La Via Campesina responds to the WTO’s purported plans to set up a ‘Civil Society Council’

29 May 2023 Key Documents (WTO), World Trade Organisation

Recently, La Via Campesina received a request to participate in a civil society “council” to the WTO executive. After careful consideration, we decided to decline this invitation. Through this open letter, we wish to explain why we believe it is impossible to reform the WTO in a way that is favourable to peasants and, more generally, to the interests of the people.

Since 1995, the WTO has aimed to facilitate and increase the share of international trade in world production and consumption. Compared to the GATT, one of the main changes brought about by the creation of the WTO was to integrate agriculture into this logic of generalized free trade.

As early as 1993, La Via Campesina, as a world peasant movement, was created against this logic of globalization and commodification of agriculture and food. The principles of free-market ideology and the legal frameworks that have governed international trade over the past three decades have deep roots in the history of colonialism. It was clear to the vast majority of peasant organizations around the world that giving priority to international trade over agricultural production for feeding local populations would only accentuate the marginalization of peasant populations, worsen hunger in the world and increase the power of transnational companies.

The Agreement on Agriculture, which came into force in 1995 and was to be applied for a limited period of time, is so unfair that, since then, no agreement has ever been reached between the WTO member states on the agricultural issue. As the title of the late Jacques Berthelot’s book expresses it, “agriculture is the Achilles heel of globalization”, and therefore the eternal Achilles heel of the WTO.

This year, in 2023, we commemorate the 20th anniversary of the tragic death of our brother, friend and comrade Lee Kyung Hae from South Korea who gave his life in Cancun in 2003 to denounce the WTO. In his memory, we call to finally end the WTO and build a new framework for fair international trade based on food sovereignty.

An unfair agreement on agriculture

The Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) is fundamentally unfair. It is the direct result of the 1992 Blair House agreement between the United States and the European Union, which sets out a common strategy for these two actors to the detriment of the other states of the world, and in particular against the interests of the countries of the Global South.

Export subsidies are certainly limited in principle (although in reality they continue via various mechanisms), but replaced by direct support from the US and the EU to farmers. However, this direct aid, whose very purpose is to maintain the competitiveness of US and European production on international markets, is classified in the “green box” of so-called “non-distorting” support. Most countries in the South do not have the budgetary capacity to distribute such levels of public aid to farmers: the green box is reserved for rich countries that control international monetary production. On the contrary, market regulation tools and in particular agricultural price support measures (tariffs, supply management mechanisms, MSP minimum support prices, public stockholding, etc.), which are more accessible to poor countries, are classified in the amber box and are therefore subject to significant reductions. The AoA is an agreement tailored to the United States and the EU, against the countries of the South. African, Asian and Latin American countries have very good reasons to denounce this unfair agreement.

From the point of view of peasants in the South and the North, this agreement has had disastrous consequences, as we predicted in 1993. All over the world, the power of transnational companies has increased and they have succeeded in increasing their margins to the detriment of the peasants, who have received only a minimal share of the value of their production. In the South, these companies have also grabbed more and more land, water sources and seeds, to the detriment of peasant communities and often in a violent way, based on the WTO agreements, but also on the structural adjustment programmes imposed by the IMF and the World Bank. In the North, farmers on small and medium-sized farms have received little or no direct aid (80% of farms in the EU are smaller than 10 hectares), but they have suffered from the fall and volatility of agricultural prices following the dismantling of market regulation tools (the end of milk quotas for example). They were put in competition with large farms that received tens of thousands of dollars or euros in public subsidies.

More generally, the AoA has been a disaster for people and the environment. Food supply chains have become globalised: when major shocks occur on international markets and prices soar with financial speculation, indebted countries that have become dependent on imports to feed their populations are extremely vulnerable, as we saw at the time of the 2008 crisis, but also currently. Thus, far from the declarations of the 1996 food summit which promised to end hunger through international trade, the opposite is happening. Hunger is increasing, fuelled by poverty and social inequality. Rural populations are driven out of their territories by land grabbing and lack of agricultural income and migrate to cities or neighbouring countries. Agrarian countries are becoming poorer. Huge industrial monocultures for export are replacing the diverse mixed farming methods that used to produce healthy food for local populations. Pesticides, synthetic fertilisers and GMO seeds are proliferating and polluting the water, soil and air, seriously affecting the health of rural populations.

This is the result of almost 30 years of AoA: green deserts, hunger and a dying countryside.

La Via Campesina’s historic struggles for food sovereignty

On the contrary, since 1996 we have affirmed the need to build and defend food sovereignty, i.e. the right of peoples to decide on their agricultural and food policies, without dumping on other peoples.
Food sovereignty includes the right of peoples, and therefore of States, to distribute land and water use rights not according to a so-called “law of the market”, but according to the general interest. It includes the right of states to put in place public policies to regulate the market so as to guarantee agricultural production in line with the needs of the population and at stable prices. It considers the importance of production methods, and in particular agroecology, to protect the health of territories and populations. It gives priority to local production and consumption of food, not to exports of agricultural goods. It puts people, especially small-scale food producers, and in particular women and youth, at the centre, rather than the interests of transnational companies and financial actors.

For years, we have seen that the WTO continues to be a powerful instrument for the destruction of people’s food sovereignty. The WTO is used by rich, agro-exporting countries to denounce and criminalise policies that aim to support peasant agriculture, regulate agricultural markets and stabilise food prices for people. For example, the constant denunciation via the WTO of public storage is a shame. In March 2022, we were given access to WTO documents that contained threats to use the dispute settlement body against Egypt, which expressed a pressing need to increase its public stocks to ensure food for its population in the face of the sudden rise in prices on international markets. Similarly, the group of African countries, India, China, South Africa, the G33 and the ACP group have been expressing the need to allow public storage to support their local food production and fight hunger for many years, and they are not being heard.

Food sovereignty is not compatible with the AoA, nor with the very principles of the WTO. This is why we have always denounced the AoA and said “Down Down WTO”.