-Conscious”, North gave some startling statistics on the costs of cotton production and consumption in the mid-1980s (ibid.). For instance, cotton actually took up “half of the total area which [grew] non-food crops” on planet Earth (ibid.). Exploitative elites subjected workers to dangerous pesticides, with also about half the total then used in the Third World being allocated to this one crop. In addition, the extensive use of fertiliser caused much water pollution. Prices were falling at the same time for peasant cotton producers in competition with heavily subsidised farmers in the US and the EU impacting on the world market. Synthetic fibres were also making very substantial inroads into the consumer market. It should be recorded here in passing that Richard North later reinvented himself as a fervent Rightwing, anti-Green ideologue known now as Richard D North. Suffice to say that “The Real Cost” effectively undercuts his later ideological position.    

Free-Loading On The Environment

In the 20th Century, the pursuit of “white gold” in the form of cotton took an environmentally disastrous turn in the formerly Communist Soviet Union, a country committed in doctrine at least - whatever the grim reality - to the ideals of social justice and egalitarianism. Its pernicious industrial legacy persists today. Unsustainable cotton farming has destroyed large-scale ecosystems with the most egregious case being the devastation of the Aral Sea region under the Soviet regime (“Cotton: A Water Wasting Crop” – World Wide Fund For Nature” [WWF], http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/about_freshwater/freshwater_problems/thirsty_crops/cotton/). In an atrociously misjudged development project to cultivate cotton on a massive scale, the Stalinist dictatorship created one of the world's worst environmental disasters to date. The regime was enamoured with the massive industrialisation of agriculture, draining away most of the Aral Sea in a crazy technocratic irrigation scheme. As an article in National Geographic (NG) explains: “Diverted to water crops (mostly cotton), what was once a vast inland sea is 90% gone” (contents page, June 2015). Started in the 1920s under Stalin, enormous irrigation projects on the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers indeed continued right up into the 1960s. The thriving Aral Sea fishery was ruined and nowadays vast areas are just a dusty, salt-covered wasteland laced with toxic chemicals from cotton farming. These chemicals are still causing cancer and other dire health problems for the local people. 

In this NG article, aptly titled “Sins Of The Aral Sea”, the impact of Soviet industrial agriculture can be seen as yet another damning testimony to modern “mega-technics”, the “technical fix” syndrome, and the prevailing technocratic mindset. The progress of industrial civilisation combines economics and technology in a programme to dominate and control the natural world whatever the costs (“The Pentagon Of Power”: 'The Myth Of The Machine', vol. ii, Lewis Mumford, Secker & Warburg, 1970). Western civilisation and its offspring are devoted to the “worship of and a commitment to the ideology of the machine – the unholy pentagon of power, made up of progress, profit, productivity, property, and publicity, with pleasure thrown in” (ibid.). This “megamachine” mindset is currently reflected here by the neoliberal National government in Aotearoa/NZ with its pursuit of the “white gold” of dairy production, deep sea fossil fuel mining, etc., and in similar activities in so many other places round the planet. In NZ's case, the technocratic fantasies of water control for agricultural over-exploitation exemplify once more a well-worn syndrome in human history (reflected retrospectively for the modern era in older civilisations from the cradle of Mesopotamia to that of Angkor Wat in Cambodia). These National government fantasies are taking the form of excessively grandiose and artificially contrived irrigation schemes violating the limits dictated by both the existing environment and those increasingly imposed by climate change, e.g., the Canterbury Central Plains Water Project. Driven by Chinese consumer demand and corporate investment, dairying has taken over from sheep farming on Canterbury's naturally dryish pastoral plains, which are also regularly subject to drying winds, especially the foehn-like “nor-wester” sweeping down over the Southern Alps from the West Coast. Hence the cargo cult projects to harness snow-fed rivers such as the Waimakariri, Rakaia and Rangitata to milk more of the “white gold”.

