Nafta

Nafta

In my last speech I talked about globalization and more specifically the affect of NAFTA on the Mexican corn farmers. As a result of the removal of tariffs on agricultural products, Mexico, a country once self sufficient in basic grains, today imports 95 percent of its soy, 58 percent of its rice, 49 percent of its wheat, and 40 percent of its meat. This has resulted in Mexican corn farmers being put out of business. More than 80 percent of Mexico's extreme poor live in rural areas, and more than 2 million are corn farmers. There is no way they can compete with subsidized American agribusiness. In my last speech I didn’t mention the affect of globalization on the U.S. In the U.S., a comparison between the 1930s and today tells a similar grim tale. Then, 25 percent of the population lived on the nation's 6 million farms; today, 2 million farms are home to 2 percent of the population. Small family farms have been overwhelmingly replaced by large commercial farms, with 8 percent of farms accounting for 72 percent of sales. Small family farms can’t compete with the large industrialized farms, where the only relevant objective is profit margin. While doing my research for this speech I was trying to find some type of policy that the U.S. carries for globalization, to my surprise there is no actual outlined policy. There are policies on various different topics that all fit into the globalization. I would like to concentrate on our trade policy in terms of agriculture.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Agriculture (AOA) requires that countries open their economies to agricultural products. Due to the low or at times non existent tariffs on importing and exporting we are cutting jobs domestically and abroad. With American markets already saturated, the U.S. is aggressively pushing to open up foreign markets -- with great success. Already, one out of three acres planted in the United States produces food or fiber destined for export, and one quarter of American farm sales are now exports. Though agriculture was the incentive to lure the Third World into the WTO and other trade agreements, it has turned into the most contentious issue as the Third World is devastated by the dumping of cheap and subsidized agricultural products from the United States and the European Union. While beefing up agribusiness with agricultural subsidies (the U.S. and the EU subsidize their agriculture to the combined tune of almost $1 billion a day) which are denied to the poor farmers in the South, and lowering world prices, the AOA has become a form of control of the food system that puts power squarely in the hands of export producers, large businesses and elites, at the expense of family farmers. For example, the U.S. exports corn at prices 20 percent below the cost of production, and wheat at 46 percent below cost. How can family farmers of any country compete with that? Our policy is driven by making money but while doing just that we are also taking the livelihood of many people. The reform that I feel is needed is to impose tariffs on many products, while all of the free trade organizations were created to avoid tariffs this system is not having the desired affect. The AOA has been the economic engine for promoting industrial agriculture -- replacing family farmers with agribusiness and corporate farms. Both industrial agriculture and liberalization of agriculture have further concentrated land holdings with the rich landlords, displacing small farmers around the world. Displaced from their lands, farmers have been forced to