Since the early days of the WTO, agriculture has been one of the hottest potatoes in trade talks. Agribusiness and other corporate lobby groups use trade agreements to increase their market access and profits.
The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) as well as its “sister” CETA (Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement) are an assault on sustainable farming on both sides of the Atlantic. TTIP and CETA will affect food safety, animal welfare and environmental protection, lead to further intensification and corporate concentration of agriculture and threaten peasants’ survival as well as citizens’ health.
At today’s breakfast event in Brussels “TTIP – trading away our food and farmers?” Hanny van Geel, member of the Coordinating Committee of European Coordination Via Campesina (ECVC), underlined the negative effects of existing trade agreements on peasant farmers and a sustainable food system. NAFTA the North American Free Trade Agreement), for example led to rising exports and falling product prices. 40% of Canadian producers as well as millions of Mexican peasant farmers had to close down their farms. The latter ended up as seasonal and migrant workers in the US. Hanny van Geel said: “Food and agriculture are too important to leave them to business. Food is no commodity – it’s a human right. We need to put people’s rights in the center of our politics. Instead of promoting the neoliberal agribusiness model and supporting large multinational corporations, we need food sovereignty and a sustainable food and agriculture system based on agroecology.”
ECVC emphasizes that European farmers won’t accept betrayal for theoretical opportunities to increase exports to the US or Canada. Instead, as the report from Friends of the Earth Europe “Trading away EU farmers” underlines, TTIP will massively increase imports from the US – which are produced to lower standards and therefore have lower production costs – while having far fewer benefits for EU producers. Studies foresee a decline of up to 0.8% for EU agriculture’s contribution to gross domestic product, while US agriculture’s contribution to US GDP will increase by 1.9%. Increased competition could mean the final knock-out blow for European small scale and family farming. “If you kill small farmers, you also kill the environment”, Mute Schimpf, food campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe, warns.
European citizens have to be told the truth about how TTIP and CETA would affect food production and farming. Hanny van Geel: “Europeans do not want to depend on industrialized food coming from factories instead of family farms. Therefore, we have to stop negotiating agriculture in so called free trade agreements and work together to realize food sovereignty!”
Contacts:
Hanny van Geel, Member of Coordinating Committee of ECVC
Email: hanny@eurovia.org
Mob:+31 61 390 3434 ( NL-EN)
Irmi Salzer, OBV-ECVC
Email: irmi.salzer@viacampesina.at
Mob : +4369911827634 (DE-EN)
Andoni Garcia, COAG-ECVC
Email: andoni@coag.org
Mob: +34636451569 (ES)
Claude Girod, Confédération Paysanne – ECVC
Email: claudegirod@gmail.com
Mob: +33385747189 (FR-EN)
See the program of the press event here
See the IT translation here
This Press release is part of the Hands on the Land Campaign