In South Canterbury, the Opuha reservoir or Lake Opuha, the source (stemming from the Opihi River) for an irrigation project lavishly lauded by its pundits and beneficiaries, actually got so low during summer in 2015 that local dairy farmers suffered severe water problems. Water supply was restricted and then even cut off to the 250 farms provided by the lake for several weeks. The lake was “down to less than 10% of its capacity” (“Opuha Dam To Stop All Irrigation”, Radio New Zealand News, http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/rural/266040/opuha-dam-to-stop-all-irrigation, 13/2/15). “But one of the farmers drawing water from Opuha, Nicky Hyslop, who had also been the Chair of Irrigation NZ, said things would be a lot worse for them and the river environment, if they did not have the dam” (ibid.). The shortage actually conveyed the message for him “that we need to be looking at more alpine (water) storage, to not only assist farmers but the communities that sit around them” (ibid.). There is no recognition here of over-stocking, exceeding the natural limits, downgrading the local ecosystem, and undermining ultimate carrying capacity. In some areas, this problem is very evident, e.g., the MacKenzie Basin of South Canterbury/North Otago. Dairy intensification is on a treadmill. So much of this industry is now grounded on pastoral land that is highly unsuitable, continually demanding further inputs and interventions of one sort or another under increasingly difficult conditions. Moreover, not only will Canterbury's great braided rivers eventually suffer from markedly diminished flows when global warming has melted down so much of the mountain ice pack but water pollution will intensify, and the vital water-tables for Christchurch and other urban areas be adversely affected. Canterbury aquifers have been deeply affected by both dairying and earthquakes (e.g., “North Canty's Water Woes: There's Something In The Water”, Press, 23/1/16). The overly big and ambitious irrigation schemes are rooted very much in short-term capitalist thinking (again requiring fuller treatment in a future article). Rising sea levels are also going to infiltrate and contaminate water aquifers in the Christchurch region and elsewhere in the country unless sufficiently pre-emptive action can be taken. 

In Central Asia, the Aral Sea is now divided into two parts, one controlled by Kazakhstan and the other by Uzbekistan. The former country has managed to revive its part to a fair extent whereas the latter is left with a dead water mass. Uzbekistan is still hugely dependent on its annual cotton crop and the presiding regime there effectively coerces a national workforce to pick it. In one of those many sad ironies relating to the destruction of the biosphere by humankind, Uzbekistan is mining for oil and gas on the salt wastelands of the former Aral Sea, “a massive disincentive for the Government to do anything that might cause the Sea to refill” (“Sins Of The Aral Sea”, NG, op. cit., p125). In the Soviet disaster, a lake was ruined by draining the rivers flowing into it. In so many irrigation projects in Aotearoa/NZ, rivers are being milked to create artificial lakes and reservoirs in ways that are creating another special set of environmental problems. Neighbouring Australia's accumulating empty reservoirs, and withering rivers like the vital Murray-Darling system, should be sending lots of warning signals here in Aotearoa/NZ. The “Big Dry” continues to bite across Australia, the continent most vulnerable to climate change (e.g., “The Big Thirst”, op. cit.).             

