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Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch:
Excerpts of a Study on the NAFTA's Legacy in Agriculture
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Nipawin - Monday, January 14, 2002 - by: Mario deSantis |
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family
farms
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I remember reading an article by ecologist Donella Meadows on the disappearing
of the family farms in the United States. This article was written before 1990 and
Meadows provided an array of policy suggestions to stop the spiral cycle of the takeover
of the family and smaller farms by bigger farms. Since then the NAFTA agreement has
been implemented with the understanding that the agricultural industry would have
improved; instead the situation has worsened in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. I just
read the executive summary of the study "Down on the Farm: NAFTA's Seven-Years
War on Farmers and Ranchers in the U.S., Canada and Mexico" authored by
the Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch and I feel worthwhile to mention the following
excerpts: |
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43%
drop in
income
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- U.S. Farm Income
- In the U.S., 33,000 farms with under $100,000 annual income have disappeared
during the seven years of NAFTA. This is a rate six times steeper than the pre-NAFTA
period. In the U.S., farm income is projected to decline 9% between 2000 and 2001
-- from $45.4 billion to $41.3 billion in 2001. This compares to annual farm income
of $59 billion before NAFTA went into effect in 1993 -- a 43% drop compared to the
2001 farm income projected by the Farm and Agriculture Policy Research Institute.
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15
million
farmers
endangered
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- Mexican Farm Income
- NAFTA-required changes have resulted in literally millions of Mexican peasant
farmers leaving their small farms and their livelihoods and being forced to migrate.
The land redistribution program established in the Mexican Constitution at the time
of the Mexican Revolution was changed to meet NAFTA's foreign investor protection
requirements-- meaning that, for the first time in 80 years small farmers could lose
their land to bad debt. Projections range up to 15 million displaced Mexican small
farmers because of NAFTA's agriculture provisions.
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down
19%
in
Canada
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- Canadian Farm Income
- While Canada's NAFTA agricultural exports grew by C$6 billion between 1993 and
1999, net farm income declined by C$600 million over the same period instead of rising
by $1.4 billion as Agri-Food Canada had predicted. Since NAFTA, the rate of Canadian
farm bankruptcies and delinquent loans is five times that before NAFTA, even as Canadian
agricultural exports doubled. Dropping prices meant that in Canada, farmers' net
incomes declined 19% between 1989 and 1999, although Canadian agricultural exports
doubled during that period.
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ConAgra
up 189%
Daniels
Midland
up X3
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- Greater Concentration of Agribusiness in NAFTA Era
- Many agribusiness concerns operating in North America took advantage of the new
rights of market access for agricultural products and NAFTA's new investor protections
and began rapid consolidation. Agribusiness mega-mergers like the unions of Smithfield
Foods and Murphy Family Farms, or top poultry producer Tyson Foods with meat packer
IBP, have become a feature of the NAFTA era. Agribusinesses have been able to create
new export platforms which play farmers from the U.S., Mexico and Canada against
one another in a fight for survival as prices paid to producers are steadily pushed
down. While the number of independent farmers dropped between 1993 and 2000, agribusiness
giants such as ConAgra and Archer Daniels Midland had significant earnings gains.
From 1993 to 2000, ConAgra's profits grew 189% from $143 million to $413 million;
and Archer Daniels Midland's profits nearly tripled between 1993 and 2000 from $110
million to $301 million.
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biopiracy
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- One More Agribusiness NAFTA Goodie: Intellectual Property
Provisions That Are Patent Protectionism and Encourage Biopiracy
- NAFTA contains a chapter establishing intellectual property rights that require
the three countries to issue patents guaranteeing 20-year monopoly marketing rights
on a vast array of items, including seeds and plant varieties. It also required Mexico
to change its domestic law and institute criminal penalties for violating these NAFTA
rules. These vast new intellectual property rights have established yet another way
for U.S. and Canadian agribusinesses to benefit from NAFTA: biopiracy. Indigenous
communities that have been planting and crossbreeding strains of food crops for centuries
to develop perfectly adapted varieties can be required, under NAFTA, to pay an annual
license fee to use their own saved seeds if a corporate bio-prospector has collected
the seeds and patented them. The report documents several specific cases that have
arisen in recent years.
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----------------References: |
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Down on the
Farm: NAFTA's Seven-Years War on Farmers and Ranchers in the U.S., Canada and Mexico,
Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch http://www.citizen.org/publications/release.cfm?ID=6788
full text: http://www.citizen.org/documents/ACFF2.PDF
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