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CJ Buchmann's List: In Advocacy Paper

Foreign Policy In Focus | Moratorium on Free Trade Agreements

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on 2008-03-12
- It is not surprising that Democrats have been unable to come up with an alternative trade policy. As the most experienced critics of the current model freely admit, no one is prepared to offer such an overarching plan. However, elements have been identified that can make trade more fair and sustainable. Some of them have been incorporated into the Democrats’ proposal—sort of.
- On labor, the outline presented to the public calls to “enforce basic international labor standards.” It does not specifically refer to the International Labor Organization’s eight core human rights conventions, which cover child labor, forced labor, discrimination, and freedom of association. Of course, there’s a problem in requiring trade partners to adhere to ILO standards. The United States itself has one of the worst ratification records in the world. Of the eight, it has only ratified two.
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- - The Democrats’ proposal also refers to using the “same dispute settlement” mechanisms. These mechanisms are practically unenforceable. Under the labor side agreement of NAFTA, the number of labor violations sanctioned in thirteen years comes to a grand total of zero. Needless, to say, this is not because there have been no trade-related labor rights violations in the United States, Canada, or Mexico since 1994.
  - The proposal also calls for free trade agreements that would “re-establish a fair balance between promoting access to medicines and protecting pharmaceutical innovation” and require adherence to multilateral environmental agreements, among other changes in the current model. All these intentions are laudable but fail to deal with the root cause of the problem—the FTA model itself.
  - Even in Colombia, a staunch U.S. ally in Latin America, opposition to the FTA has run high. Over 2,000 labor activists have been assassinated in the country since 1990, and the agreement adds no effective protections while at the same time encouraging further gouging into workers’ rights. A Colombian health negotiator also resigned in protest, this time due to U.S. insistence on restrictive pharmaceutical patents that would affect access to medicines.
  - Indeed, many of the most controversial provisions of the FTAs, including the imposition of supra-national investment guarantees and intellectual property exclusivity, have little to do with trade.
  - Moreover, existing trade agreements, including the General System of Preferences (GSP), the Andean Pact Trade and Drug Enforcement Agreement (APTDEA), and the Caribbean Basin Initiative, carry less baggage than the FTAs and have already built strong trading relations between nations.
An interview with Bishop Juan Alberto Cardona, Methodist Church of Colombia | Abolissons La Pauvreté

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on 2008-03-12
- An interview with Bishop Juan Alberto Cardona, Methodist Church of Colombia
- Education is another big issue. There is very little education in rural areas and virtually no way to acquire skills to improve their agricultural practices and so the poor can't compete with larger farmers who know the most modern methods, and have the best equipment. To export your products overseas, and earn money this way, the products have to be of very good quality -- and the smaller and poorer farmers don't have the knowledge or the machinery to produce at this level of quality standards. So any trade deal that is to reduce poverty has to think about how to make sure the poor can participate and get up to the high levels of quality and international standards.
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- - These small farmers sell their products in markets alongside big landlords, who produce in large quantities and have much lower costs of production. The large landlords then push the small ones out of business. There are no government programs for small farmers in Colombia. And there's clearly little concern about them in many parts of the country.
  - What is most important for a small-scale farmer is his land. If you lose your land after a natural resource company comes in and takes it, the person is destroyed morally, psychologically, and the fabric of the family is changed. The family is then used for cheap labour by the corporation or large landowner. The quality of life goes down, because the farmer can't exploit his land for himself and the needs of his family, and survival becomes dependent on the cash economy -- which can be fragile. The benefit for the economy is minimal, because the workers earn little, don't learn much, and their standard of living goes down.
  - The government uses an agreement like this one with Canada as an umbrella. They say "we're getting results" -- but behind that they're standing on the backs of the poor. It benefits the corporations in Canada, the rich in Colombia, but it ignores the poor.
Family Farms -- Introduction

www.worldhungeryear.org/...ria_600.asp - Preview

family farm on 2008-03-10
- Faced with these crises, a quiet revolution has begun in which consumers and farmers "are forging links to promote smaller-scale, more diversified, and ecologically sound agriculture."1 Increasing numbers of consumers are buying food from local markets and farm stands. The U.S. independent family farm, the backbone of American democracy in Thomas Jefferson's agrarian vision, is being rediscovered in all its benefits for the production of healthful food, self-reliant communities, and environmental conservation.
- On the international level, the global campaign for food sovereignty asks the critical question: Who is in control of our seeds, food, land, water, and other basic life-sustaining resources? The campaign seeks to restore control from the World Trade Organization, multinational corporations, and international financial institutions back to individual nations/tribes/peoples, and ultimately to those who produce the food and those who eat it. The Via Campesina peasant movement is at the forefront of this campaign at the global level, and here in the US, the National Family Farm Coalition has been leading the food sovereignty movement, along with partners such as Grassroots International, Food First, WHY, and others.
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- - The Benefits Of Family Farms
  - Agricultural policy in the
    U.S. has promoted a “get big or get out” policy that changed a system designed to prevent overproduction into one that encouraged it. Basic agricultural commodities -- such as corn, wheat, and soybeans – flooded the market, and prices plummeted.
  - Agri-"culture,” based on care for the land, for farm animals, and for healthy food has been radically
    changed. Today the farmer is just one factor in a "giant food production, manufacturing, and delivery system
    called 'agribusiness'."5 Corporations such as ConAgra, Cargill, ADM, and Monsanto seek to reduce the number of farmers and expand the size of farms and the scope of agricultural markets.
CQ Researcher Online - Entire Report

