Calling for an end to WTO and Free Trade Agreements
Global supply chain disruptions, rising prices for foods and farm production inputs, increasing evidence of agriculture’s impact on climate change, and unconscionable numbers of people experiencing hunger and food insecurity set the tone of the World Trade Organization’s 12th Ministerial meeting which was held in Geneva, Switzerland during the week of June 12.
Iowa farmers, and Iowans as a whole, in fact, all the world’s people, need stability in agriculture and in our food system, not volatility and fragility. We are led to believe that it is good that Iowa is in the top two producers of corn, soybeans, eggs, and pork, with a promise of new markets to raise prices. This path has not benefited farmers, communities, or our precious ecosystem. We need policies that allow farmers to be paid a fair (parity) price, to have diversity in our production system with livestock on farms and beneficial crop rotations. For us to have any chance of achieving these goals and to end food insecurity at home and elsewhere, the World Trade Organization must get out of agriculture.
Five Steps That Won't Feed the World and the Solutions That Will
We are posting this essay by George written in May 2014 as it is just as relevant - perhaps even more so - today. World Food Day was recognized on October 16 with demonstrations and actions around the world while here in Iowa the World Food Prize with all its glorification of ‘feeding the world’ continued the corporate agribusiness narrative, explicitly and implicitly. Meanwhile, the number of food insecure people has risen to an estimated 821 million. Climate change, rural poverty, land grabbing, and peasants being pushed off the land are just some of the causes of this increase in hunger that are directly and indirectly related to the chemical and technology dependent agriculture system promoted by agribusiness.
The brief article, “A Five-Step Plan to Feed the World” offered by Professor Jonathan Foley in the May 2014 National Geographic magazine, clearly states the stark features of a global society on the brink of overshooting the capacity of the ecosphere. I highly commend Professor Foley and his colleagues for being honest about the depth of the crisis because in the general media, and especially the farm media, one wouldn’t know that anyone should be alarmed at all. Here in Iowa where the landscape is plastered with millions of acres of genetically modified corn and soybeans along with their poisonous herbicides, insecticides, fungicides and fertilizers polluting our lakes and rivers, our institutions deny that Silent Spring has arrived, let alone that anything needs to change.