WTO not a convincing farmer’s friend
Now, in Mexico, what the World Trade Organisation seems to offer them is even harder times, so that small farmers in the Third World get a chance to eke a living out of the land.
Perhaps the soundbites from Cancun don't tell the full story, but it's hard for European farmers to swallow what's on offer the remote hope that farmers who can't even feed themselves at present will somehow rise up and become a trading force to be reckoned with, able to feed their own populations and even break into the world food markets.
In Brazil, these farmers don't even have land. They risk their lives trying to steal a few acres from the landlords who cut down the Amazon rain forests and employ them at such low wages that Brazil can export beef to Europe, pay duty on it, and still take market share from European farms.
In other countries, the peasants make their meagre wages labouring on coffee, cotton or tea ranches owned by multinational companies, or in multinational factory food operations which poison the environment. They are a long way from becoming viable farmers in their own right.
United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan says the farm products of poor countries are excluded from rich countries by protective tariffs and quotas, and heavily subsidised food products from the same rich countries push prices down in poor countries, where farmers are consequently put out of business.
He wants the chance for poor countries to trade their way out of poverty. Irish farmers wouldn't mind a similar deal, if there was any hope of them making enough money on farming alone to survive without subsidies.
Just surviving is a more pressing problem in the Third World. Mr Annan says the WTO must arrange access to cheap generic drugs for the millions suffering and dying in poor countries.
Perhaps he should concentrate on this, rather than hope to turn third world farmers into international traders overnight.
Here, the Irish Farmers Association has rightly pointed out that the EU cannot be asked to give away the food security for its 440m people, and depend on the vagaries of world markets, climates and conflicts, and multinational companies.
As it is, the EU is the only "rich nation" trying to help the Third World, by moving from big farms getting 70% of subsidies to rewarding small farmers who raise expensive, high-quality food that is rarely exported, thus doing no harm to the Third World.
In contrast, Americans boast that one out of every three acres is planted for export, and their industrial scale farms get 90% of their farm aid. Inexplicably, their WTO trade representative, has proposed cutting more than $8 billion of subsidies, but only if Europe makes deeper cuts.
The obvious explanation is that the $38m of political funding per year for President George Bush from America's industrial-scale farmers pulls more weight than starving Third World farmers.
The trade ministers who negotiate the WTO agreement probably have their own priorities, boosting the slowly recovering US and European economies and ending Japan's slump.
They want to increase personal incomes worldwide by up to $520 billion by the year 2015, through trade liberalisation; unfortunately there are much more powerful forces fighting for their space at this trough than small farmers, whether of the EU or the Third World.