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on 2008-03-10
- Supporters say subsidies help keep farmers solvent when crops fail or prices plummet. Critics contend subsidies overwhelmingly go to large agricultural operations, interfere with the free market and encourage farmers to overproduce subsidized crops.
- Many smaller farms are struggling to stay afloat in the face of low commodity prices, ever-increasing costs for equipment and fertilizer and steep competition from large farming operations.
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- - When policymakers talk about helping farmers, they have people like Williams in mind — relatively small- to medium-size planters trying to keep up the family business. But critics say the government's farm policies — which direct the bulk of subsidies to large-scale grain and cotton growers who farm 1,000 or more acres — may actually be tipping the scales toward corporate farming operations that are driving small- and medium-sized farmers off their land.
  - Moreover, rural communities are losing population, as young people seek better economic opportunities in the cities — a situation some say is exacerbated by government subsidies, which tend to go to large agribusiness concerns, discouraging diversification of the rural economy. Studies have shown that two-thirds of subsidies go to just 10 percent of the recipients — mainly large operations.
  - In fact, 60 percent of U.S. farmers don't get any direct assistance from the government. Most of the fresh produce in supermarkets is grown without subsidies, and livestock producers are ineligible for most government payments.
  - Leonard is typical of a growing number of small farmers — generally those owning no more than about 500 acres — who can no longer count on eking out a living every year from the land. About half of the nation's 2 million farmers now supplement their income with off-farm jobs, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. Other small farmers survive by producing niche products, such as organic produce, or by supplying their goods directly to farmers' markets or restaurants.
  - Some analysts say small farms' profit margins these days are too narrow to survive years of bad weather or low commodity prices. U.S. farmers face especially fierce competition now that globalization is forcing them to compete with overseas farmers, some of whom have lower production costs and fewer restrictions on pesticide use. Others, however, put much of the blame on government programs. They say that because large farms — those larger than 1,000 acres — receive the lion's share of government subsidies, they can outbid their smaller neighbors when it comes to buying land.
  - But rural-development advocates say the loss of family farms is depopulating many rural areas, destroying small-town economies and fostering the growth of “factory farms” that generate — in the case of livestock raising — enormous amounts of manure and environmental pollution.
bsf declaration 4-3-07-1.pdf - By Nitro PDF Software

www.pdfdownload.org/...pdf2html.php - Preview

on 2008-03-12
- This dumping of agricultural commodities seriously undercuts the ability of small farmers and
  peasants in developing countries to sell their goods at fair prices in their own domestic
  markets.
- We pledge our support for alternative agriculture and trade policies that will provide
  sustainable livelihoods for farmers in the United States and around the globe, by helping to
  ensure that global food corporations pay family farmers a fair price for their products in the
  marketplace and promote socially and environmentally sustainable farming.
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- - Building Sustainable Futures for Farmers Globally campaign
    
    advocates a broad platform to address the overproduction and low prices that are harming
    small farmers in the U.S. and abroad

The Ecologist - Archive Detail

www.theecologist.org/archive_detail.asp - Preview

on 2008-03-12

When you buy your bunch of cut flowers, bare in mind that workers on
the flower farms earn around $2 a day. Slave wages aside,
investigations by the International Labour Rights Fund (ILRF) have
uncovered frequent and serious labour rights abuses on flower farms
across the world.
In Kenya 90 per cent of female workers have been raped by their supervisors.

ScienceDirect - Women's Studies International Forum : Working with flowers in Colombia: The ‘lucky chance’?

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on 2008-03-10

Production in Colombia started with small family businesses in the 1960s, promoted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank as a development and diversification strategy for Southern countries (Ortiz, 2000). The sector experienced rapid growth in the 1980s, supported by state tax, credits and tariff benefits, and saw widening employment opportunities, especially for women. In the third stage, from the end of the 1990s the sector entered a period of concentration in the hands of fewer owners, including a multinational corporation, Dole, bought almost the 25% of the cut flower production infrastructure. Many small companies closed, and there were employment layoffs.
Studies of the sector by academics and NGOs over some 20 years have shown that the industry working standards have not changed substantially, and have even declined, and that violations of the right to freedom of association are widespread in ‘the most dangerous place in the world to be a trade union activist' (ICFTU, 2002: p. 1). Almost 4000 trade unionists from various sectors have been murdered since 1986 (ICLR, 2004: pp.1–2). Work intensification, increasing competition among workers, subcontracting labour and short contracts make labour organisation difficult ([Colectivo Bernardo Adam, 1999] and [Ortiz, 2000], p.5; [ILRF, 2003] and [Oxfam, 2002]: p.85; Untraflores, 2005). Nevertheless cut flower workers formed an independent national trade union of flower workers, UNTRAFLORES, in spite of harassment and dismissal of union members ([ILRF, 2003] and [Untraflores, 2005]).
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- The work is dangerous, with exposure to pesticides and other chemicals that are used intensively, sometimes without proper health and safety measures, ([Ortiz, 2000], [Tenenbaum, 2002] and [Oxfam, 2002]: 85; ILRF, 2003). Wages are inadequate: by Colombian law cut-flower workers are entitled to earn the national minimum wage, but this meets only 45% of a family's basic needs (Oxfam, 2004: p.78). Women workers are usually hired by sub-contractors on a daily basis, are paid less than contract workers, and denied health insurance and transport benefits.²

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CJ Buchmann

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This is the list of all sources that are included in my advocacy paper

Updated on 2008-03-12
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CJ Buchmann's List: In Advocacy Paper

Foreign Policy In Focus | Moratorium on Free Trade Agreements

An interview with Bishop Juan Alberto Cardona, Methodist Church of Colombia | Abolissons La Pauvreté

Family Farms -- Introduction

CQ Researcher Online - Entire Report

bsf declaration 4-3-07-1.pdf - By Nitro PDF Software

The Ecologist - Archive Detail

ScienceDirect - Women's Studies International Forum : Working with flowers in Colombia: The ‘lucky chance’?

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