Trade liberalisation, hunger and starvation

For women on the continent of Africa, the upcoming 6the Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in Hong Kong in December will stand out as the apogee of failure for the globalisation project.

Women and social movements have articulated the need for economic democracy. This involves the equitable participation of all people in the ownership of the productive assets on which livelihoods depend upon.

Some of the key messages African women are sending to the Hong Kong meeting centre around research of the lived experiences of women, which indicate that agricultural trade liberalisation measures can create starvation and famine when tariff barriers are removed. These measures allow the flow of cheap food, which displaces poor women and men and destroys their entitlements.

Lowering of import barriers and flooding of the market with imported food grains sold at low prices is the result of the many levels of hidden subsidies of the rich countries. These have been shown to contribute to hunger and starvation in agricultural societies, which predominate in African countries. What the Agreement on Agriculture aims to achieve is the replacement of women and other subsistence producers with agribusiness as the main providers of food. Behind the obfuscation of terms such as ‘market access’, ‘domestic support’, is a raw restructuring of power around food: taking it away from people and concentrating it in the hands of a handful of agro-industrial interests.

The agriculture negotiations when taken up by our governments are treated as gender neutral. These discussions do not take into account the 75% contribution women make to agricultural production. They assume a common myth that separates affluence from poverty. If you produce what you consume, you do not produce. This is the basis on which the production boundary is drawn for national accounting that measures economic growth.

This myth is perpetuated in the WTO contestation and contributes to the mystification of growth and consumerism. It also hides the real processes that create poverty. The WTO agriculture negotiations are inimical to people’s interests. They have become a space for protecting the interest of agribusiness corporations and commercial farmers whose priority is not food security but profit. Their profit distribution is a monopoly. They are the sellers of inputs to farmers, the buyers of agricultural commodities from farmers, and the sellers of processed foods to consumers. Women do not see the agreement on agriculture as a conflict between farmers of the North and those of the South, but between small farmers everywhere and agribusiness multinationals. In Africa the small farmers are women, even though their role has remained invisible and has been neglected in the official trade discussions.

In the upcoming Hong Kong meeting women will fight against the free export and import of agricultural products because this translates into the destruction of small farmers and local food production capacities. By locating food in the domain of international trade, women recognise that this will dislocate its production in the household and community.

Trade liberalisation through the WTO is aimed at removing all restrictions for trade and trading interest and results in the removal of food security by removing the legal and policy instruments that protect the entitlements of poor women and men who have little to no purchasing power and are therefore excluded from the market.

African women find trade negotiations a rather strange place for products of the mind to be discussed. Yet, that is precisely what has happened. Trade and plunder merge in what is called Trade- Related Intellectual Property Right (TRIPs). This is another instrument, which will dispossess rural women of their power, control and knowledge. Land, water, forests, rivers, indigenous medicines, plants are regarded as commodities. Even more obscene women are fighting against TRIPs intention to take seeds out of the custody of women and make it private property of multinational corporations. By adding ‘trade related’ to intellectual property right, the WTO has forced issues of ownership of genetic resources and life forms on to the agenda of international trade.

The construction of ‘intellectual property’ in the WTO is linked to multiple levels of dispossession for women. The preamble of the TRIPs agreement states that intellectual property rights are recognised only as private rights. This excludes all kinds of knowledge, ideas and innovations that take place in the intellectual commons, in villages, farmers, indigenous people. TRIPs is a mechanism to privatise the intellectual commons and de-intellectualise women, so that in effect, the mind becomes a corporate monopoly. TRIPs critique by women stems from the Latin root of private property, privare, and means to deprive. The laws of private property which rose during the 15 -16th centuries eroded people’s common right to the use of forests and pastures, while creating the social condition for capital accumulation through industrialisation. These new agreements in the WTO are created to protect individual right to property as a commodity, while destroying collective rights to water, land, food, health and the basis of sustenance.

Economic democracy is fundamental to the essential and efficient functioning of economies and sound public regulation. Today’s markets respond only to money, they are obsessed with the wants of the rich and neglect the most basic needs of poor women and men. Economic democracy is a necessary foundation of individual, community, and national economic self-determination – the right to determine one’s own economic priorities and the rules of one’s economic life – because it helps secure a political voice for each person.

* Mohau Pheko is the coordinator for the Gender & Trade Network in Africa, based in Johannesburg, South Africa ([email protected])

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