WTO-SPECIAL: Young French Farmers Fight for Subsidies

By Emad Mekay Reprint | | Print |

Emad Mekay

HONG KONG, Dec 17 2005 (IPS) - Noëlle Poisson-Hedouin has been working 16 hours a day since she came here, all for one purpose: to stop delegates from 149 countries meeting at the World Trade Organisation ministerial conference from forcing France to cut its farm subsidies.
      She only has one more day to go to “success”.

Noëlle Poisson-Hedouin has been working 16 hours a day since she came here on Monday, all for one purpose – to stop delegates from 149 countries meeting at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) from forcing France to cut its farm subsidies. She only has one more day to go to “success”.

“I have been sleeping only about four hours a day since I came here,” Poisson-Hedouin said as she juggled a mobile phone, a folder and two bags full of press releases.

“I am jetlagged too. It is not good, but when you are under pressure and when you think everybody is ganging up on you, you think it’s worth it. It is all for a good cause.”

What so many people here are clamoring to end is the more than 11 billion dollars French farmers pocket every year from the European Union in farm subsidies. The subsidies, also handed out by the United States and other wealthy countries, have been criticised for distorting global agricultural markets, to the disadvantage of millions of farmers in poor nations.

But Poisson-Hedouin, who works for a group that represents 50,000 young French farmers, Jeunes Agriculteurs, a Paris-based non-governmental organisation, says she is in Hong Kong to protest that view.

The Jeunes Agriculteurs’ five-member delegation here is one of the most active, crisscrossing the corridors of the Hong Kong convention centre with a clear message that they will shoot down any plans to force farm subsidies cuts through the WTO.

Poisson-Hedouin starts her day at 08:00 a.m. After checking messages from members in France supplying her with overnight news, she jockeys with journalists to find a seat at press conferences to hear the latest on negotiators’ positions at the meetings.

In between, she is glued to her mobile phone, talking to her boss or to other activists. They meet regularly to coordinate over lunch or around coffee tables and continuously pledge solidarity. “We work closely with other groups,” she says.

When she gets a free minute during her crammed day, she glides through the metal detectors and identity checks that pepper the halls of the delegates, NGOs and the press centre. At her computer, she writes up press releases in French, updates farmers back home via email and communicates with “our political contacts and our press contacts in France”.

The most fruitful part of her day, she says, remains the time she spends tracking down French or EU officials, often bickering with them over the details of their proposals and suggesting they move a word her or add a verb there, all with the purpose of pre-empting European concessions on farm subsidies.

Last night, as the drafts of the final statements from the meetings trickled out, she and her colleagues met with officials to persuade them to change their position on the draft text of the WTO meetings.

“This is unacceptable,” she says. “The WTO wants to dismantle current regulations.”

And is there anything farmers can do about it? “We go after our government first,” she said of her “activism”, elsewhere called lobbying. “Then we go after the EU. We are not so happy, but the conference is not finished and this thing is not finished.”

The text reportedly calls for another round of reforms in the 25-member bloc’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which was last changed in 2003.

“We’ve just reformed the CAP,” she says. “This is not balanced. We see that there’s a lot of talk on agriculture and nothing on the other pillars of talks (trade in goods and services).”

The farmers are the driving power behind France’s forceful official position here, which feeds into the EU stance at the WTO meetings. Paris will not accept changes to the make-up of its agriculture subsidies.

As if all she is not taken on enough already, Poisson-Hedouin also has to balance another task – watching the ongoing discussions in Europe over the EU budget. French farmers say they will also oppose a budget that would cut their subsidies. “They are both linked,” she said.

So far in the WTO meetings, which end on Sunday, the EU has toed the French farmers’ line, much to the dismay of many trade diplomats here.

EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson and Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel’s have put up stiff resistance to pressure from the United States and from developing nations, along with some NGOs, who all want the French farmers to budge on their own farm subsidies.

Oxfam International, for example, says its analysis of European Commission statistics show that the top 15 percent of French farming businesses consume a massive 60 percent of its direct payments.

“This is as graphic a picture of inequality,” said Celine Charveriat, who heads Oxfam’s Make Trade Fair campaign.

But Poisson is not convinced. “I think all this pressure is unfairàOur strategy is to make sure that Mandelson and our French Minister (of Foreign Trade Christine Lagarde) stay strong. Even if there’s strong pressure from all sides, it is not possible for us to give up. We have the right to make efforts before anything happens,” she said.