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Contributions from
the Column
Studies and reports
Dollar decline threatens emerging economies
Access to water – a human right
Rural women: Resistance to free trade
Churches: Making development aid more efficient
05/2005 |
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[ Rural women ]
Resistance to free trade
Belinda Formanes is familiar with the consequences of economic liberalisation. She works for an organisation in the Philippines which promotes land reform and rural development. Formanes bemoans the fact that structural adjustment was imposed on her country 25 years ago, whereupon the government withdrew all rice subsidies. Production is cheaper in neighbouring countries and today the Philippines imports rice. As a result, self-sufficiency is being diminished, and poverty in rural areas is on the rise. As Formanes reported at the international Rural Women’s Congress held in Stuttgart in early April, 70 per cent of the poor Filipinos currently live in rural areas, and three quarters of them are rice farmers.
Rural women from other countries also demand that staple foods not be treated like insurances or cars. They want agricultural products to be taken out of World Trade Organisation negotiations. The Australian Ambassador to Germany, Pamela Fayle, does not share this view. According to her, the problems of today’s small farm agriculture cannot be put down to trade liberalisation because, internationally, trade has not been liberalised yet. She defends the principle of free trade: “Many farmers will benefit from removing the trade barriers which restrict the import of agricultural products in industrial nations.”
Fayle’s view did not prevail at the Stuttgart Congress. About three dozen rural women from 15 countries insisted on changing multilateral policy in order to protect national markets and production methods, and thereby safeguard the food sovereignty of the people. Trade liberalisation, as the World Trade Organisation is striving for, would favour agricultural industries and threaten small-holder farmers who cannot keep up with the competition.
According to Christoph Kohlmeyer of the German Development Ministry, support for small-holder farming is not a luxury. Rather he sees it as essential for the survival of many people suffering from poverty. Danuta Sacher, a campaign coordinator with the Protestant aid agency Bread for the World, said that a change in perspective is needed. “Small-holder agriculture forms a basis of society. If the problems from which it suffers are not solved, then society as a whole is failed”. She stresses that the policy debate on agriculture should also consider economic, social and cultural human rights, including right to food and the right to water.
The conference and a tour of various German farms were organised by Bread for the World, the Rural Women’s Association (Landfrauenverband) of Württemberg-Baden, the ecological farmers’ association Arbeitsgemeinschaft bäuerliche Landwirtschaft and Via Campesina, the international farmers’ organisation. Christl Hess of the Landfrauenverband concluded that the Congress had made an important contribution to networking. “It is important to recognise that global trends are damaging to all small-scale farmers.”
Carolin Callenius and Bettina Lutterbeck
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