Organic farmer Slawek Dobrodziej with volunteers from Warsaw helping on his farm. Credit: Courtesy of Malgosia Dobrodziej

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Aug 21 2014 (IPS)

Polish farmer Slawek Dobrodziej has probably the world’s strangest triathlon training regime: he swims across the lake at the back of his house, then runs across his some 11 hectares of land to check the state of the crops, and at the end of the day bikes close to 40 kilometres to and back from a nearby town for some shopping.

That Dobrodziej would still want to enter the triathlon, despite working daily in the fields from dawn until well into the night, speaks volumes about his supra-human levels of energy.

But it takes this kind of stamina to succeed as an ecological farmer in Poland.Community-supported agriculture “could help promote farm biodiversity because consumers buy different types of vegetables and products in this scheme, and it could also help to spread the certified organic model, which is only marginally developed in Poland today” – organic farmer Sonia Priwieziencew

Today, around 3.5 percent of Poland’s agricultural land is taken up by organic farms. Their number has been growing steadily over recent years, yet farmers complain of obstacles. Of the country’s some 1.8 million farmers, just 26,000 have organic certification (though some of these farms are just meadows and do not necessarily produce food), and only 300 of these are vegetable producers.

Under the most recent national policies (adopted in parallel to the new European Union’s 2014-2020 budget, which will finance Polish agriculture), Polish authorities have been cutting subsidies for medium and large organic farms, and they have practically eliminated public support for organic orchards.

Smaller organic producers have to struggle with complicated bureaucratic procedures in place for obtaining national or European funding.

Slawek Dobrodziej and his wife Malgosia clearly have the determination to penetrate these procedures. Over the past eight years, the couple have managed to build up a successful organic farm in the village of Zeliszewo, near the western city of Szczecin. They sell some 100 types of fruit and vegetables to consumers in several Polish major cities, including the capital Warsaw.

According to Malgosia, the book-keeper of the family farm, the first years were particularly rough. Selling large quantities of one product to food processing companies did not pay off: organic farming, which uses no pesticides, is labour-intensive, and the prices paid by the companies were not enough to cover costs.

The family managed to access some national and European funds, but the amounts were barely sufficient to buy some basic machinery. European money must often be co-financed by the recipient, meaning that obtaining more funds would be impossible without becoming heavily indebted to banks.

The Dobrodziej’s fortunes improved once they diversified their vegetable production and found opportunities to sell their produce directly to consumers in big cities. Selling to a bio bazaar in Warsaw was a turning point.

Additionally, for the first time this year, they started selling to consumers via two community-supported agriculture (CSA) schemes in the cities of Szczecin and Poznan, through which the roughly 30 consumers in each scheme pay them in advance for vegetables they will receive weekly throughout the summer and autumn months.

The CSA model is based on the idea that consumers share risks with the farmers: consumers enter the scheme agreeing to take whatever vegetables the farmer is able to produce given weather conditions. They are also able to volunteer on the farm, which provides an understanding of seasonality and farm work that few city inhabitants have. Malgosia says that CSA is an excellent way of offering financial stability to a small farm.

The first CSA was created in Poland in 2012 in Warsaw, and this year six such schemes are operational in the country, including the two served by the Dobrodziej. More schemes are expected to be launched next year, given the warm welcome the model has received from city consumers and the farming community.

At the moment, the Dobrodziej’s week is a mad rush among various cities in Poland, with night-long drives to deliver fresh products, followed by days in the field. Yet Malgosia hopes that next year, once the bank credits are paid, they will be able to rely only on the two CSA schemes and sales to bio bazaars in Warsaw and Katowice. Meanwhile Slawek dreams of setting up an organisation to promote the model nationally.

“We do absolutely too much work right now, and we spend too much time packaging half kilos of vegetables to sell to small organic shops,” explains Malgosia. “The CSA model seems very promising, because we get rid of the packaging ordeal and we also get money in hand at the start of the season from which we can make investments in the machinery we need.”

“I think many Polish farms could go this way, because the model is really economically viable for farmers,” says Sonia Priwieziencew, who together with her partner Tomasz Wloszczowski, runs a 6 hectare organic farm in the village of Swierze Panki, 120 km northeast of Warsaw, which has been serving the first CSA in Poland for three years.

Priwieziencew and Wloszczowski had been active for years in NGOs promoting organic farming in Poland and they wanted to put theory into practice.

“CSA could help promote farm biodiversity because consumers buy different types of vegetables and products in this scheme, and it could also help to spread the certified organic model, which is only marginally developed in Poland today,” says Priwieziencew.

After years of experience with advocacy work and promotion of the organic model among farmers, Priwieziencew is quite critical of the authorities’ approach to ecological farming. According to her, despite the fact that the vast majority of farmers in Poland today have small plots of land, the policies issued both by the Polish government and the European Union are more favourable to large-scale industrial farming.

Despite the new Common Agricultural Policy adopted this year in Brussels, which is supposed to provide guidance to farming in the European Union for the coming years, paying much lip service to organic farming and small-scale agriculture as means to ensure food security, limit climate change and preserve biodiversity, national policies and financing do not necessarily follow this direction, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe.

