"Protecting Small Farmers and the Rural Poor in the Context of Globalization": Marcel Mazoyer presents a series of proposals to confront the impoverishment that the international market is causing for 1.25 billion people.
After a century of agricultural revolution and half a century of green revolution together with food aid, the moment has arrived to try to understand what it is that, in the functioning of world economy, maintains, produces, reproduces, and spreads extreme poverty and undernourishment. This is not, according to the perspective of Marcel Mazoyer, a problem of agricultural overproduction, but rather a question of underconsumption that reaches dramatic numbers due to the devastated buying power of farmers (and, consequently, the rest of the economic sectors closely dependent on the agricultural sector in developing countries). An international market dominated by the (subsidized) agriculture of industrialized countries and the extensive exploitation of low salary costs in some developing countries has resulted in unsustainably low market prices of agricultural products, trapping farmers in poor countries (1.25 billion people) in a blind alley with no way out. The solution, it has been demonstrated, is not in international free trade.
In "Protecting Small Farmers and the Rural Poor in the Context of Globalization", Mazoyer, professor of Comparative Agriculture and Agricultural Development at the University of Paris I, proposes a progressive increase in the agricultural prices in order to: boost the income of the underequipped farmers and thereby give them back the possibility of surviving, investing and developing; stop the exodus from agriculture; limit urban unemployment and poverty; raise the general level of salaries and other income, thus multiplying opportunities for the poorest countries while creating in them an investment capability that will allow them to expand solvent global demand and, as a result, spur world growth.
How? Mazoyer proposes a new method to regulate international agricultural trade that seeks:
--to establish large areas of agricultural free trade involving countries with comparable agricultural productivity and protect these "large agricultural markets" against the importation of surpluses at sharply discounted prices.
--to negotiate, product by product, international accords that establish as equitably as possible an average price for exportation as well as authorized exportation quotas for each of these markets.
--to reduce the differences in agricultural income by a differential territorial tax, more or less steep for favoured regions and null or negative for disadvantaged regions, in addition to anti-accumulation laws.
This means, concluded the professor, "opposing a blindly liberal globalization that excludes the poor, and supporting a thoughtful globalization, organized and regulated, which benefits everyone."
"Protecting Small Farmers and the Rural Poor in the Context of Globalization" will be available to governmental representatives as well as the International NGO/CSO Planning Committee for the preparation of the Multistakeholder Dialogue (MSD) during the World Food Summit: five years later.
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