Protecting Free Trade

By the mid-1980s, Chinese and other “Third World” manufactured textiles were digging deep into the American market. But a First World protection device called the Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA) shielded a lot of developed country textile manufacturing. Major protective quotas were phased out between 1995 and 2005, although large tariffs still remain on many textile products. In one of those poignant ironic twists of history, the textile and garment industry was revived in a new version in the Bengal region of India. Bangladesh, aided and encouraged by the World Bank and other Western agencies, emerged to be a leading exporter. Against expectations, too, it is seen in recent times to have been the biggest beneficiary of the liberalisation of the garment trade. But horrendous factory building collapses and fires, along with the exposure of shocking exploitative “sweatshop” conditions, have demonstrated the real nature of its comparative advantage. Yet at least Bangladeshi industry problems have elicited some international concern and supportive, remedial action. Of course, the powerful, predatory Western TNCs and their governments, in conjunction with the international agencies of the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), etc. under their control, have the greatest responsibility for such global exploitation. The spotlight has briefly and intermittently been put on the Western TNCs involved, including big companies like Walmart, Benetton, and The Gap. There has been some pressure for positive change in health and safety practices, and general working conditions, but any improvements tend to be just window-dressing with plenty of local contractors willing to supply the TNCs at the rock bottom prices wanted. Still, having said this, NGO action has got some worthwhile results, e.g., SumOfUs claims to have made Joe Fresh (Canada), River Island (UK), and Woolworths (Australia) sign the Bangladeshi Fire & Safety Accord (www.sumofus.org/). Unfortunately, however, the Bangladeshi government is seeking to expand its textile industry by coal-fired power stations and such-like measures that will both harm the environment and facilitate further factory industrialisation rather than more cooperative and sustainable employment

Critics have accused Woolworths-operated supermarkets here in Aotearoa/NZ of unfair treatment of small suppliers, including local farmers. The Countdown chain in particular has come in for strong criticism on these grounds. Progressive Enterprises, which is the base company for Woolworth's supermarkets in NZ, has had big labour disputes with local unions at its distribution centres. Close monitoring and related activities by unions and NGOs around the world are constantly vital in countering TNC power hurtful to local people, communities, and their interests. In Aotearoa/NZ, Progressive Enterprises forms an oligopolistic, dominant duopoly with Foodstuffs, the NZ owner of several parallel supermarket chains. In recent decades, supermarket power has emerged to constitute a key link and power player in the worldwide food supply chain (e.g., www.waronwant.org/past-campaigns/fighting-supermarket-power; “Supermarket Power - Consumer NZ, 4/6/13: https://www.consumer.org.nz/articles/supermarket-power). In 2015 the National government was quick to bury a Parliamentary bill initiated by the Greens for a supermarket adjudicator. The ways in which international commodity prices - from cotton to milk - are translated into consumer prices will continue to be a perennial issue. More generally, the imperative of better and environmentally benign employment demands more localisation, economic democracy, and cooperative enterprise with egalitarian participation to the fore (e.g., see “Green Liberty Is The Antidote To Authoritarian Corporatism And Global Ecological Collapse”, Dr. Glen Barry, 24/3/15, http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1503/S00213/green-liberty-is-the-antidote-to-authoritarian-corporatism.htm). This requires in turn yet more effective campaigning and dissemination of information. Hearteningly, international solidarity and action seem to be growing with online-oriented movements like SumofUs and Avaaz (https://www.avaaz.org), sparking and spreading positive activism around the globe, and on a widening range of issues.

Manipulating Market Forces

For over more than two centuries, the US, that self-proclaimed great champion and proponent of free trade (certainly since World War 2 when it really set out to penetrate foreign markets), has been able to manipulate the factors of production, e.g., labour, capital, and land, very much in its own interest. But increasingly in recent decades, this manipulation has been predominantly to the comparative advantage of a grossly wealthy and very small section of its population, and as we have seen, exacted at an ever greater ecological cost worldwide. American-based transnational capital has become disconnected to a very marked degree from the national interest in the sense promoted by the traditional economic theory of comparative advantage. Since the start of the 21st Century, Chinese imports have evidently been the main cause of a sharp decline in American manufacturing as US-based TNCs like Walmart & co. readily exploited Chinese cheap labour, low environmental and safety standards, weak regulation, and so on. In the mid-1980s the US accounted for about half of the world's factory goods. Now China rules the roost with almost a quarter of global capacity versus 17% for the US (“China Solidifies Its Position As The World's Largest Manufacturer”, https://www.mapi.net/blog/2015/09/china-solidifies-its-position-world%E2%80%99s-largest-manufacturer, 30/3/15). But more TNC factories are relocating from China to cheaper wage countries even as China itself moves increasingly to adopt robotic, automated production. Meantime, the demise of American manufacturing has left the door open for the intrusion and consolidation of military-related enterprise of one kind or another as the US gears up for current and future geopolitical confrontations, including with China.

