So all WTO protestors are rich, white people?

[Solly]

Pint of milk (576ml) = 30p
Bottled water (500ml) = 50p to £1

[Lawrence of Arabia]

I'm sorry to have to inject actual facts into your little rant but the US actually removed all direct farm subsidies for three years during the 1990s. You see the EU said they'd remove their CAP if the US would just take the leadership to end it's subsidies first. The US took them up on the offer and the Republicans passed the Freedom to farm act which eliminated all federal subsidies to farmers. The result? The EU dramatically INCREASED the amount of subsidies they gave their farmers and absolutely refused to honor their side of the agreement to eliminate subsidies.

After three years of our farmers getting pelted by cheating Euros we decided the lieing jerks weren't going to make good on their promises so we reinstituted subsidies but at a lower level then before. As it stands a Euro farmer gets around twice the subsidy on a per unit bases as an American farmer does.

Two wrongs don't make a right.

[Jack_www]

Originally posted by Drogue

Human and animal waste is one of the most natural fertilizers. They have been used for centuries without problem. It is the artificial pesticides, insectacides and fertilizers that cause problems IMHO. Besides, you already import fruit from Latin America and coffee, chocolate and some fresh produce from Africa. Why would some more affect you? I am not sayting you have to change your import regulations. They would still have to pass health and safety tests. All I ask is that you stop subsidising and putting tariffs on the imports from developing countries.

Using human waste as fertilizer????? That is one sure way to spread dease.

[Lawrence of Arabia]

Using human waste as fertilizer????? That is one sure way to spread dease.

Vietnam uses human crap as fertilizer. Same with Korea (or at least they used to, dont know if they do it any more.)

[Dinner]

The main result of the 3rd world's refusal to talk about trade will be that the rich countries will sign bilateral treaties with the countries who have a "can do" attitude while the poor countries who have the "won't do" attitude will be frozen out of the system and will see their trade stagnate or decline.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3108460.stm

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Jack_www
Using human waste as fertilizer????? That is one sure way to spread dease.

True dat. Theoretically, it could be sterilized.

[Jack_www]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara


True dat. Theoretically, it could be sterilized.

I dont think that thrid world countries would have the money to do this and enforce that everyone did it. I would never eat food that was grown with human waste.

[HershOstropoler]

Originally posted by Oerdin


I'm sorry to have to inject actual facts into your little rant but the US actually removed all direct farm subsidies for three years during the 1990s.

You're a real joker.

"the Freedom to farm act which eliminated all federal subsidies to farmers. "

That act set a plan to phase out subsidies over several years - with some fat exceptions. And initially it provided extra subsidies as transition funding. It worked for maybe two years with high world market prices; as soon as they dropped, "emergency" farm subsidies were all the rage.

[Lawrence of Arabia]

Cancún's charming outcome
Sep 18th 2003
From The Economist print edition
Champions of the world's poor are celebrating the collapse of global trade talks. Some champions

“VICTORY to the people,” cheered a press release from a globophobic activist group, Food First, after the world trade talks broke down in Cancún on September 14th. This delight is widely shared among developing-country advocates and even among many poor-country governments. Great news from Cancún? What scandalous rubbish. The failure sprang not from principle, nor even from intelligent calculation, but from cynicism, delusion and incompetence. It is going to leave most people in the world worse off—and, without a doubt, those who will suffer worst are the world's poor.

At the very least, Cancún's failure has delayed progress towards concluding a trade round that would have given poor countries the biggest economic gains. Launched in the Qatari capital, Doha, in November 2001, the Doha trade round was explicitly dedicated to helping poor countries. Its chief goal was to lower trade barriers in areas where freer trade would help poor countries most, especially agriculture. With the Doha round in tatters, the day when rich countries repeal their grotesque farm subsidies and poor countries can finally sell textiles to the rich world without facing punitive tariffs has been pushed far into the future. The chances of concluding the round by the original deadline of December 31st 2004 are now nil. To finish it within five years would be difficult.

As if this were not bad enough, the breakdown in Mexico may have dealt a mortal blow to the multilateral trading system itself—a system that, for more than half a century, has underpinned global prosperity. Since the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was signed in 1947, with its basic principle that tariffs must not discriminate between countries, trade has been governed by multilateral rules. The World Trade Organisation, created in 1995 as a successor to the GATT, is the system's core. With 148 members (Cambodia and Nepal joined just days ago), the WTO is the only trade forum in which the needs of the developing countries can be given full weight. Decisions there are reached by consensus; every country, no matter how small or poor, has a veto. Nowhere else do poor countries have such clout.

