John Minto: Shot by our own farm gun

John Minto

In the 1960s my family visited a dairy farm in the Waikato run by distant relatives. It was a great experience for a bunch of city kids and had all the romantic appeal we'd imagined. The grass was lush, the cows big and happy and the cowpats were eye-opening. It was picture-postcard perfect.

It was 35 years till I visited another dairy farm - this time near Rakaia in Canterbury. The romance was there but heavily discounted. The intensity of the farming was astonishing - detailed planning of herd size, herd movement, animal output, fertility rates, fertiliser application, pasture management, and so on.

Cattle management was detailed to the last day, pasture management to the last blade of grass, and irrigation to the last litre a minute.

I left with the overwhelming feeling that this intensity of farming is just not sustainable. It's not so much a house of cards as a rickety structure constructed on shaky foundations with short-sighted economics.

Fast forward to the Doha round of World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations shortly to reach a climax in Hong Kong where New Zealand is at the forefront of a dirty drive to both open up agricultural trade and pressure poorer countries to open their economies to the wealthy nations.

The rationale goes like this. The world will become one single free market. Countries must develop competitive products for this market. We have a "competitive advantage" with agriculture and therefore our future lies in getting other countries to open their borders to our wool, meat and dairy products.

To get this we will have to give up other areas of our economy to foreign predation.

This is deeply worrying.

Global warming and changing climate patterns make our agricultural future uncertain at best and the damage to our environment from intensive farming is plain to see. But our government blunders on. New Zealand has joined seven other rich countries to develop a scheme to require all countries, rich and poor, to open permanently a minimum number of their services to foreign firms.

The rich countries also want credit for the commitments they made in the previous Uruguay round of negotiations and our own Labour Government has even suggested a formula to calculate the commitments each country - rich and poor alike - should be forced to make.

This would have a devastating effect on fledgling industries, agriculture and the service sector in developing countries with the beneficiaries being the large transnational corporations (TNCs).

In a previous round, Labour had even asked the European Union countries to open up their public education systems to private companies, while telling us here at home that they will protect our own public education system. Yeah, right.

Now Labour has gone further and is setting up a Friends of Private Education Exports group to push for more private sector takeover of education worldwide through WTO negotiations.

In these actions New Zealand is standing firmly with the rich countries and their large TNCs. We are behaving like a playground bully's sidekick. The irony is that if the Doha round is "successful" it will be a disaster for New Zealand and Third World people alike.

When the WTO was established in 1994 its purpose was to raise standards of living and ensure full employment and a growing real income for all the world's people. Eleven years later, through the WTO's trade and investment rules, worldwide unemployment has grown and tens of millions are in low-paid part-time employment with little or no income protection.

New Zealand is a classic example, with many families relying on long hours in low-paid jobs to make ends meet, and 15 per cent of our families borrowing money just to pay for daily living expenses.

Throughout the world millions of peasants have lost their land to large agri-businesses and been forced into urban ghettos. This will accelerate dramatically if trade in agricultural products is opened up. Family farming will disappear and intensification of farm practices and a focus on food crops for export will dominate worldwide. This will drive down prices and put millions out of work. The WTO mantra that increased trade leads to increased economic growth, and hence positive development for the world's poorest citizens, is a grubby myth.

Even when a country's economic growth looks good on paper, it bears little relationship to the quality of life of its citizens. New Zealand, for example, has had six years of "outstanding" economic growth, yet a third of our children live in poverty, loan sharks abound (perhaps the biggest growth area of our economy in recent years) and breadwinners work exhausting hours just to get by.

In fact we are the great negative example for the advocates of so-called free trade and open economies. Meanwhile, the profits of TNCs operating in New Zealand are celebrated in the boardrooms and in the homes of wealthy shareholders. We are an abject lesson in the failure of WTO policies. New Zealand is the turkey at the WTO turkey shoot.

For the sake of our farms, families and communities let's hope we can celebrate the outright failure of the Doha round.

* John Minto is a spokesman for Global Peace and Justice Auckland