Since the end of WW2, American Administrations have ensured a lot of continuing State support, subsidisation, and protection to pump up market forces. They have systematically helped ensure sufficiently remunerative prices for American (particularly large and corporate) farmers and agribusiness; and at the same time keep export prices competitive enough to dominate world markets, including the “dumping” of products at the expense of poor producers. These policies and practices have operated under the mantra of free trade, which NZ has bought into so fervently from the mid-1980s. Once again, cotton provides a salutary illustration of how both protection and free trade policies meld together according to the goals of American agricultural strategy. I have observed how the US and European Union have heavily subsidised their cotton farmers. Cotton became a highly controversial issue within the WTO, which even has a specific Cotton Sub-Committee as part of the Agricultural Committee in the context of ongoing agricultural negotiations. The WTO's so-called Doha Development Round came to grief by 2008 with agriculture figuring as the biggest bone of contention. In December 2015, the NZ Government celebrated an agricultural agreement reached at Nairobi under WTO auspices. This deal arranges for further reductions in subsidies but the Doha Round remains stalled. The latest deal includes a commitment to abolish export subsidies for farm exports. Supportive measures recognise “the vital importance of the cotton sector to Least Developed Countries [LDCs]” (WTO|2015 News items: “WTO Members Secure ‘Historic Nairobi Package’”, 19/12/15, https://www.wto.org/english/news_e/news15_e/mc10_19dec15_e.htm). Yet, ultimately, free trade is the WTO's determining and operative criterion for longer-term agricultural outcomes.   

The core issues involving free trade and food security are still carefully screened from public scrutiny here in Aotearoa/NZ by the mainstream media, an outrageous case of propagandistic media manipulation prevailing now for over 30 years. Food sovereignty has indeed been central to this debate with countries like India and China standing firm on governmental support for food security against the highly hypocritical and cynical American-led free trade assault. The fight for human rights in regard to food among the big players carried on in 2015 (“India, China To Push For Food Security Agreement At WTO”, http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2015-05-14/news/62165808_1_trade-facilitation-agreement-india-and-china-g-33). “Developing countries are supporting the draft text of 2008 which allows programmes supporting low-income or resource farmers without being penalised but the developed world want it debated afresh” (ibid.). “Wealthy nations spend 20 times more on farm subsidies than the $US12 billion they allocate to food aid and support for poor farmers annually” (“Global Food Crisis”, Brookings Institution, http://www.brookings.edu/research/topics/global-food-crisis,  23/10/15). And, of course, plenty of criticism can also be levelled at such current aid and support on the grounds of social justice and sustainability. Some very qualified protection was gained for “developing members” from the latest WTO agreement in Nairobi. WTO members are still seeking a permanent (if problematic) solution on “Public Stockholding For Food Security Purposes” (WTO|2015 News items, op. cit.). Meantime, other vital measures necessary to ensure food security in an era of growing crisis are simply being neglected or undermined, all in aid of corporate free trade. The media continue to protect the free trade machinations of the rich and powerful. TVNZ's neo-liberal propaganda can be so perverse and nauseating that it has even screened the doco series “Feeding The Super-Rich”!

