RIGHTS: Protesters Taste Tortillas in Solidarity with Farmers

By Marty Logan Reprint | | Print |

Marty Logan

MONTREAL, Apr 18 2003 (IPS) - Protesters munched on tortillas made from organic corn under the shadow of a flour mill owned by one of the world’s largest agricultural companies on Thursday, accusing Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) of exploiting farmers worldwide.

More than 100 people marched through the streets of downtown Montreal from the stock exchange tower to the riverside offices of the U.S. firm to mark the World Day of Farmers’ Struggle, established by the international organisation Vía Campesina in memory of the victims of a police crackdown on rural workers in northern Brazil seven years ago.

Many carried signs with slogans like, ”Compost Capitalism”, ”Save Traditional Corn Varieties” and ”No to FTAA”.

FTAA (the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas) ”means that Brazil will once again be colonised by the United States, will once again be run by people from outside the country”, said Maurilio Galdino, representing Brazil’s Landless Peasants’ Movement.

While the FTAA is currently being negotiated, the hemisphere’s largest trade deal to date, NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) has paid off handsomely for multinationals like U.S.-based ADM since it was signed in 1993. The firm has nearly tripled its profits, from 110 million dollars to 301 million dollars, said march organisers, a coalition of anti-free trade and farmers groups.

Former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who negotiated the NAFTA deal, is now a director of ADM, one of the world’s largest processors of soybeans, corn, wheat and cocoa, whose net sales for the fiscal year ended Jun. 30, 2002 were 22.6 billion dollars.

”What trade deals have done for farmers is make them compete against each other in a single, hyper-competitive market,” said Peter Dowling of Canada’s National Farmers Union.

In the province of Quebec, for example, dairy farms have been reduced from 15,000 to 7,000 in the last 10 years.

”In the South it’s more visible because there are more people farming. Here it’s more subtle – people just (give up and) pack it in or their neighbour swallows them up,” said Gowling.

While Canadian agricultural exports grew by six billion dollars from 1993 to 1999, net farm income declined by 600 million Canadian dollars (413 million U.S. dollars), according to a report by U.S.-based Public Citizen.

The 2001 report predicted that up to 15 million Mexican farmers would be displaced by the trade deal, which forced changes in constitutional protection of farmers’ land.

Today, civil society groups say 600 Mexican farmers quit their land daily, no longer able to earn a living because of the meagre return they receive from their produce, because they cannot compete with highly subsidised U.S. products or because their land is seized for ‘development’ projects.

In Brazil, "one million small producers have been forced off the land and people are attacking delivery trucks at supermarkets so they don’t starve”, said Galdino.

His group has traditionally ”occupied” fallow lands, or areas whose titles are in legal dispute. In the past two weeks, it has occupied 14 rural properties in the state of Pernambuco, establishing settlements with 3,780 families.

Another two ranches 50 kilometres from Brasilia were occupied Apr. 9, for a total of 10,000 hectares under landless farmer control. The group justified the action there saying the lands were public areas that were illegally claimed by a businessman.

Thursday’s march also protested the use of genetically modified (GM) products in agriculture. Canadian farmers in the province of Saskatchewan are suing multinational seed producers and Monsanto and Aventis for contaminating their non-GM canola with a modified variety of the crop.

They claim that GM canola is now grown so pervasively in Saskatchewan that it has essentially destroyed the organic canola market for local farmers.

Their lawsuit also argues that Monsanto and Aventis violated environmental laws by not conducting environmental impact assessments before releasing the GM seeds.

The two firms are awaiting a Canadian government decision on their application to license GM wheat seeds for the 2004 growing season. The crop would likely be milled at ADM’s Montreal wheat flour operation, said groups Thursday.