Yet, over recent years, citizens in these regions have become increasingly aware of the faults of industrial food production and numerous initiatives intended to safeguard small farming and promote ecological agriculture have been created across both regions.

This month, Warsaw saw the opening of the first cooperative shop bringing vegetables and other foods directly from producers, most of them local, and selling them at a discount to members of the cooperative who volunteer work.

Cooperatives and vegetable box schemes exist in most big Polish cities and are even developing at the level of neighbourhoods. A newly discovered passion for urban gardening in the country has led museums in Warsaw and other cities to open up their green areas to local inhabitants who want to grow vegetables.

Other countries in the region are not lagging behind. At least 15 CSA initiatives exist in the Czech Republic and, in addition, vegetable box schemes and urban gardens are continually appearing. In Romania, CSA groups exist now in at least six different cities, with some of the farms explicitly employing people from marginalised social categories.

”Every such new initiative gives small-scale ecological farmers a new chance to sell more and develop in Poland,” says Warsaw-based food activist Piotr Trzaskowski, who set up the first CSA in Poland. ”These farmers must survive because they are real caretakers of the land and the environment, unlike large-scale conventional producers who commodify the land, buying it, using it up and ignoring the impact on biodiversity, people and the environment.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

By Martin Khor
GENEVA, Oct 1 2013 (IPS)

A fight taking place in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations towards the Bali Ministerial Conference shows how the rules on agriculture allow developed countries to continue to shell out huge subsidies while penalising farmers in developing countries.

Food security is one of the key issues now being negotiated at the WTO as part of its preparations for the Bali Conference in December. For developing countries, food security and the livelihood and incomes of small farmers are top priorities.

Reducing and eventually eliminating hunger worldwide is one of the key Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted by governments at the United Nations. In the present negotiations in New York on formulating Sustainable Development Goals in the U.N., food security, nutrition and agriculture make up one of the key clusters of issues.

Against this background, there is a remarkable discussion now taking place at the WTO as part of the preparations for Bali. Developing countries grouped under the G33 are asking that their governments be allowed to buy food from their small farmers and stock the food without this being limited by the WTO’s rules on agricultural subsidies. Some governments plan to provide food to poor households free or at subsidised rates.

Martin Khor

However their proposal is facing resistance, mainly from some major developed countries, especially the United States, whose official position is that such a move would “create a massive new loophole for potentially unlimited trade-distorting subsidies”.

This clash is an outstanding example of how the agriculture rules of the WTO favour rich countries while punishing developing countries, including their poorest people.

It is well known that the greatest distortions in the trading system lie in agriculture. This is because the rich countries asked for and obtained a waiver in the 1950s from the liberalisation rules of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the predecessor of the WTO.

They were allowed to give huge subsidies to their farm owners, and to have very high tariffs. This was at the expense of developing countries, which have a comparative advantage in agriculture.

When the WTO was set up, it had a new agriculture agreement that basically allowed this strong farm protection to continue. The rich countries were obliged only to reduce their “trade-distorting subsidies” by 20 percent but could change the nature of their subsidies and put them into a “Green Box” containing subsidies that are termed “non trade-distorting or minimally trade-distorting”.

There is no limit to the Green Box subsidies. And several studies have shown that many of the Green Box subsidies are in fact trade-distorting as well.

With this shifting around, the rich world’s agricultural subsidies have been maintained, or have actually soared. For instance, WTO data show that total domestic support in the U.S. grew from 61 billion dollars in 1995 to 130 billion dollars in 2010.

A broader measure of farm protection, known as total support estimate, which is used by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, shows that the agriculture subsidies of the developed country members climbed from 350 billion dollars in 1996 to 406 billion dollars in 2011.

The effects of continuing developed-country subsidies have been devastating to developing countries. Food products selling at below production costs are still flooding into the poorer countries, often eating into small farmers’ incomes and livelihoods. Ironically most developing countries are in a situation where they are not allowed to have the same huge subsidies.

The reason is that the agriculture rules say that all countries have to cut their trade-distorting subsidies. So if a developing country has not granted subsidies before, it is not allowed to give any, except for a small minimal amount (10 percent of total production value) known as “de minimis” support. Most developing countries had no, or few, subsidies when they joined the WTO due to lack of funds.

This is where the present WTO controversy comes in. The developing countries under the G33 are asking that food bought from poor farmers and stocked by the government should be considered part of the Green Box without conditions.

The present rule sets an unfair condition. Even if governmental stockholding programmes for food security purposes in developing countries are placed under the Green Box, there is a provision that the ‘subsidy’ element in such a national purchase scheme should be accounted for in the country’s AMS (aggregate measure of
support), which is the main category of subsidies considered to be trade-distorting, and which for most developing countries is limited to de minimis amount.

Other Green Box subsidies, including those that developed countries mostly use, do not carry such a condition.