Growing Commodity Costs

Cotton has had a very significant traditional role in some “Third World” areas in helping to provide for food security, gaining vital income for poor farmers. Much of West Africa (once the prime site of the slave trade) and parts of North Africa have been critically dependent on income from cotton exports, e.g., the countries of Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad and Mali. Cotton cultivation has been West Africa's biggest employer. Ironically, back in the slave trade days cotton was a key European good in exchange for slaves. But “soft power” rules today. Early in the first decade of the 21st Century, the US & co. were subsidising the rich, and dumping on the poor by undercutting cotton prices for West African producers. Unfair trade was keeping millions of people in poverty and hunger with the American Administration giving its cotton farmers more than $US3.5 billion in subsidies each year (“The Cost Of Cotton: Cotton Subsidies”, People' & Planet, https://peopleandplanet.org/redressfashion/briefing/subsidies; “The Impact Of US Subsidies On West African Cotton Production”, http://cip.cornell.edu/DPubS?service=UI&version=1.0&verb=Display&handle=dns.gfs/1200428204). As the second largest producer of cotton (next to China) and the world's largest exporter, the US has violated free trade principles at will on cotton, as well, of course, on wheat, corn, and other agricultural commodities. By 2011, American cotton subsidies over the previous ten years had taken a very heavy toll (“America's $24bn Subsidy Damages Developing World Cotton Farmers”, 24/5/11, http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/may/24/american-cotton-subsidies-illegal-obama-must-act). 

The US even got into a major long-running dispute, beginning in 2002, over cotton subsidies with Brazil. “In 2005 the WTO upheld a challenge that Brazil had filed against the (US) cotton subsidies, as well as some export-credit guarantees for all American farm products, but the US essentially ignored the ruling” (“Why The US Is Also Giving Brazilians Farm Subsidies”, Time, 9/4/10:  http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1978963,00.html). But the world's biggest power was recalcitrant. Instead, in a temporary deal, the US gave many millions of dollars to Brazilian cotton farmers ($US147.3m. per year), as well continuing its own domestic subsidies. The payoff to Brazil was both cheaper and more convenient. And the dispute went on. “The US appealed, but eventually lost the case altogether in 2009 when the WTO arbitrator approved the largest trade sanctions in history” [my emphasis] (“US, Brazil To Resolve Decade-Long Trade Dispute Over Cotton Subsidies”, Reports, 1/10/14, http://www.ibtimes.com/us-brazil-resolve-decade-long-trade-dispute-over-cotton-subsidies-reports-1697528). Even a Time writer can criticise cotton subsidies as “a particularly egregious form of corporate welfare” (op. cit.; note that the figure cited in this particular reference for African subsistence cotton growers is an obvious mistake with the real number far higher). Such are some of the politically contrived contortions of the great world champion of free trade and its perversion of soft commodity power. The US has since settled the dispute with Brazil in 2014 to a very large degree on its own terms. It contemptuously batted away any actionable punitive sanctions legitimated by the WTO for implementation by Brazil. Thus, this whole long drawn-out controversy has again highlighted the extent to which the US is a rogue nation, a maverick law unto itself on the international scene, and just how hugely flawed are NZ's own ambitions for the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) and for a future US-NZ free trade agreement (FTA). NZ has got minimal gains for dairy and meat out of the TPPA deal. The history of the US-Brazil cotton dispute demonstrates how slim and fragile any supposed gains from the US would be, particularly as socio-economic problems mount and compound around the planet.

Counting The Hard Costs Of Soft Commodities

Besides the legacy of the Aral Sea disaster, other hugely important Earth ecosystems are under stress from the cultivation of cotton. Cotton farming sucks up a lot of water in several large river basins, including the Indus River in Pakistan, the Murray-Darling Basin in Australia, and the Rio Grande in the US and Mexico (www.wwf.panda.org/, op. cit.). Other crops compound such damaging effects. “Around the world, there are rivers that are so over-used and over-stressed by climate change that they no longer flow to their own mouths – (for instance) starting, in fact, with the Murray River, which needs a dam to hold back the sea, and including the Colorado River, the Rio Grande, and the merged Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Iraq, the Shatt al Arab, which no longer holds back the Persian Gulf, so that salt water is now flushed 100 miles inland” (“The Big Thirst”, op. cit., p281). There are thus enormous political and environmental ramifications of cotton farming for a natural material, which makes up about half of the clothing for humankind. For instance: “The water consumed to grow India's cotton exports in 2013 would be enough to supply 85% of the country's 1.24 billion people with 100 litres of water every day for a year” (http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/mar/20/cost-cotton-water-challenged-india-world-water-day). 

