A Pandora’s Box Opens on the Fields

By Sanjay Suri

Dorivaldo Pereira de Sa can grow food on just four hectares of his 51-hectare farm in Mirandiba village in Pernambuco province in Brazil, and that has everything to do with his presence at the World Social Forum.

“I can produce just enough for my own survival, almost nothing for the market,” he tells TerraViva. “I cannot compete against the big land owners who grow for export,” he says. “The government needs to dig wells, irrigate the land so that we can grow food here. If we import more instead of producing, that will be the end of us.”

Pereira de Sa is in Porto Alegre finding out the experiences of farmers in other countries, and discovering that they really are no different. For him, the coming together of the local and the global is no slogan; he is making it happen every day.

Without knowing it, Pereira de Sa has walked right into the global controversy over the creation of what came to be known as the development box. The idea of the box means fundamentally that when cheaper imports of agricultural goods threaten the livelihood of family farmers, governments should have the right either to impose tariffs on imports, or step up subsidies to local farmers – or both.

“More than a million farmers have left their lands over the past ten years,” Adriano Campolina, policy director for the non-governmental organisation ActionAid Brazil told TerraViva. “That is in the face of an average 4.75 per cent decline a year in the price of what they sell.”

For big landlords the decrease has been less than half of that, he says. The farmers producing milk, maize and beans have been hit hard. Brazilian farmers have been affected particularly by imports from neighbouring Argentina and Uruguay, and from the United States.

“A development box would give us flexibility in protecting farmers,” says Campolina. “Support to family farming is the key to fighting inequality. Family farming cannot be regulated by the big markets. Family farming can create jobs and distribute income more effectively than farmers who produce for export.”

ActionAid, which is supporting the case of small farmers, is finding similar problems around the world. “In Pakistan the government has started cutting subsidies for wheat,” says Aftab Alam from ActionAid in Pakistan. The production has been in excess of need, but there is no promising price in the local market, and no support for export, he says.

“The U.S. has a budget of a million dollars a day just to support export of agricultural goods,” he says. “The poor Pakistani farmer just cannot fight that.”

Farmers across the world are facing similar difficulties, ActionAid activists say. The poor farmer is fighting imports from countries which give subsidies both for production and for export. And they are finding less and less subsidies to support any exports they might attempt.

The development box was first proposed two years ago by a group of countries including Pakistan, Kenya, Honduras, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela. A report on those recommendations was handed over to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to be debated for a decision by March 31 this year. That deadline is now likely to be extended, Alam says.

“It is very important to get this right,” he says. “There is a real danger that the developed countries might concede a development box as a concession, but we have to be very careful what that box contains. We do not want an empty box.”

Many developing countries are now asking for time to propose details and mechanisms to protect the small-scale farmers of developing countries under the ongoing review of the Agreement on Agriculture within the WTO.

Pereira de Sa is not alone. There are just too many like him around the world for the WTO, or for governments to ignore. There is a real danger to the WTO itself if it cannot make room for people like him, Alam says. Independent and influential groups like the Via Campesina want agriculture out of the WTO. That could lead to great pressure on the WTO, activists say. But it would only be the consequence of the pressure farmers now face.