Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | M | Multinational Monitor

Losing the farm: how corporate globalization pushes millions off the land and into desperation.

Article Excerpt
An Interview with Anuradha

Anuradha Mittal, a native of India, is the co-director of Food First/The Institute for Food and Development Policy. Prior to becoming co-director, she was the Institute's policy director and coordinated Economic Human Rights: The Time Has Come!, a national campaign in the United States on growing hunger and poverty and the loss of family farms in the United States. Mittal is the co-editor of America Needs Human Rights (Food First Books, 1999). Prior coming to the United States, Mittal worked with Society for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), a major development group in India.

Multinational Monitor: What is the fundamental issue at stake in the ongoing World Trade Organization agricultural agreement negotiations?

Anuradha Mittal: The fundamental issue at stake is our food sovereignty--defined by Via Campesina, the world's largest farmers organization and which includes landless workers and women farmers, as the human right of all peoples and nations to grow food in ways that are culturally, ecologically and economically appropriate for them.

Though agriculture was the carrot 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.

The WTO Agreement on Agriculture (AOA) requires that countries open their economies to agricultural products. 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.

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,...