CAFTA No Benefit for North American and Central American Family Farmers

As the new U.S. Congress faces ratifying the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), it's not too late for citizens to voice their objection that CAFTA, like earlier free trade agreements, will further destroy our nation's sovereignty, in this case, food sovereignty. CAFTA will be one more nail in the coffin of family farm agriculture, reliable domestic production, and healthy rural economies. What might surprise most folks is that, from what I've discovered on a recent tour of farms in El Salvador, CAFTA spells DOOM for their farmers and hopes of rural economic development, too.

Our tour, sponsored by the National Family Farm Coalition, brought seven farmers from Iowa, Michigan, Indiana, Montana, and Wisconsin, along with two from the Mexican farmer movement La Gente No Aguanta Mas to share experiences with Salvadoran farmers and government officials.

Ten years of farming under the North American Free Trade Agreement

(NAFTA) and eight years of U.S. free trade farm bills (Freedom to Farm and the 2002 Farm Bill) provided examples of free trade outcomes that don't recommend passage of CAFTA, the farmers of North America agreed.

The U.S. farm bills allowed farm prices for basic commodities like corn, soybeans, cotton, and wheat to fall without limit and only prevented a farm economic train wreck by sending government payments to farmers in the range of $15 to $20 billion a year. NAFTA delivered the incredibly low prices for corn and cotton to Mexican farmers, but not the government payments, creating unprecedented hardship in the Mexican countryside. Cheap corn has encouraged corporate livestock factories that displace family farm production on both sides of the border. Over a million Mexican producers have been forced out of agriculture and it is estimated that up to 600 poverty stricken peasants leave their communities every day often headed to the United States to look for work.

Increased fruit and vegetable exports to the U.S. under NAFTA have benefited only large producers: those under contract with big corporations, who employ displaced peasants for only four dollars per day, the Mexican farmers report. According to the Border Agricultural Workers Center in El Paso, Texas, the impact in the U.S. is lower farm prices and unemployed farm workers.

Surprisingly, Salvadoran farmers, both large and small, told us that they have "been there, done that." Trade concessions made by their government through the years have already brought the curse of low farm prices to their communities, and most were concerned that CAFTA would only intensify their poverty and emigration to large cities and the United States. Many farmer coops that were set up during land reforms following their civil war have collapsed because of low farm prices and their inability to satisfy the new international market demands of corporate food processors and retailers. Headlines in the Salvadoran newspapers cried of widespread crime and family tragedy fed by poverty and emigration. Two million Salvadorans now live in the United States and send dollars back to family members among the six million back home.

The manager of a coffee cooperative, who had been educated at an Iowa college, told how coffee, a big Salvadoran export, has been priced by the "free market" at the New York Coffee Exchange since 1989 when the United States withdrew from the International Coffee Agreement. Prices dropped 50% at the time, but an even worse calamity lay ahead. Viet Nam was encouraged to raise coffee and became the second largest exporter in the world in recent years (Sound like Brazil and soybeans?). Coffee prices dropped to 50 cents a pound in New York in 2000, which meant that the coffee coop could only get one cent per pound!

The U.S. Congress finally reacted in 2004 to the economic hardship in El Salvador and other coffee-producing countries by rejoining the International Coffee Organization. If a minimum coffee price and supply management are re-established, coffee producers will have a chance to survive.

After visiting with the well informed and friendly farmers of El Salvador, we North American farmers concluded that we want Congress to support fair trade agreements that include minimum prices, international supply management, and food sovereignty. We want Congress to reject free trade agreements like CAFTA.

George Naylor raises corn and soybeans near Churdan, Iowa. He is a member of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement and president of the National Family Farm Coalition 515-370-3710