Issue 2:2 | Non-Fiction | Wendell Berry

 

A Bad Big Idea

Wendell Berry

from: The Art of the Common Place (Counterpoint, 2002)

(mg. pub: Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community, Pantheon, 1992)

 

After World War II, the United States and seventeen other nations entered into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (also known as GATT) for the purpose of regulating international trade and resolving international trade disputes. Beginning in 1986, with the so-called Uruguay round of GATT negotiations, the Reagan and Bush administrations, working mostly in secret undertook to make a set of charges in GATT that would have dire economic and ecological effects on the more than one hundred nations now subscribing to the agreement—and that would significantly reduce the freedom of their citizens as well. Whether or not the Clinton administration will continue the Reagan-Bush agitation for these changes remains to be seen.

 

            The U.S. proposals on agriculture were drafted mostly by Daniel Amstutz formerly a Cargill executive, and they are backed by other large supranational corporations. Made to order for the grain traders and agrochemical companies that operate in the “global economy,” these proposals aim both to eliminate farm price supports and production controls and to attempt to force all member nations to conform to health and safety standards that would be set in Rome by Codex Alimentarius, a group of international scientific bureaucrats that is under the influence of the agribusiness corporations. Pressure for these revisions has come solely from these corporations and their allies. There certainly has been no popular movement in favor of them—not in any country—although there have been some popular movements in opposition.

 

            When very important persons have plunder in mind, they characteristically invent ugly euphemisms for what they intend to do, and the promoters of these GATT revisions are no exception:

 

            Tariffication refers to the recommended process by which all controls on imports of agricultural products will be replaced by tariffs, which will then be reduced or eliminated within five to ten years. This would have the effect of opening U.S. markets (and all others) to unlimited imports.

 

            Harmonization refers to a process by which the standards of trade among the member nations would be brought into “harmony.” This would mean lowering all those standards regulating food safety, toxic residues, inspections, packaging and labeling, and so on that are higher than the standards set by Codex Alimentarius.

 

            And fast track refers to a capitulation by which our Congress has ceded to the president the authority to make an international trade agreement and to draft the enabling legislation, which then is not subject to congressional amendment and which must be accepted or rejected as a whole within ninety session days.

 

            If the proposed revisions in the GATT are adopted, every farmer in every member nation will be thrown into competition with every other farmer. With restrictions lowered to international minimums and with farmers under increasing pressure to make up in volume for drastically reduced unit prices, this will become a competition in land exploitation. Such conversation practices as are now in use (and they are already inadequate) will of necessity be abandoned; land rape and the use of toxic chemicals on markets entirely controlled by the suppliers, will be forced to market their products in competition with the cheapest hand labor of the poor countries. And the poor countries, needing to feed their own people, will see the food vacuumed off their plates by lucrative export markets. The supranational corporations, meanwhile, will be able to slide about as will over the face of the globe to wherever products can be bought cheapest and sold highest.

 

            It is easy to see who will have the freedom in the international “free market.” The proposed GATT revisions, as one of their advocates has said, are “exactly what exporters need” –the assumption being, as usual, that what is good for exporters is good for everybody. But what is good for exporters is by no means necessarily good for producers, and in fact these proposed revisions expose a long-standing difference of interest between farmers and agribusiness marketers. We in the United States have seen how unrestrained competition among farmers, increasing surpluses and driving down prices, has directly served the purposes of the agribusiness corporations. These corporations have in fact, remained hugely and consistently profitable right through an era of severe economic hardships in rural America. They are clearly in a position to take excellent advantage of “free-market” competition, for the proposal GATT revisions would permit them to practice the same exploitation without restraint in the world at large.

 

            What these proposals actually propose is a revolution as audacious, far reaching, and sudden as any the world has seen. Though they would deny to the people of some 108 nations any choice in the matter of protecting their land, their farmers, their food supply, or their health, these proposals were not drafted and , if adopted, would not be implemented by anybody elected by the people of any of the 108 nations. Their purpose is to bypass all local, state, and national governments in order to subordinate the interests of those governments and of the people they represent to the interests of a global “free market” run by a few supranational corporations. By this single device, if it should be implemented, these corporations would destroy the protections that have been won by generations of conservationists, labor organizers, consumer advocates—and by democrats and lovers of freedom. This is an unabashed attempt to replace government with economies and to destroy any sort of local (let alone personal) self-determination. The intended effect would be to centralize control of all prices and standards in the international food economy and to place this control in the hands of the corporations that are best able to profit from it. The revised GATT would thus be a license issued to a privileged few for an all-out economic assault on the lands and peoples of the world. It would establish a “free” global economy that would be a tighter enclosure than most Americans, at least, have so far experienced.

 

            The issue here really is not whether international trade shall be free but whether or not it makes sense for a country—or, for that matter, a region—to destroy its own capacity to produce its own food. How can a government entrusted with the safety and health of its people’s ability to feed itself? And if people lose their ability to feed themselves, how can they be said to be free?

 

            The supporters of these GATT revisions assume that there is no longer any possibility of escape from the global economy and, furthermore, that there is no need for such an escape. They assume that all nations are therefore already properly subservient to the global economy and that the highest purpose of national governments is to serve as attorneys for the supranational corporations. They assume also (like far too many farmers and consumers) that there is no possibility of a food economy that is not decided on “at the top” in some center of power.

 

            But in so assuming, these people unwittingly have provided the rest of us with our best occasion so far to understand and to talk about the need for sound and reasonably self-sufficient local food economies. They have forced us to realize that politics and economics are in fact as inseparable as are economics and ecology. They have made it clear that if we want to be free, we will have to free ourselves somehow from the purposes of these great supranational concentrations of greed, wealth, and power. They have forced us to realize that a General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade may be able to set the standards for governments but that it cannot set the standards for individuals and local communities—unless those individuals and communities allow it to do so. They have, in other words, made certain truths self-evident.

 

            The proposed GATT revisions offend against democracy and freedom, against people’s natural concern for bodily and ecological health, and against the very possibility of a sustainable food supply. Apart from the corporate ambition to gather the wealth and power of the world into fewer and fewer hands, these revisions make no sense, for they ignore or reduce to fantasy all the realities with which they are concerned: ecological, agricultural, economic, political, and cultural. Their great evil originates in their underlying assumption that all the world may safely be subjected to the desires and controls of a centralizing power. For this is what “harmonization” really envisions: not the necessary small local harmonies that actually can be made among neighbors and between exploiter and exploited after all protest is silenced and all restraints abandoned. The would-be exploiters of the world would like to assume—it would be so easy for them if they could assume—that the world is everywhere uniform and comfortable to their desires.

 

            The world, on the contrary, is made up of an immense diversity of countries, climates, topographies, regions, ecosystems, soils, and human cultures—so many as to be endlessly frustrating to centralizing ambition, and this perhaps explains the attempt to impose a legal uniformity on it. However, anybody who is interested in real harmony, in economic and ecological justice, will see immediately that such justice requires not international uniformity but international generosity toward local diversity.

 

            And anybody interested in solving, rather than profiting from, the problems of food production and distribution will see that in the long run the safest food supply is a local food supply, not a supply that is dependent on a global economy. Nations and regions within nations must be left free—and should be encouraged—to develop the local food economies that best suit local needs and local conditions.