As expected, the United States and the European Union have arrived at a new accord, just ahead of the fifth World Trade Organisation (WTO) Ministerial meeting at Cancun from 10 to 14 September , which in letter and spirit lays out a detailed road map for what can be called the second phase of the "great trade robbery".
The new framework–a "common vision" rather than a detailed plan–is aimed at further destroying whatever remains of the strong foundations of food self-sufficiency in developing countries already wilting under the compound impact of the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) which was reached in 1994 and which provided for the conversion from quantitative trade barriers to tariffs or tariff rate quotas, and for reductions in export subsidies and trade-distorting domestic support policies. For the small farmers and giant agribusiness alike in North America, Europe and the South Pacific, it will however be business as usual. Rich countries subsidise agribusiness by allowing them to buy very cheap, with the government then making up some of the differences with direct payment to the farmers.
The situation now borders on the absurd. The richest man in the United Kingdom, the Duke of Westminster, who owns about 55,000 hectares of farm estate, receives an average subsidy of 300,000 pound sterling as direct payments, and, in addition, gets 350,000 pounds a year for the 1,200 dairy cows he owns. In the US, recipients of agricultural subsidies in 2001 included David Rockefeller and Ted Turner. Little wonder then that the CNN has no time for the voice of the farm sector in developing countries.
It certainly is an unequal world, and perhaps the most debasing and demeaning of all the world's inequalities is the manner in which the cattle in the rich countries are pampered at the cost of several hundred million farmers in the developing world. It has now been worked out that the EU provides a daily subsidy of USD 2.7 per cow, and Japan provides three times more at USD 8, whereas half of India's 1000 million people live on less than USD 2 a day.