The grip is slowly tightening. The United States has launched an all-out offensive using the three most important instruments of global economic power – the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – and bilateral pressure applied directly on governments of the South. This time, the theme is not oil but global acceptance of genetically modified (GM) foods and crops.
The battle for control of the global food chain has begun. The Bush administration fired the opening salvo in May by announcing that it would lodge a formal complaint with the WTO against the European Union (EU) for the latter's five-year ban on approving new biotech crops, setting the stage for an international showdown over an increasingly controversial issue. Interestingly, the US trade representative, Robert Zoellick, says that the EU policy is illegal, harms the American economy, stunts the growth of the biotech industry and contributes to increased starvation in the developing world.
Coinciding with the frontal attack through the dispute panel of the WTO is a seemingly harmless exercise to close ranks around flawed economic policies. Senior officials of the WTO, the World Bank and the IMF met at Geneva in May to deliberate on how to bring greater "coherence" into their policies through "liberalisation of trade and financial flows, deregulation, privatisation and budget austerity". As if loan conditions of the World Bank-IMF that have forced developing countries to lower their trade barriers, cut subsidies for domestic food producers, and eliminate safety nets for rural agriculture were not enough, the WTO Agreement on Agriculture could be used very effectively to allow the US – and 12 other food exporting countries – to dump unwanted GM foods on markets throughout the world, thereby destroying food self-sufficiency in developing countries and expanding markets for the large grain exporting companies.
Trade and financial manipulations alone, however, are not all. With the UN no longer relevant, any such global offensive needs political allies. Therefore, three ministers from each of 180 invited countries – those holding the portfolios of trade, agriculture and health – will assemble in downtown Sacramento, California, from 23-25 June. The invitation, which comes from US Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, is essentially for 'educating' country representatives on (in reality, intimidating them into accepting) the virtues of GM foods, and why they must back US transnational corporations' fight against global hunger. And, failing that, the lesson is on why they must remain quiet, just as they did when the US was searching for 'weapons of mass destruction' in Iraq.