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2 US, Korea fight over
food By Christine Ahn
The Korea-US Free Trade Agreement (FTA),
signed on June 30, awaits ratification by the US
Congress through an up-or-down vote without
amendment. So far, the Democratic leadership has
said that FTA is dead in the water, but only on
the unenlightened grounds that the FTA did not go
far enough in prying open South Korea's automobile
and beef markets.
If enacted, the FTA will
become the most economically significant trade
deal since the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA). Financial
transactions between the United States and South
Korea surpass US$74 billion annually. The US also
intends to use it as a model to expand trade
liberalization throughout Asia.
Like
NAFTA, the FTA will forever change South Korea's
agricultural economy. For this reason, the deal
has been furiously opposed by Korean farmers who
believe it will force thousands of their dwindling
numbers into poverty, seriously inhibit South
Koreans' right to buy local food, and undermine
domestic food-safety laws.
"In 1990, South
Korea had 10 million farmers. Today, there are 3.5
million," said Sin Moon-hee, of the Korean Women
Peasants' Alliance. "This is what unfettered trade
has done to us and to the Korean countryside."
In 2006, the United States exported $3.4
billion worth of agricultural, fish and forest
products to South Korea, the sixth-largest US
export market. US agribusinesses are salivating at
the opportunity to reach more of South Korea's 49
million consumers and the $12 billion agricultural
market through the FTA.
Pro-business
interests in South Korea argue that the FTA will
make Korean farmers more competitive, especially
in cultivating rice, the country's most
economically and culturally significant crop. But
Korean farmers have already undergone severe
competition through market-opening reforms over
the past two decades. The costs? More than 6.5
million farmers have been displaced and many
traditional Korean crops, such as barley, wheat,
corn, fruits and cotton, have virtually faded from
the Korean countryside.
Korean peasants,
militant on the front lines against the FTA, view
the agreement as the final straw in a string of
domestic and international policies systematically
designed for their demise. During the 1960s and
1970s, South Korean peasants in essence subsidized
the country's export-led industrial development.
Then-dictator Park Chung-hee intentionally
depressed agricultural prices to acquire a steady
flow of cheap labor for export factories.
But this export-industrialization policy,
which drove millions of farmers off the land, was
mitigated by South Korean trade policies that
limited imports with high tariffs and quotas.
Farmers' incomes diverged considerably from those
of urban workers in 1995 when the South Korean
government joined the World Trade Organization
(WTO) and signed on to the Agreement on
Agriculture (AOA).
Under the veil of
making agriculture more competitive, the AOA
forced developing countries to eliminate quotas
and forced governments to import a minimum amount
of agricultural commodities at a low tariff. While
developing countries were shredding the safety net
for their farmers, by the early 2000s, the US and
the European Union were spending $9 billion to $10
billion more on subsidies than they had spent a
decade earlier, with the bulk of subsidies going
to large corporate farms.
Small-scale
farmers in the global South were surviving on less
than $400 a year, while US and EU farmers received
on average $16,000-$21,000 a year in subsidies. In
2003, the US dumped on the global market five
commodities at 10-47% below the cost of
production.
In the US, the average rice
farm is 160.7 hectares, compared with South
Korea's average rice farm of 1.4 hectares. About
8,000 of the United States' 2 million farms grow
rice, compared with South Korea, where more than
787,000 farms - or 57% - cultivate rice. From 1995
to 2005, the US rice industry received more than
$10.5 billion in government subsidies, of which
25% went to the top 1%.
"It doesn't even
matter that rice wasn't included in the text of
the agreement," said Heo Young-keo, vice president
of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions. "By
2014, Korea's rice market will be opened," said
Heo, referring to the AOA, "and that is the reason
why rice does not have to be included in these
negotiations."
Going the way of
NAFTA According to South Korea's National
Policy Institute, when tariffs on 20 or more
sensitive agricultural products are eliminated,
within 10-15 years, the decline in production by
Korean farms will mean the loss of $1 billion to
$2 billion annually. South Korea's agriculture
could disappear in 10-15 years.
For
example, tangerines account for up to 70% of Jeju
(also spelled Cheju) island's agricultural
production. It is estimated that opening South
Korea's citrus market to powerful US
companies
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