Where can you find the reverse of Robin Hood effect: robbing the world’s poor to enrich corporate agribusiness? That is the way free trade works in agriculture. Agriculture is the source of livelihood for over 40% of people on earth. Most of these producers are small-scale and subsistence farmers who constitute 75% of the world’s poor. Subsistence farmers are farmers who prioritize to produce food for their families and communities utilizing natural resources from their surrounding environment. This fact shows that subsidies and other international agreements support capital-intensive agriculture dominated by transnational corporations. Moreover, agricultural subsidies run by free trade system has contributed to the decline of rural area on both human and natural resources. Free trade in agriculture delivers to farmers’ impoverishment, destruction of farm environment, and violation of people’s right to food.
Agricultural trade liberalization impoverishes farmers. According to the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), it interprets agricultural subsidies and deregulation. Both of them result in the impoverishment of farmers. Firstly, agricultural subsidies given away as a protection to domestic products reverse from its preceding purposes which are to save small farmers and preserve a way of life. In contrast, they mostly go toward rich farmers and corporate agribusiness. Farmers do not accept anything from this policy except a loss of their cultural habituation in the form of the independence to produce their own production tools. The subsidies are used by agrochemical corporations to provide chemical inputs of production. Secondly, a policy called deregulation is implemented to support free trade. The government commits on international obligations to reduce domestic and export subsidies, increase market access, and regulate agriculture trade with more disciplines on domestic farm policies. All those regulations do not protect small farmers in all aspects of their farms, from cultivation to marketing. Eventually, they bring to farmers’ bankruptcies. The capital used for buying agricultural inputs that farmers cannot pay back in cash from corporate agribusiness must be paid by their land and assets of farm as the warranty, so they are homeless and being loss of their community.
Another bad effect is the increasing yield for export oriented crops destroys farm environment. To drive crop yield vastly and continuously, chemicals input such as fertilizers and pesticides are needed in a big amount and this makes farmers dependent extremely on them for a long time ahead. This practice can decrease land fertility and disturb farm ecosystem. In addition, there will be a destruction on biodiversity by monoculture. The concentration on only one or some commodity crops in one farmland area makes farmers stop rotating their crops with the result that create an imbalanced ecology. There will be no more various kinds of plants and animals correlating in a circle of eating in a particular farm environment.
One more bad effect of free trade in agriculture is people’s right to food has been weakened by the dependence of free market. International financial institutions which promote free market have created a system that focuses on export-oriented production and alienates people from productive resources such as land, water, and seeds. Farmers could fulfill their daily food from subsistence farming for years before, but now they can merely rely on food from the market whose quality and safety cannot be guaranteed. It can be found in many places that farmers starve because their low incomes cannot afford adequate food. For the interest of producing exported commodities, both government and big companies take control on all natural resources to be exploited. They can be considered to violate people’s right to food, especially farmers’. Right to food is the right of every human being who has physical and economic access any time to obtain sufficient food as a requirement of human’s dignity. There are two aspects that can be categorized in the violation of the right to food: obstructing access to natural resources and making to consume unqualified food. It is ironic that farmers as food producers have to suffer from hunger.
Agricultural trade liberalization has increased global poverty and hunger and disrupted environmental conservation. Therefore, farmers organizations and social movements all over the world recommend strongly that free trade in agriculture should be halted. These movements prioritize health, qualified, and culturally appropriate subsistence production for farmers’ households and the domestic market. Furthermore, they conduct intensive communications with governments and participate in the World Trade Organization’s agenda to conduce juster policies and regulations for marginalized people. Anyone, who are keen on supporting these movements, should better analyze precisely the free trade’s problems in agriculture that affect basic human needs as our joint problems.
Dian Pratiwi Pribadi
No comments:
Post a Comment