By Eugene Matos De Lara and Amelia Baxter.
Agricultural liberalization can have nefarious effects on the poorest countries. More powerful states use liberalization processes to gain concessions from weaker states without lowering their own domestic protections. Agricultural trade in some developing countries should be strongly regulated and in turn, diminish neoliberal market trends within these states because of its negative effects on local producers. The negative effects can be dismantled by over viewing its causality by domestic subsidies and the market flooding.
The US provides 56% of worldwide food aid with Haiti as its biggest client. However, the US also retracts what it offers with farm subsidies. This initiative is a national legal project that directs the benefits towards US farmers by giving them ownership of a food aid monopoly. The “Food for Peace” program costs US taxpayers 1.5 billion in 2012 alone. The total amount of agricultural subsidies per year averages to 300 billion US. Quality standard control in developed countries tends to be significantly higher than the developing counties, sometimes barring the possibilities for mutual trade. Additionally, subsidies allow American agricultural producers to export and sell in developing states at a competitive or sometimes cheaper price than its equivalent found domestically. These reflect a double standard that hinders a developing country’s full potential. The effects of these policies on Haiti have lead to a market flood of US grown products.
In 2011, US exports to Haiti totalled $326 million and drove former President Bill Clinton to state that these neoliberal market actions “may have been good for some farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked for Haiti, it was a mistake”. The distributional and collateral effect on the poor has witnessed the disappearance of Haitian rice and with it, Haitian food sovereignty. Haiti had self-sustained food security up until the 1980s, supported predominantly by its rice production. Since the 1990s, Miami Rice aid and trade imports have “outpaced” the domestic production. In 2000, US rice imports totalled 219,590 metric tons (t), when domestic production was 130,000t, in contrast to 1985 when local production amounted to 163,296t and US imports were weighed at 7,337t. This empirical evidence demonstrates two things. One is the substantial decrease of agricultural production in Haiti. Two, the drastic decrease of the price of rice and the apparition of an additional 178,957t per year demonstrate that the consumption of rice in Haiti has changed to the extent that it outpaces the Haitian agro-productive force of rice in any year. Consequently, by relying more on American prices and quantity, food sovereignty in Haiti is almost nonexistent.
In summary, not all developing countries benefit from agricultural liberalization. “Few developing countries find themselves in a position to compete internationally in liberalized agricultural markets most notably, Brazil, Argentina, China, and those of the former Soviet Union –have demonstrated the competitiveness to take advantage of such market openings. The smallest-scale farmers are likely to benefit the least, as large-scale industrialised producers capture most growth in export markets”.
As an alternative, food sovereignty stipulated by Kim Burnett professor at the University of Ottawa, offers a more direct solution than agricultural liberalization in the food crisis by identifying the potential strength of local market and small scale producers socially, economically and on the global macroeconomic scale. Food sovereignty is a right to “healthy and culturally appropriated food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods” ( K.Burnett & S.Murphy, 2014).
This idea offers a counter proposal to today’s neo-liberal macroeconomic trend. Food sovereignty has unraveled many initiatives aiming to increase smallholder representation, their market power, awareness of organics, and indigenous cultures in agriculture. In hindsight, it is safe to state that food sovereignty carries the perspective of food producers in most developing states while liberalization does not.
