GATT: a bad big idea - General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade

The Reagan and Bush Administrations, working mostly in secret, began in 1986 to make a set of changes in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (also known as GATT) adopted after World War II by the United States and seventeen other nations. The proposed changes would have dire economic and ecological effects on the more than 100 nations that now subscribe to the agreement, and would significantly reduce the freedom of their citizens. Whether or not the Clinton Administration will continue the Reagan-Bush agitation for these changes remains to be seen.

If the proposed revisions in GATT are adopted, it will mean that every farmer in every member nation will be thrown into competition with every other farmer. Farmers and other workers in the "developed" countries will find themselves competing with workers who earn nine cents an hour or two dollars a day. With restrictions lowered to international minimums, and under increasing pressure to make up in volume for drastically reduced unit prices, this will be a competition in land exploitation. Conservation practices now in use (and they are already inadequate) will, of necessity, be abandoned; land rape and the use of toxic chemicals will increase, as will the exploitation of people.

American farmers, who must continue to buy their expensive labor-replacing machines, fuel, and chemicals on markets entirely controlled by the suppliers, will be forced to market their products in competition with the cheapest hand-labor of the poor countries. And the poor countries, needing to feed their own people, will see the food vacuumed off their plates by lucrative export markets. The supranational corporations, meanwhile, will be able to slide about at will over the face of the globe to wherever products can be bought cheapest and sold highest.

It is easy to see who will have the freedom of this international "free market." The proposed GATT revisions, as one of their advocates has said, are "exactly what exporters need" - the assumption being, as usual, that what is good for exporters is good for everybody. But what is good for exporters is by no means always good for producers, and in fact these proposed revisions expose a longstanding difference of interest between agribusiness marketers and farmers.

We in the United States have seen how unrestrained competition among farmers, increasing surpluses and driving down prices, has directly served the purposes of the agribusiness corporations. The large corporations, which have thus remained hugely and consistently profitable right through an era of severe economic hardship in rural America, are clearly in a position to take excellent advantage of such competition. The proposed GATT revisions would permit them to practice the same exploitation without restraint in the world at large.

The U.S. proposals on agriculture were, in fact, drafted mostly by Daniel Amstutz, formerly a Cargill executive, and they are backed by other large supranational corporations. Made to order for the grain traders and agrochemical companies that operate in the "global economy," these proposals aim both to eliminate farm price supports and production controls, and to attempt to force all member nations to conform to health and safety standards that would be set in Rome by Codex Alimentarius, a group of international scientific bureaucrats that is under the influence of the agribusiness corporations. Pressure for these revisions has come solely from these corporations and their allies. There has been no popular movement in favor of them, although there have been some popular movements in opposition.

What the GATT revisions actually propose is a revolution as audacious, far-reaching, and sudden as any the world has seen. Though they would deny to the people of some 108 nations any choice in the matter of protecting their land, their farmers, their food supply, or their health, these proposals were not drafted and, if adopted, would not be implemented by anybody elected by the people of any of the 108 nations. Their purpose is to bypass all local, state, and national governments in order to subordinate the interests of those governments and of the people they represent to the interests of a global "free market" run by a few supranational corporations.

By this single device, if it should be implemented, these corporations would destroy the protections that have been won by generations of conservationists, labor organizers, consumer advocates - and, indeed, by democrats and lovers of freedom. This is an unabashed attempt to replace government with economics, and to destroy any sort of local (let alone personal) self-determination.

The intended effect would be to centralize control of all prices and standards in the international food economy, and to place this control in the hands of the corporations that are best able to profit from it. The revised GATT would thus be a license issued to a privileged few for an all-out economic assault on the lands and peoples of the world. It would establish a "free" global economy that would be a tighter enclosure than most Americans, at least so far, have experienced.