Common Dreams bracht vorige week een achtergrondartikel over de Wereld Handels Organisatie en de landbouw: 'WTO: ‘Importing Food is Importing Unemployment' NEW DELHI - When J.B. Penn, United States under secretary for agriculture, came visiting last month he was told that for India, like any other mainly farming country, importing food was as good as importing unemployment.
'We can do so (open up markets as requested by Penn), provided the U.S. is willing to provide a visa to every farmer displaced as a consequence of the import of cheaper and highly subsidised food,'' Penn was told by India's articulate trade minister, Kamal Nath. It was apparent that U.S. Congress would reject any deal that does not open markets in developing countries--even if they have agrarian economies-- for American farmers. A week before the World Trade Organisation (WTO) ministerial at Hong Kong began, Saxby Chabliss, chairman of the U.S. senate's agriculture committee was quoted: ‘'To say we're just going to open up our markets without having our farmers here have access to new markets...if that's all that comes out of (the WTO meeting) Hong Kong, then we've accomplished nothing''. Compare this to what Nath told Indian parliament just before he left for Hong Kong: ‘'I cannot sacrifice the future of India's 600 million farmers at any cost. What the U.S. proposed, last month, is not real cuts in agriculture subsidies. The real cuts would be when there is a decline in the support provided by the U.S. treasury.'' A vast majority of the developing countries, whether in Latin America, Africa or Asia have, in the first 10 years of WTO, turned into food importers. Millions of farmers have lost their livelihoods as a result of cheaper imports.' http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1213-04.htm
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