Why does the WTO not enforce free trade in agriculture and ban illegal subsidies in the West ?

[magonzetcetcetc]

WTO is sold out to the West, third world countries have comparative advantage in agriculture, but Western countries do not want to compete because they know they cannot win.

[coragryph]

The WTO is not an enforcement body -- they don't have the legal authority to enforce anything -- they just help the member countries negotiate trade deals.

It's the countries involved that don't want to change things.

[Kel]

In the West we have a quaint custom of voting for our political leaders and farmers seem to regularly vote, so why should our elected leaders want to take away benefits generations old and lose their support and votes.... PS it also hard to compete against a 6000 acre completely mechanized western farm growing genetically enhanced corn, soy beans and pigs with or without subsidies..."feed the world"...especially when competing against the rest of the World who are farming a sixty acre section with a hand driven roto-tiller and a garden tractor.....

[curtis s]

How exactly do you propose that the WTO--which has no army, navy or airforce--ban any thing? Lack of force or the ability to force equals lack of ability to impose will on others.

[Tmess2]

The WTO is based on a treaty. It can only enforce the language of the treaty (and has minimial enforcement powers at that). If the West is not willing to give the WTO the power to sanction countries for subsidies for agriculture, then it has no power over that issue. Even for those issues that fall within the WTO's jurisdiction, a case still needs to be brought complaining about the unfair trade practice.

[Luke]

The underlying premise of the WTO’s agriculture rules is that food should be treated like any other good or commodity, subjected to global market forces and covered by the same sort of trade rules as tin ore, tires or automobiles. But food is not just like an automobile.

Food – like water – is not an optional product that consumers may choose to purchase: food is the basis of life. People without food die while people without cars or tires walk and people without tin ore use local materials. Yet, the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) and the patenting and monopoly control of seeds included in the WTO’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) seek to transform food and seeds into commercial units with profit, not sustenance, as the end goal.

Food and agriculture policy has shifted from nation states to global corporations and global markets, from food production to commodity trade. As a result, real food security – and its necessary condition of food sovereignty – is declining.

A few of the past and potential outcomes of the large scale corporate agriculture model promoted by the WTO include:

* If the AoA were implemented and all farming and food production around the world met “efficiency” rates of western high-input farming, 2 billion of the 3.1 billion people now living on the land throughout the world would no longer be “needed” to participate in the rural sectors of their countries.
* In Mexico and China, the push to establish large scale corporate agriculture has resulted in millions of peasants losing their rural livelihoods and being forced off the land. An estimated 500 million of China’s peasant farmers are expected to lose their livelihoods as their “surplus” labor is eliminated by China’s agricultural modernization.
* Meanwhile, these same policies are wreaking the demise of small-scale agriculture in the rich countries. Corporate globalization has accelerated agribusiness consolidation and factory farming with alarming social, food safety and environmental consequences for family farmers in the United States, Canada, Japan, and Europe. The U.S. lost 38,310 small farms between 1995-2002.
* Increasingly horrific health problems are arising in the countries that have adopted the large scale corporate agriculture model: mad cow disease, widespread food contamination from centralized high-speed slaughter and processing facilities, and obesity, malnutrition, and childhood diabetes linked to consumption of overprocessed foods.

Obviously, something is seriously wrong with current WTO agriculture rules. The volume of food trade is up, but most farmers in rich and poor countries see their income decline, with many losing their farms and livelihoods while consumer food prices have not fallen. Perhaps the only beneficiaries are the global commodity trading companies who were instrumental in writing the AoA rules and who can take advantage of their elimination of government price and supply management to manipulate supply and demand so that prices paid to farmers in countries around the world can be pushed down, but consumer prices for food increased or kept steady, creating profits for the trading firms. ***