WTO Rules Set To Devastate Biodiversity
Sept 4
http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/press_releases/wto_rules_set_to_devastate0.html
As hundreds of small farmers, indigenous people's groups and landless peasants start preparations to descend on Cancun in the next few days, Friends of the Earth added its voice to the groups protesting against the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its new rules that promise a devastating impact on the world's biological and cultural diversity.
The WTO's draft agreements on
agriculture, services and intellectual property rights will lead to increased
deforestation and the replacement of traditional agricultural crops, seeds and livestock
by large-scale monocultures, including those based on genetically modified (GM)
crops, Friends of the Earth said today [1].
The most
devastating impacts would come from agricultural trade agreements, especially
if they are based upon the recent US-European Union joint proposal for the
modalities of agricultural negotiations.
This proposal sets the scene for drastic market liberalization for
agricultural products, but leaves virtually untouched the massive direct and
indirect subsidies these trading blocks provide for their own export-oriented
farmers (except for a limited category of direct export subsidies).
The result will be devastating for small
farmers in developing countries, who will be unable to compete with subsidized large-scale
producers in industrialized countries.
These small farmers are the main custodians of the world's
agrobiodiversity, which consists of thousands of plant and animal varieties and
related traditional knowledge. When
these farmers disappear, this wealth of biological and cultural diversity
disappears too.
Friends of the Earth International
campaigner Simone Lovera said:
"The large-scale, export-oriented
agriculture that is promoted in current WTO proposals is also the main cause of
deforestation, especially in tropical areas.
"It is now widely recognized that
the recent increase of deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon is mainly caused
by the rapid expansion of soy bean production for the - mainly European - export
market."
The traditional knowledge of small
farmers and indigenous peoples relating to the use and conservation of
biodiversity is also being threatened by the growing practice of so-called
"biopiracy", the practice where Northern biotechnology industries to
patent seeds, traditional knowledge and other elements of biological and cultural
diversity of the South.
Developing countries have demanded a review
of the WTO's Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs)
agreement to protect themselves against such biopiracy. As part of these egotiations, African
countries have called for a prohibition of patenting of life forms.
Friends of the Earth international calls
upon all countries to put a halt to such forms of privatization and the commercialization
of biological diversity. We call upon
WTO members to protect small farmers and their agrobiodiversity against the
devastating impacts of trade liberalization and prohibit the patenting of life
forms and other forms of biopiracy.
Notes:
[1] See Friends of the Earth
International's report `Trade and people's food sovereignty' at