The unfairness of this condition is worsened by the way the subsidy element is calculated in the Agriculture Agreement, as the difference between the acquisition price and the external reference price.

The problem is that the acquisition price is the current price level, while the ‘external reference price’ is defined as the average world price level in 1986-1988 (during a period when the Uruguay Round that led to the WTO was being negotiated).

Since 1986-1988, global and local prices of food items have increased tremendously. The 1986-1988 price is thus obsolete and much too low to be used to determine whether a developing-country government is subsidising its farmers.

Countries that are in danger of exceeding its AMS or de minimis maximum level include India. Its parliament has just passed a food bill that entitles the poor (two-thirds of the population) to obtain food from a government scheme that buys the food from small farmers.

But the estimated 20 billion dollars the government will spend annually may exceed the allowed AMS and de minimis levels, because India was not a big subsidiser before the WTO rules came into force.

Other developing countries that provide subsidies to their farmers and consumers, such as China, Indonesia and Thailand, may also one day find themselves the targets of complaints.

For rich countries that are paying a total of 407 billion dollars a year in subsidies to disallow poor countries from subsidising their small farmers is really an especially bad form of discrimination and hypocrisy.

Whether this controversy can be settled fairly before the WTO’s Bali Ministerial Conference remains to be seen.
(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

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By Pascal Lamy
GENEVA, Mar 27 2013 (IPS)

For decades, commodity trade has been understood from the point of view of “commodity dependent” exporting countries, those whose revenues are largely generated by commodities exports. The trend of decreasing agricultural commodity prices was the focus of attention. However, from the beginning of the 2000s, there was an upward trend in agricultural commodity prices culminating in the price peak of 2007-08.

Pascal Lamy. Credit: Couresy of WTO.

Following this period, food prices have started to ease but remain at relatively high levels underpinned by continuing strong demand resulting, among other factors, from the “nutritional transition” that goes hand in hand with poverty reduction, rising costs of inputs and often slow reaction of supply to price signals, stemming notably from partial “marketisation” of livelihood farming.

Nominal prices of agricultural commodities are expected to trend upwards over the next ten years, or even more, and are projected to average 10 to 30 percent above those of the previous decade.

These developments have shifted the focus from commodity trade, and more specifically food commodity trade, more towards importing developing countries and the bill they have to pay for their food commodity imports. This is the “food security” concern, which is an important one for the global community.

Does looking at the two faces of the same “commodity coin” imply some contradiction as regards the role of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in opening trade and the disciplines applicable to international commodity trade? On the contrary, the WTO can contribute to ensuring that commodity trade can address both import and export priorities.

Export subsidies are recognised as the most egregious form of trade distorting support. In the past, export subsidies contributed to decreases in already low world prices, with negative consequences for producers and exporters from developing countries. While agricultural commodity prices are generally higher now, it remains true that eliminating export subsidies and agreeing on further disciplines on export credits, exporting state trading enterprises and food aid modalities would contribute to a less distorted and more predictable international trading system.

Export restrictions can contribute to unpredictability and price volatility. By promoting consistent and predictable trade measures through binding and transparent rules, the WTO could bring a more positive contribution.

Policies that support domestic prices, or subsidise agricultural commodity production in some other way, artificially encourage production. These policies end up discouraging imports or leading to subsidised exports having a direct impact on more efficient producers in other countries. Reducing trade distorting domestic support would therefore increase global welfare by eliminating inefficiencies introduced by government intervention and offer producers a fairer price.

Regional and bilateral agreements tend to leave domestic support out of their scope. The multilateral negotiating table remains the sole forum for ensuring a fairer trade in agriculture products, one that allows countries to better capitalise on their comparative advantages.

Consider the case of cotton. A number of poor countries are dependent on cotton exports for their economic development. However, the cotton sector remains highly subsidised, especially in some developed countries as well as in some emerging ones. These subsidies depress prices and increase the difficulties faced by countries such as Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali and Chad. Progress has been made in this area, especially on strengthening the development support aspects, or on improving market access for cotton exporters but more remains to be done, in particular to address the trade distorting subsidies that remain.

Bound tariffs on agricultural goods remain substantially higher than those on manufactures almost everywhere around the world. Furthermore, tariff escalation where tariffs increase with value addition to commodities is frequent in agriculture. Reduction in peak agricultural tariffs increases market access opportunities for countries enjoying a comparative advantage, can lower the cost of food for consumers and also allows for the diversification of production, including value-added processing, and export markets.

Trade opening has created opportunities for agrifood firms to reorganise their production and distribution systems around value chains. A particular challenge is to ensure that smaller companies in poorer countries can join in value chains. Aid for Trade has an important role to play here. This is why the WTO’s Fourth Global Review of Aid for Trade, to be held next July, will focus on connecting to value chains including in the agrifood sector.

With the help of surveys by companies on the ground, we will examine the barriers which developing countries face in entering, establishing and moving up value chains, something that is of key importance for commodity exporters too.

Recommitting to commodity sector development in all its aspects is crucial to the objectives of promoting growth and eradicating poverty.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

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