HIGH
TIMES MAGAZINE (MARCH 2004)
SOCIAL JUSTICE REPORT
FARM BLADE
Does the WTO kill farmers? Lee Lee said yes.
BY DAVID BIENENSTOCK
Lee Kyung-hae traveled halfway across the globe, to Cancún,
Mexico, with a simple message for the World Trade Organization.
The 57-year-old South Korean farmer perched atop the security
fence surrounding the group’s September 2003 negotiations
and unfurled a banner that read, The WTO Kills Farmers.
Then he plunged a Swiss Army knife directly into his own heart.
Within hours, the longtime activist was dead.
Lee's bloody sacrifice was the final act in a personal drama
of defiance that included over 30 hunger strikes. In 1993,
he starved himself in front of the Korean parliament to protest
falling rice prices. Prior to that, in 1990, he attempted
to disembowel himself outside the WTO office in Geneva, slicing
into his guts with a dull blade in opposition to an agreement
that would open Korea to rice imports for the first time.
This was five years before the WTO was officially established,
and nearly a decade before multinational trade agreements
began receiving major scrutiny from a rising global protest
movement.
At the time, Lee was attempting to revitalize his country's
domestic food production with Seoul Farm, an 80-acre agricultural
experiment five years in the making. Working on the isolated,
mountainous land where he was born, the university-educated
Lee brought modern methods and technology to the small town
of Jangsu in 1974, and with help from his wife and daughters
built a working farm that also served as a teaching college.
Students lived and toiled on Seoul Farm, learning techniques
intended to propel Korea's struggling farmers into the next
century. In 1988, the project earned Lee a United Nations
award for rural leadership. But as the WTO fought successfully
to open Korea's market to increasing agricultural imports,
prices dropped, spelling disaster for the nation's poor farmers.
Four years ago, Lee lost Seoul Farm in a foreclosure sale.
Unable to compete with giant agribusiness corporations in
the developed world, rural farmers like Lee have seen their
children flee to take manufacturing jobs in the city. According
to Reuters, the population of Jangsu has dropped by 50 percent
since 1984. South Korea is now the fourth largest market for
US agricultural exports.
“Human beings are in an endangered situation,”
Lee wrote in a statement that he distributed just before his
death in Cancún. “Uncontrolled multinational
corporations [and] a small number of big WTO official members
are leading an undesirable globalization of inhumane, environmentally
degrading, farmer-killing, and undemocratic policies.”
The chief complaint against the WTO from peasant farmers worldwide:
the $1 billion per day in subsidies spent to protect large-scale
agriculture production in the United States, Europe, and Japan.
Farmers in poor and developing countries claim the resulting
drop in prices leaves them unable to compete in the world
market, either by exporting their own products or selling
domestically against cheap imports. Organizations including
the WTO and International Monetary Fund have been integral
in forcing poor nations to reduce their subsidies and tariffs
through trade agreements and debt reduction plans, while little
has been done to level the playing field by reducing subsidies
on the other side. Additionally, many environmentalists decry
the current system, pointing to the wasted resources used
to transport food around the world rather than focusing on
producing and consuming locally.
Trade ministers for the WTO, established in Geneva in 1995,
argue that the complexities of globalization make progress
slow and difficult, and that deep disparities between nations
cannot be erased overnight. They promote free trade as a rising
tide that will lift all ships. Costs are cut when companies
access lower-wage workers and lower-cost materials in the
global marketplace. Make a widget in China, assemble it in
Malaysia, and the increased efficiency makes a better world
possible. According to the WTO Website:
Economists estimate that cutting trade barriers in agriculture,
manufacturing, and services by one-third would boost the world
economy by $613 billion—equivalent to adding an
economy the size of Canada to the world economy. The fact
that there is additional income means that resources are available
for governments to redistribute.
According to the WTO, their trading system also cuts the cost
of living, reduces political corruption, encourages good government,
and can even create a global marketplace so interdependent
that war will end among nations.
Crudely put, sales-people are usually reluctant to fight
their customers. In other words, if trade flows smoothly and
both sides enjoy a healthy commercial relationship, political
conflict is less likely.
Who can argue with that? One unlikely new recruit to the anti-WTO
bandwagon may be George W. Bush. In March of 2002, the US
President imposed huge tariffs of up to 30% on imported steel.
Designed to appease voters in steel-producing swing states
like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, the decision flew
in the face of Bush’s avowed free-trade fundamentalism.
The tariffs were also declared illegal under international
rules by the WTO, spurring a counterattack from the European
Union, including a threat of retaliatory tariffs targeted
to hurt Bush in similar swing states (i.e. Florida orange
juice).
Ultimately, Bush backed down, repealing the tariffs less than
two years after they took effect. Still, the president remains
a far cry from the stereotypical WTO protestor, first burned
into the public consciousness during “The Battle in
Seattle” of 1999. Millions watched that confrontation
on television, which featured $3 million dollars in property
damage and over 400 arrests as militant anti-WTO forces broke
from the main ranks of protestors, attempting to shut the
group’s meeting down through coordinated street action.
And so, the modern social justice movement was born, much
like the world, from chaos.
Five years later, the notorious black bloc, unhinged, throw-a-brick
anarchists still steal the scene, but they remain merely a
vocal fringe. Larger demonstrations and organizations are
dominated by completely hinged folks with deep concerns about
the WTO’s effect on organized labor, the environment,
public education, affordable health care, the world’s
poor, and the sovereignty of nations in the face of corporate
colonialism.
Basically, the WTO’s discontents come in two flavors:
those who oppose free trade and those with a vision of “fair
trade.” Both camps dismiss the current incarnation as
a “race to the bottom,” where instead of a rising
tide, free trade has created a lowest common denominator.
Developing countries, desperate for foreign investment, are
pitted against each other in a battle to impress corporate
overlords. Fallout: lower wages; less money spent on health
care and education; elimination of tariffs; subsidies, and
other protectionist measures; deterioration of organized labor
and working conditions; and reduction of environmental standards.
Recent history at the WTO has been a mix of reform and disappointment.
For example, there was great hope that the latest round of
WTO negotiations in Cancún would significantly address
farm subsidies, the issue which so consumed Lee Kyung-hae,
but instead the meetings collapsed amid a bitter stalemate,
with nations from the developing world banding together as
the so-called Group of 21 to reject overtures from the industrialized
nations as insufficient. Singapore Trade and Industry Minister
George Yeo, who was chairman of the hotly contested farm trade
talks in Mexico, described the breakdown as a self-inflicted
wound for developing nations, while US Trade Representative
Robert Zoellick noted that “some countries will now
need to decide whether they want to make a point, or whether
they want to make progress.”
The chair of the G21, however, echoed the belief of the group's
member nations and supporters around the world, declaring
that the showdown in Cancún was a painful step in a
long journey to equality. “The fight for social justice
is not only outside of the WTO on the street,” said
Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim, “but also with
us, inside the WTO.”
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