GATT Changes Would Give Away the Farm : Proposed revisions would limit member nations’ ability to protect their land, farmers, food supply and health.

Farmers, citizens, beware. As the leaders of the world’s richest nations reach agreement in Tokyo on lowering the world’s industrial tariff barriers, they remain intent on pushing new agricultural trade policies that would jeopardize farmers--and democratic freedom--worldwide.

The Clinton Administration is backing changes in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which would eliminate agricultural price supports and production controls.

These changes would throw every farmer in the member nations into competition in the so-called “free market.” American farmers, who must continue to buy expensive labor-saving machines, fuels and chemicals, will be forced to compete against the cheap labor of poor countries. And poor countries will see much-needed food vacuumed off their plates by lucrative export markets.

No farmer will win this contest.

It is easy to see who will have the freedom in the international free market. The GATT revisions were drafted mostly by Daniel Amstutz, a former senior vice president of Cargill--the agribusiness giant. The revisions, as one advocate has said, are “exactly what exporters need”--the assumption being that what is good for exporters is good for everybody. But what is good for Cargill and other exporters is by no means always good for farmers.

In the United States, we have seen how unrestrained competition among farmers--increasing surpluses and depressing prices--has benefited agribusiness. These companies have remained hugely and consistently profitable through an era of severe economic hardship in rural America. The proposed GATT revisions would permit them to practice the same exploitation without restraint in the world at large, sliding at will to wherever products can be bought cheapest and sold highest.

What’s more, international bureaucrats would set health and safety standards for us all. Member nations and their local governments could not impose stricter regulations without risking severe economic penalties. The 111 GATT member nations would be limited in their ability to protect their land, their farmers, their food supply and their health. Worse, those who drafted and would implement the proposals, unelected bureaucrats.

In short, these proposals would centralize control of all prices and standards in the international food economy and place it in the hands of the few powerful corporations able to profit from it. The amended GATT would be a license issued to a privileged few for an all-out economic assault on the land and people of the world.

The GATT “reforms” offend against democracy and freedom; they offend against any intelligent concern for bodily or ecological health; they offend against every wish for a sustainable food supply. They make no sense, for they ignore--or reduce to fantasy--every reality that concerns them: ecological, economic, agricultural and cultural.

The issue here really is not whether international trade shall be free, but whether it makes sense for a country to destroy its own capacity to produce its own food. How can a government, entrusted with the safety and health of its people, conscientiously barter away the people’s ability to feed itself? And if people lose their ability to feed themselves, how can they be said to be free?

Trade bureaucrats speak euphemistically about “international harmonization”--the process by which trade standards of different nations are brought into chorus, often lowering standards tougher than those set by the GATT bureaucracy. The bureaucrats, and the companies whose interests they represent, would like to assume that the world is everywhere uniform and conformable to their desires.

The world, in fact, is made up of an immense diversity of countries, climates, ecosystems, soils and human cultures. Anybody interested in real harmony, in economic and ecological justice, will see immediately that justice requires not international uniformity but an international generosity toward local diversity.

And anybody interested in solving, rather than profiting from, the problems of food production and distribution will see that in the long run the safest food supply is local, not dependent on the global economy.

Nations should be left free and should be encouraged to develop local food economies that best suit local needs and conditions. It is foolish to jeopardize this most necessary freedom and diversity for the sake of an economic idea.