As I write this I am sick to my stomach. A new WTO (World Trade Organization) agreement may be reached this week that restricts the right of developing nations to subsidize large farming populations so they can afford to grow more food at cheaper prices to feed starving domestic populations.
The rich nations including the US do this in the name of free trade to keep open foreign markets for the farmers in the rich nations.
The horrible irony or contradiction is that vast majorities of the people who need food in developing nations cannot afford imported food from rich nations and cannot get food from poor farmers in their own countries.
This demand from the US and other rich nations is a moral abomination and a foolish foreign policy maneuver.
Do we not remember that because of NAFTA the Mexican government took away the subsidies on the growing of corn and beans, further impoverishing the farmers and campesinos and starving the workers in the cities, and spiking emigration from Mexico to avoid starvation? Was that not evil enough?
Workers, unions, poor people, and activists need to come together and take a stand for global justice. We need global solidarity to disrupt the Elite domination that furthers misery, because of capitalism run amok in service of “sacred profits.”
Current trade deals in both the Trans Pacific Partnership and the World Trade Organization only benefit the Elites, expand the the gulf between the rich and the rest of us, and should make us all shiver at the growing evil corporatization of all aspects of our lives.
Photo of: WTO protests in Seattle, November 30, 1999. Pepper spray is applied to the crowd.
Photo source: Steve Kaiser on Flickr via Creative Commons License: Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)