Articles by Dr. Shiva

FAILURE OF W.T.O. DOES NOT MEAN END OF "FREE TRADE": THE FTA ROUTE TO RETAIL MONOPOLIES

by Dr. Vandana Shiva

WTO was bad. It has caused much harm over the past decade, including forcing small farmers off the land, or into debt and suicide. Now that WTO has been used to allow corporations to enter local and domestic economies, it can be allowed to go into intensive care.  

The collapse of W.T.O. talks could be intentional to make way for bilaterals for “free trade”, which increase and accelerate the market access for corporations of the North to markets of the South.   This is clearly what is happening in the food and retail sector.  

After the Hong Kong Ministerial, the Doha round has not made any progress.  This has given the U.S. and Europe opportunity to negotiate bilaterally with India, and get better market access deals than they can multilaterally.  

The U.S. India Agriculture Agreement has helped U.S. corporations get increased market access to India In fact corporations such as Monsanto, Con Agra, and Walmart sit on the board of the bilateral agreement.  

Since the agreement was made, the push for deregulation of biotechnology has increased.  The dismantling of Biosafety has so far been prevented because of Public Interest Litigation filed by citizens groups in the Supreme Court of India.  

The agreement has also led to increased imports of wheat, at higher prices and lower standards even though India is producing 73 million tones of wheat at lower prices.  

And Walmart which has been seeking direct entry through Foreign Direct Investment in retail has, for the time being, settled for a partnership with Bharti, the telecommunication company.  

The failure of the recent W.T.O. talks of the Quad – U.S., Europe, Brazil and India is now being used by Europe to get access to India's huge retail market which employs more than 40 million to provide for the basic needs of more than a billion.  

On June 28-29, 2007 India and EU will be holding formal talks on for trade in goods, services and investment.  India's retail sector is the top priority for Europe.  

As the Financial Express reports “European retail majors like TESCO and Carrefour may still find a way out for three plans, with New Delhi embarking on an ambitious broad-based bilateral trade and investment agreement with the European Union.”  (Arun S “Trade Talks hold out hope for TESCO, Financial Express, 28 Jun 07).  

Agriculture Commissioner, Mariann Fischer Boel, at a meeting with European Agricultural Trade Experts, said:  

“The Indian middle class is hungry for exciting food and drink experiences that go beyond Indian cuisine.  And this class is growing at the rate of 35 million people per year, or in other words, by the population of a medium-sized European country.”

She also said that when so many foreign companies are getting into strong position to increase their sales in India, the European food-processing firms would also “need a piece of the action.”

Food retail in India has clearly became an important part of global trade wars.  But this is about more than trade.  For the people of India it is about culture and ecology, about employment and food security.  

With Walmart and TESCO targeting the Indian middle class, a war around food culture is being unleashed.  The Indian fresh food culture must be made to look inferior to make the packaged and processed food on supermarket shelves look superior.  And this cultural war over food also uses pseudo science as a weapon. Food safety and pseudo hygiene standards are an example of instruments based on pseudo science being used to shut down street foods and small scale processing. While India will focus on EU's non-tariff trade barriers like labeling norms and sanitary and phyto-sanitary requirements in the free trade negotiations which are to be completed by the end of 2008, domestically India has already changed its own Food Safety lens through the Food Safety and Standards Act 2006 to mimic EU laws on pseudo-hygiene, which reduces safety to the size of cucumber and the ownership of a refrigerator. When the Food Safety laws were passed, the Food Minister openly stated that this would help supermarket sales grow by 30%.  Street food vendors in Delhi have already been banned even though study after study has shown that hot street foods are safe.  The small cold press “ghanis” were banned in 1998 to facilitate GMO soya oil.  

At a time when movements like Slow Food are growing worldwide to promote and protect local food cultures and economies, the Indian elite and middle classes are rushing, headlong into an industrial food culture. At a time when the west is recognizing that the Walmart – TESCO model degrades food, culture and employment, and farmers markets are growing everywhere, India with the largest and richest “bazaar” culture in the world is being manipulated by corporations and their friends in the governments of the U.S., E.U. and India to become part of the “clone” culture of supermarket chains that Andrew Simms describes so well in his “Tescopoly”.  

He has called supermarket chains an invasive species (like Lantana and Parthenium)  which destroy local ecosystems and local cultures.   

Just as we need to protect ourselves from invasive species to protect our biological diversity, we need to protect our food cultures and livelihoods from the invasion of supermarket chains.  “Free trade” for Walmart and TESCO is the end of freedom for farmers, hawkers and vendors who constitute a population of more than 800 million in India. W.T.O. might be dying, but corporate hijack of our livelihoods in food and farming is more intensive than ever. And governments have become instruments and facilitators in the promotion of corporate farming and corporate retail.  

Citizens must take the lead in shaping societies that protect the earth, give work to all hands and enrich our communities and societies.  Our slogan “Our world is not for sale” must move to every farm and every street in every society. Our freedoms and our very lives are at stake.