Militant farmers today picketed Department of Agriculture calling for a halt on the importation of highly sensitive agricultural products that already suffered from the policy of liberalization and demanded the government to get out of the World Trade Organization (WTO). 

The 5th Ministerial Meeting of the WTO will be held in Cancun, Mexico on September 10-14 this year. 

Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas secretary general Danilo Ramos said “a moratorium on importation of rice, corn, coffee, garlic, onion and other vegetables, poultry, livestock and fishery products would give immediate relief to farmers who suffered from the burdensome impacts of agricultural trade liberalization.”

The peasant group said the grain sector, particularly palay (unhusked rice), suffered the most hit by the policy of importation and trade and import liberalization. 

“Aside from the rice dumped through the US Public Law 480, the NFA imported 1.14 million metric tons of rice, compared to only 260,000 metric tons of palay it bought from local farmers last year,” the KM P said. 

“Since the country’s adherence to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade-WTO in 1994, rice importations increased to 540 percent,” the peasant group cited.

The KMP added that vegetable growers in the provinces of Benguet and the Mt. Province lost more than P3.6 million last year due to the massive flooding of imported vegetables from China, Australia and New Zealand. In 2001, more than two (2) million kilos of vegetables was imported by the government from a low of 10,000 kilos in 1999.

“Benguet and Mt. Province farmers will lose P60 million a year once the WTO-Agreement on Agriculture is fully implemented,” Ramos warned.

“We have been at the losing end of this highly onerous and one-sided agreement. In fact, seven years after the WTO, the Philippines incurred more than US$5.2 billion agricultural trade deficit.” 

Big industrial capitalist countries primarily the United States, Japan and the European Union are expected to push and arm-twist developing countries for the full agriculture trade liberalization under the AoA and new issues for negotiations like government procurement, competition policy, investments, and trade facilitation in the Cancun WTO Ministerial Meeting.

Agriculture Secretary Luis “Cito” Lorenzo recently said that the government will demand for the removal of subsidies of developed countries and if not, the government would impose higher tariffs.

“Secretary Lorenzo is daydreaming. The US and the EU were powerful enough to force upon the rest of the world their brand of agricultural trade liberalization, while maintaining most of their protectionist barriers intact,” Ramos stressed.

He added that, “the WTO-AoA serves to consolidate and strengthen the monopoly control of US transnational corporations on the food and agricultural sectors of third world countries like ours.”

“The Cancun meet is no ordinary birthday party. It will deliver the final death blow to Philippine agriculture,” says Ramos.
“The Macapagal-Arroyo government and its panel of pro-globalization negotiators will push for the further sell-out of Philippine sovereignty and patrimony,” the peasant group stressed. #
 

KMP - 13 August 2003