Cancún's collapse leaves the whole system in peril. It comes less than four years after a similar flop in Seattle in 1999, where efforts to launch trade talks failed amidst street violence. After two such abject defeats in four years, the WTO is in enormous trouble. If it becomes entirely irrelevant to the conduct of trade policy—as it may, and as many governments and activists seem to desire—the developing world will come to regret the consequences bitterly over the coming years.
Who to blame

The breakdown was entirely unnecessary. Trade ministers were not trying to come to a final agreement on the Doha round; they were not even making difficult choices about exactly how far to open their economies. The purpose of Cancún was far more limited: to be no more than a mid-course stock-taking, a time to agree on principles for taking negotiations forward. It is extraordinary, and all the more shameful, that the ministers failed even to do this.

All concerned are pointing the finger, as one might say, at each other. In fact, nearly everybody involved deserves criticism (see article). For all the fine promises made at Doha, rich countries could see no farther than the interests of their own farmers. America's unwillingness to curb its cotton subsidies—which have an especially severe effect on poor-country producers—is unforgivable. So too is Japan's unyielding defence of its own swaddled rice farmers. And for all its ballyhooed efforts at reform, the European Union remains the most egregious farm subsidiser of all. Europe deserves added blame for trying to push poor countries into negotiating new rules on investment, competition, government procurement and trade facilitation, when most of them clearly did not want to.

Yet the rich countries did not wreck Cancún by themselves. Many poor countries saw the Doha round, and its promise to be pro-poor, as an excuse for making demands of the rich world while doing nothing to lower their own trade barriers. They forgot that trade talks require compromise. Egged on by a bevy of activists, too many third-world politicians got carried away by the thrill of saying no—ignoring the fact that poor countries actually have more to gain from lowering their own trade barriers than from persuading rich countries to lower theirs. According to the World Bank, over 70% of the benefits that poor countries might see from the Doha round would come from freeing trade with each other. By refusing to compromise, poor countries have come away with nothing.
Heading for a fractured world

Optimists, of whom there are still a few, point out that previous trade rounds have all taken longer than scheduled to complete. The Uruguay round took eight years rather than the planned three. Maybe the Doha round can be revived after all.

If so, the prospect looks remote. A presidential election is looming in America: starving peasants are not a pressing constituency. The European Union, with ten new members to absorb, is also going to be distracted. In any case, the energies of rich-country trade negotiators can always be deployed in a different—and, as they would see it, more effective—direction. Bilateral and regional trade agreements are already in favour with the Bush administration. In this setting, the poor countries have far less sway than they would have at the WTO; that is why American legislators prefer such deals. America is pursuing a regional trade agreement for the Americas, has signed bilateral deals with Chile and Singapore, has begun bilateral talks with 14 other countries, and promises many more.

This way lies a fracturing of the global trading system. Adding to the danger is growing protectionist sentiment in the United States. For the past decade, America has been the main engine of global growth: its trade deficit and its debts to foreigners have therefore been soaring (see our survey of the world economy). Trade deficits, particularly when jobs are scarce, increase demands for protection.

China, with its huge and growing bilateral trade surplus with America, has already been cast as chief villain. With a cheap currency, the argument goes, China is stealing American jobs. Once this scapegoating starts, protectionism follows close behind. Last week, senators from both parties introduced a bill that would put high tariffs on imports from China unless China adjusts its exchange rate. This particular measure will probably fail, but there will be others. In the mid-1980s, when America last had a huge trade deficit, demands for new protection (mainly against Japan) proved impossible to resist.

The collapse of the global trade talks may itself worsen the backlash. The prospect of a global trade round helped curb calls for new protection, making them seem disreputable; if there is to be no round, there will be less holding back. An American government concentrating on bilateral trade deals and domestic politics bodes ill for the global economy. And the idea that the EU might exercise enlightened leadership while America is thus distracted is, unfortunately, laughable.

The humbling of the WTO not only worsens economic prospects for the developing countries (as well as for the rest of the world) but also shifts the balance of global political power from poor to rich—perhaps decisively, and who knows for how many years. That is what the developing countries' champions are so busy celebrating.

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http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystory.cfm?Story_ID=2071629

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[realpolitic]

Originally posted by dexters


It's also very efficient at killing people by not feeding them. Although some radical environmentalists and radical conversatives (it's amazing how people in the extremes think alike) think this is nature's way of correcting overpopulation. I'm assuming you're not one of those nutsacks.

There are a wide variety of farming practices, high-tech no less, that doesn't need destructive chemicals to produe high yield crops.

Organic food a delusion of the hippies

I'll tell you what's not a delusion of the hippies. It takes 20 pounds of plant protein to produce 1 pound of beef, 5 pounds to produce poultry and dairy. How about skipping that hamburger and junk food occasionally? Eating lower on the food chain also lowers concentrations of pesticides.