ForumGarden

Hallelujah. A small step back from the brink of wage slavery's finally been taken. Commodity market traders have lost just a lick of their power to impoverish a couple of billion rural workers.The main stumbling block was farm import rules, which allow countries to protect poor farmers by imposing a tariff on certain goods in the event of a drop in prices or a surge in imports.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7531099.stm

Sure, though another way of looking at it is that the fiction that its always the cynical West that ruins everything for the happy sun farmers of the developing world has been exposed, this was very much India's decision (because of their own farming lobby) backed by China, of course its the poor of these nations that will lose out most. Anyway, it will revert to bilateralism and the idea of a global framework for trade will be buried for several years. This is probably a good thing for the G8 anyway, as it allows them to bolster what little is left of their economic authority.

Galbally;935159 wrote: Sure, though another way of looking at it is that the fiction that its always the cynical West that ruins everything for the happy sun farmers of the developing world has been exposed, this was very much India's decision (because of their own farming lobby) backed by China, of course its the poor of these nations that will lose out most.Why will it be the poor of these nations that will lose out most? The rural farmers who've risen above subsistence farming are for ever having their economic basis torn from them by floods of cheap dumping undercutting their local market price, or by cynical Western "charities" bringing in grain boats to impoverish a region by establishing dependency. They're for ever having their economic basis wrecked by commodity markets collapsing the price of their product and effectively stealing what they grow at below cost. I'm not even going near the pressure tactics of Monsanto to accept their sterile hybrids year after year which only grow if you pay buckets of cash for the patented trigger factors. The collapse of this round of trade talks does nothing about Monsanto's death-engineering but it allows national intervention in the first two cases.

spot;935174 wrote: Why will it be the poor of these nations that will lose out most? The rural farmers who've risen above subsistence farming are for ever having their economic basis torn from them by floods of cheap dumping undercutting their local market price, or by cynical Western "charities" bringing in grain boats to impoverish a region by establishing dependency. They're for ever having their economic basis wrecked by commodity markets collapsing the price of their product and effectively stealing what they grow at below cost. I'm not even going near the pressure tactics of Monsanto to accept their sterile hybrids year after year which only grow if you pay buckets of cash for the patented trigger factors. The collapse of this round of trade talks does nothing about Monsanto's death-engineering but it allows national intervention in the first two cases.


I'm not for one moment suggesting that poor farmers in the third world have recieved fair deals in the past. But the idea that they should automatically expect fair deals suggests that somehow there is an authority in the world capable of enforcing moral arguments about why everyone should join in the political dispensation afforded to citizens of Western countries. Obviously that is not the case, and therefore thats why these issues have attempted to be solved by some parties by lumping them in with general trade agreements, (which are not the same as moral politcal philosophies, its just trade, though trade does bring prosperity). I am not suggesting that the Indians should not look after there own, of course they should, and so should everyone else, though there should be a general realization that trade in general helps everyone, as long as the trading structure is fair and relatively unmotivated by either politics, ethics, or particularist viewpoints about what is desirable.