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Media Release
For Immediate
Release: Thursday 2nd December 1999
WTO AGRICULTURE DEAL
WOULD HARM SOUTH
Friends of the Earth
International has attacked plans to
extend the WTO’s remit over
agriculture. FOEI experts from Southern
countries, present at the Seattle
talks, warn that the plan would damage
the interests of the developing world.
FOEI has joined groups such as Via
Campesina, and the IRDF and PKMM of the
Philippines, in calling for agriculture
to be taken out of the WTO
altogether.
Southern countries’ need to
preserve food sovereignty, their
environment, and the subsistance of
their people, requires controls on
agricultural imports. The WTO’s support
for unregulated free trade threatens
their right to produce healthy,
non-genetically modified food,
protecting the environment and the
cultural values of the campesino and
indigenous communities. The WTO
promotes export lead development which
has seriously affected the access of
small indigenous and campesino
producers to land, water, seeds and the
financial support. The WTO also allows
the dumping of agricultural products in
Third World economies, undermining
local communities, and promoting flight
to the cities where neither work or
social services are available for the
marginalised poor.
FOEI wants WTO
delegations to:
-
Cease any further negotiations on
the Agreement on Agriculture
-
Exclude patents on life,
biological diversity and indigenous
and traditional knowledge from the
TRIPS agreement
-
Recognise that food security is a
legitimate right of all
countries
-
Ensure that third world
governments have the right to support
production which sustains their food
security
-
Recognise the precedence of the
Biodiversity Treaty over and trade
rules
-
Resist trade specialisation and
export lead growth
-
Agree to search for alternative
just and equitable methods of
supporting sustainable agriculture,
based on meeting national and local
needs for employment and food
security .
Commenting, Miguel Lovera of
Sobrevivencia - FOE Paraguay
said :
‘The WTO is all
about unregulated free trade. It
subordinates all environmental and
social concerns to this principle. It
is absolutely the wrong body to
guarantee an agricultural system which
is fair to all countries, and meets the
needs of farmers and local communities
in the South’.’
Contact:
Emmanuel Agyapong
Vice Yu Alberto Villareal
FOE Ghana Legal
Rights and REDES
(206) 953-9433
Natural Resources Centre FOE
Uruguay
FOE Philippines
(206) 953-9287
(206) 953-9178
Chowdhury M.F.
Gerard Coffey Miguel Lovera
FOE Bangladesh
Accion Ecologica Sobrevivencia – FOE
Paraguay
(206) 953-9287 FOE
Ecuador (206) 953-6854
(206) 953-6184
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