More than 100 million people in India do not have access to safe water (ibid.). Over a billion people worldwide share this condition and up to two billion suffer water shortages. The holy waters of Mother Ganges are horribly polluted, along with so many other Indian waterways. The public service water infrastructure of this Asian country is in a most parlous state (“The Big Thirst”, op. cit., ch. 8: “Where Water Is Worshipped, But Gets No Respect”, www.thewaterproject.org water-in-crisis-india). Development goals have so often been badly formulated and implemented. Western-style intensive farming is proving sadly misconstrued. For example, most of India's cotton is grown in drier regions where the Government is subsidising the mining and consequent exhaustion of groundwater.  Monsanto now has control of 95% of the cotton seeds in India. Cotton farmers have suffered badly, with many in crushing debt at the hands of moneylenders while suicides have been common (“Farmageddon”, op. cit., p256). In India, rapidly falling water tables, pollution and salinisation of aquifers and land are rife, including in key agriculturally productive areas like the Punjab, “India's Bread-Basket”, which produces large crops of wheat, rice and cotton.  Excessive use of fertilisers and pesticides are reducing the fertility of the soil throughout the country. But NZ's main interest in India is the negotiation of a prospective FTA, with talks in train since 2010. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Trade (MFAT) is looking forward to NZ reaping rewards from a huge future market (“India May Be [The World's] Third Largest Economy After 2030: UK Think Tank”, http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2015-12-27/news/69334750_1_largest-economy-cebr-india-and-brazil, 27/12/15; https://www.mfat.govt.nz/en/trade/free-trade-agreements/agreements-under-negotiation/india/). Such crazy capitalist projections of ever growing production and consumption are the bread and butter of free trade delusions in the boom and bust bubble of evolutionary overshoot.

Since 2005, the World Wide Fund for Nature International Network (WWF) has been involved with TNCs like Levi Strauss in the Better Cotton Initiative (BCI) to promote more sustainable cotton farming. But the sustainable use of renewable resources from cotton to dairy constitutes an immense continuing challenge worldwide. The lessons here for us in Aotearoa/NZ, taken in conjunction with all our own warning signs and problems, are clearly evident and urgent. The National government ended democracy for Environment Canterbury (ECan) because it wanted more wells and irrigation readily implemented and expedited for corporate interests and the dairy industry's usurpation of the Canterbury Plains, even on land very unsuitable for dairying as in the Mackenzie Basin. The Minister for the Environment, Dr. “Landslides” Nick Smith, has indicated that full democracy will not be restored for ECan until 2019. The results have been stark (“'Shameful' Drop In Water Quality”, Press, 26/12/15; & “Desperate Need For Effective Water Rules”, Eugenie Sage, Press, 1/2 /16). The Government keeps up its PR “greenwash” about water issues. But its’ record to date is deplorable and the struggle for real sustainability continues. To be sure, being “clean and green” is imperative for our very survival. 

A Resurgent Resistance!

In the wake of the widespread resistance to the TPPA, there are heartening signs of a growing movement to counter the pernicious influences of neo-liberalism in Aotearoa/NZ. At this stage, we can only hope that there is a spreading public awareness of the importance and urgency of decisions we should be making for the future; and the nature of the issues involved. Social movements can gain traction and flourish when focused on a single clear goal. But, in order to create a fairer and more sustainable economy and society in Aotearoa/NZ, there are many facets and aspects to consider; and many projects we must embrace. Some approaches are more far-reaching than others. Addressing agriculture at the grassroots for a “more fundamental redesign of farming systems” as enjoined by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment back in 2004 (“Growing For Good”, op. cit., p178) is more imperative than ever in light of the latest evidence. An ecologically sound agricultural base is essential for sustainable development. We need to grow this.