Here's something on the WTO now up at Comment is Free.

When the World Trade Organisation talks collapsed in Seattle in 1999, there were parties in the streets, and a wailing and renting of clothes in the corridors of power. The failure of the Doha round of WTO talks in Geneva this week has drawn a more muted reaction from both its boosters and critics. In Seattle, it was possible to tell a story in which the voices of people on the streets mattered, and in which the disenfranchised had scored a victory against an unaccountable front company for international capital. This week's failure had less to do with global justice, and much more to do with the growing pains of international capitalism. ... read more »

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Posted on 30 July, 2008 - 18:41

When advocates of free trade policies pick a developing country poster-child, they often go for Brazil and Argentina. Which is why a new report, below, is especially useful in undermining the myths around agricultural trade liberalisation. The most important observation:

South America's soybean industries are winners from global trade liberalization, but few of the benefits go to rural communities. Based on high-input, industrialized monoculture farming, employment and wages have both declined despite dramatic increases in production.

Now read on... ... read more »

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Posted on 18 July, 2008 - 21:41

Couple of articles at odds with one another on the prognosis for free trade, given the current political climate, and the food crisis. The Washington Post has editorialised about why "an obscure Frenchman" - Pascal Lamy, current head of the World Trade Organization - "might be able to save the world. The only question is when he should do it."

Away from the free-trade leg-humping comes a more sober article from Bloomberg on the fading enthusiasm for free trade. ... read more »

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Posted on 17 June, 2008 - 05:25

The Financial Times is doing what it usually does - providing concise and honest insight into how the elite bosses think, this time around genetically modified crops. The recent op-ed by John Gapper follows a logic that I've been bumping into increasingly.

1. We need to increase food production to feed the world.
2. Yield-increasing science has worked before.
3. The nay-sayers want to reduce output through organic agriculture.
4. Monsanto, on the other hand, is investing in science.
5. Therefore we ought to embrace GM technology to fight the food crisis.

Almost everything about this argument is wrong. ... read more »

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Posted on 13 June, 2008 - 17:36

My friend Patrick Wilkinson has put together a fine video about the upcoming spraying of large parts of California in the ongoing war on the Light Brown Apple Moth (LBAM, pronounced el-bam).

As Patrick's film suggests, there'd better be something mighty scary about this moth to warrant monthly aerial spraying over most of Northern California over the next five years.

So what's the danger? Will the moth summon forth the apocalypse? No. Is it the harbinger of some strange Africanized disease? Not even. Will it ravage California's agriculture? Kinda. But not actually by eating anything or laying anything or causing anything to be damaged.

The reason LBAM is a menace is, er, NAFTA. ... read more »

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Posted on 31 May, 2008 - 04:03

In case you hadn't heard (and I just found out), it's Debt Week from October 14-21. The call to action, posted below, is available in altogether more pleasing PDF format here. ... read more »

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Posted on 16 October, 2007 - 18:09

Here's a tremendously thoughtful article about the world's richest man. No, not Bill Gates. Carlos Slim, the Mexican telecoms magnate. His irresistible rise is, to quote the author, Louis Nevaer, "the story of how NAFTA’s limitations distort income distribution in both Mexico and the United States."

The article comes from a news source which I'm not familiar with, but which I'm pleased to have stumbled upon. New American Media is an outlet for 'ethnic media', an unfortunate term for writing by people of colour. On the site, you'll find stories that aren't making it to CNN, precisely because they're written without the chauvinism and bully boy patriotism that seems to be the sine qua non of mainstream US media. Check out, for instance, American guns fueling violence in Mexico. And here's the article on Carlos Slim: ... read more »

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Posted on 28 July, 2007 - 17:23

My good friend and co-editor Peter Rosset recently responded to this article in the New York Times. His letter wasn't published, but deserves to be read. So here it is:

Dear Sirs:

The recent upward spiral of prices for corn tortillas, the basic staple of the Mexican population, has garnered a lot of international media attention ("Thousands in Mexico City Protest Rising Food Prices," NY Times, February 1, 2007).

Sadly, most stories have missed the point. ... read more »

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Posted on 9 February, 2007 - 21:03

A posting at the Monthly Review Zine tells of the new NAFTA supercorridor. If you've not heard of it, that's partly the point. Surreptitiously, construction has begun on the proposed route, which will link the port of Lazaro Cardenas in Mexico to Duluth at the US Canada border on Lake Superior (download map from MR).

In a bilious op-ed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a Senior Fellow at the US Business and Industry Council points out that the effect will be to relegate Mexico into a trans-shipment point for Asian imports into the US. ... read more »

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Posted on 5 December, 2006 - 08:26

In the mid-1980s, family farmers across America were in the fight of their lives. Prices had dropped below the cost of production. Family farmers were told they were inefficient and they had to either get big or get out. Deeply flawed national and international policies were the root cause of the crisis. A galvanizing effort to save the family farm helped spawn the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP). In 1986, IATP began documenting the underlying causes of America's rural crisis and proposing policies that would benefit farmers, consumers, rural communities and the environment. ... read more »

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Posted on 4 December, 2006 - 08:26