Can’t swallow this WTO deal
No sector would willingly be led to the sacrificial pyre by the current crop of ham-fisted world leaders.
The likes of US president George Bush, British prime minister, Tony Blair, and European Commission president, Jose Manuel Barroso, seem too eager to grab the predicted €100bn per year of extra world trade, for us to swallow their story that the WTO is for the good of the Third World.
The theory is that free trade generates prosperity faster than protected trade. In return for free world trade of goods and services, ‘developing’ countries would have access to the EU and US agricultural markets, which would spell the end of EU farming as we know it. The hoped-for upside would be economic growth in poor countries, built around prosperous industries from the First World - not unlike the Celtic Tiger phenomenon.
There are too many holes in the theory. Fragile Third World economies are as likely to be extinguished, as boosted, by the free trade from developed countries. That would happen even in the negotiating phase.
The US wants Europe to lower its barriers, against food imports, by 90%.
After a WTO agreement along those lines, the only guarantees would be a huge number of the EU’s 15m farmers going out of the food production business, and low-cost food producers like the USA, Argentina, and Brazil taking over.
Ranchers, like those in Argentina, with average farm holdings of 2,000 hectares (100 times the EU average), would gain.
The CAP’s largest recipients, like Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Westminster in the UK, would lose, but so also would the 15m EU farmers who preserve the European countryside (where 50% of Europeans live) and provide most of the 1.2bn meals consumed every 24 hours in Europe.
The WTO negotiators have hardly if EU farmers will be compensated for their sacrifice.
The WTO agreement the US is holding out for would also end two thirds of the €9.4bn of agricultural trade from some of the world’s poorest countries, which have preferential access to EU markets - thus hitting the countries supposed to gain most from freed-up world trade.
It will take better world leaders than the current crop to persuade EU farmers, or countries like France which gain most from the CAP, to swallow that dose.
Instead, we have George W Bush greedily leading the complete rejection of an EU offer which France was last week on the point of vetoing.
The US also still declines the EU’ s offer to end all its export subsidies if the USA do likewise.
Perhaps the most ham-fisted party in the trade talks is the European Commission.
It turned EU farming upside down this year with its decoupling reform; now it wants farmers to swallow a WTO bill which will give away their markets, and it has the EU budget for 2007 to 2011 simmering away in the background, waiting for Tony Blair to complete the gutting of the Common Agriculture Policy, and leave EU farmers and their families helpless.
If the Commission is to regain the credibility threatened by rising nationalism since member states started haggling over the EU Constitution of June, 2003, it should start by treating European agriculture with respect.
