Carmen Gonzalez, an associate law professor with the Seattle University Law School, has said that far from promoting free trade, the agreement on agriculture at the World Trade Organization (WTO) serves only to institutionalise inequality between developed countries like the United States and developing countries like Jamaica.

The agreement came out of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade Negotiations (1986-1994) and addresses agriculture trade and production.
Among other things, it requires that countries eliminate non-tariff barriers, convert them to tariffs and then reduce them over time.

According to Gonzalez, it is an agreement that has also allowed developed countries like the US and those of the European Union to engage in protectionism while developing countries of the Caribbean and Latin America have to do away with subsidies and tariffs that have hitherto protected their own smaller agriculture sectors.

"The United States and the European Union were able to utilise certain ambiguities in the agreement to create tariff barriers that in many instances were greater than before the agreement came into place. Developing countries didn't have this option... Most of them had already eliminated their non-tariff barriers under the direction of the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the World Bank (during their debt crisis of the 1980s)," Gonzalez said Saturday.

Gonzalez was addressing the international law conference of the American/Caribbean Law Initiative (ACLI) at the Jamaica Grande Hotel in Ocho Rios. The conference was the first of its kind put on by the ACLI and attracted participants from the United States and the Caribbean.

Gonzalez, a graduate of Yale University and the Harvard Law School, lectures and writes on the relationship between environmental law and the international trade regime. Her articles have appeared in publications like the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law and the Denver University Law Review.

"The agreement," she said Saturday, "required the reduction of those subsidies that were deemed to be most trade-distorting, such as paying farmers extra if they produced more. And, it allowed certain other types of subsidies that were deemed not so trade-distorting - giving farmers direct money, but not tied to production.

"So the US just shifted the money into the type of agreements that were permitted. In other words, what the agreement winds up doing in practice is to institutionalise the inequities in the global trading system - open markets for the poor, protectionism for the wealthy."

It is a reality, she argues, that allows American farmers to enjoy the benefits of the 2002 Farm Bill that provides them with over US$180 billion in agricultural subsidies over the next 10 years.

"It means that the United States and the European Union are dumping agriculture products on world markets at below the cost of production and undercutting farmers in the developing world. For example, the United States exports wheat at 46 per cent below the cost of production; corn, at 20 per cent below the cost of production. Poor farmers in the developing world cannot complete with subsidised agro-business in the United States," said Gonzalez, who was recently selected as one of the four US Supreme Court fellows for 2004-2005.

"In Mexico, the dumping of United States subsidised corn has threatened the livelihoods of 2.5 million corn producers. In Jamaica, the European Union's dumping of powdered milk has threatened Jamaica's dairy industry. In Haiti, the United States' dumping of subsidised rice resulted in increases in poverty and malnutrition as well as increased dependence on food imports and more debt in order to pay for this food import," she added.

It is a situation that must be changed even as trade is seen for what it is - a means to an end and not an end to itself, noted Gonzalez.

"There needs to be a recognition both in the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas) and in the WTO agreement on agriculture of the basic right of developing countries to protect their agricultural sector in the interest of sustainable development and food security. In other words, trade needs to be seen as a means to an end and not an end to itself."

Gonzalez argued that trade ought to be "subordinated to the basic human right to food or to the protection of biological diversity as enshrined in the Convention of Biological Diversity. There also needs to be meaning given to a principle that already exists in international trade - special and differential trade".

According to Gonzalez, it is "dangerous" to operate on the assumption that having the same rules applying to all is enough to solve problems. Indeed, there is a range of things that she says will need to be added to the agenda if consensus is to be reached. They include the dominance of transnational agro-businesses that have a virtual monopoly in agriculture trade.

"Even without agricultural subsidies, these trans-national corporations drive down market prices by purchasing from the lowest cost producers all over the world. There is a tremendous in-balance between a small group of corporate buyers and millions of small farmers throughout the world," the professor said.

Added Gonzalez: "The current agenda for WTO negotiations focuses only on tariffs, domestic subsidies and export subsidies (by respective governments). That agenda needs to be expanded if we are to truly take into account existing power disparities and existing distortions (by transnational corporations)..."

Debt relief for developing countries is another issue, which she said would have to be taken on board.

"When the IMF and the World Bank approach a country having difficulty paying its debt and insist that what that country has to do is to increase its exports, one of the consequences is that the world markets are glutted at the same time with the same commodity and the prices drop... What that means is if we are to seriously address existing inequities that reproduce underdevelopment, debt relief has got to be on the table," she said.

In addition, she said it was critical for developing countries to unite to demand concessions and an end to agriculture dumping - as has Jamaica, Brazil, China, Cuba and Venezuela. But more than free trade, she said they needed to demand fair trade. At the same time, she said developed countries needed to be reminded of the history that brought them their economic and political might.

"Rather than demanding free trade, it is important for developing countries to band together and demand fair trade, to give concrete meaning to special and differential treatment, to bring back the history, to bring back the political economy when we talk about what is fair... It is important to talk about the historical fact, about how the developed world gained its economic might and to recognise that one set of rules for everyone is not the ideal because that does not produce a fair outcome. There has to be a recognition that countries are differentially situated as a consequence of a broader history."

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