PHA-Exchange> Food for a not fairly treated thought ERRATA (3)

[Claudio]

From: "Nance (PHM)" <nance-phm at netpratique.fr>

Allow me an input. It is important that PHA gets involved in these
debates on issues.
I found the "economics" of the piece very problematic. The text below is
what I had
prepared to send prior to George Kent's remarks and since I continue to
be in disagreement even after your corrections, here is what I would
like to say:

Point Number 2:
Seems to me that experts in the WTO  like Susan George have proved
beyond a doubt how the WTO is a dictatorial supranational instrument in
the hand of corporations. I don't think we can dismiss it lightly, and
PHM would break away from the main body of resistance to WTO to big
business dictatorship as it did in Porto Allegre's World Social Forum.
That was not the main sentiment in the PHM Assembly in Cuenca.

Point number 3
The assumption that lifting trade barriers would eliminate poverty is
the argument of Chancellor Gordon Brown and part of Oxfam- It is
vehemently opposed by all those who have studied the question a little.
Removing trade barriers is like eliminating a fence between the lion den
and the sheep enclosure: it means freedom for the rich country- or
rather their rich corporation, to eat the poorer weaker one.
At the UN, I  witnessed an Ivory Coast food producer who
challenged a Vice president of the
World Bank, noting that it is NOT true that opening the barriers of the rich
would work for the poor: simply because large monopolies have control over
South to North trade and small and medium size producers are excluded.
Furthermore, this type of S-N trade is also used to kill working people
in the OECD.

Point number 4:
 "Eradicating protectionist barriers may be one of the
best ways to put food on the tables of poor people."
This is another fundamental liar peddled by mainstream economist, as a
matter of fact, this sentence can be found - exactly as it is- in most
World Development Report of the World Bank, the kind of report which
proposes that poor countries of Africa eliminate all protectionism, and
we have seen the result in the collapse of food production domestically
from Kenya to Zambia.
People should read the Corean économist book: "Kicking away the ladder".

N.