Seems it is the same old thing. America developing agreements with countries to benefit their agribusiness sector and for the good old boys who run things in Columbia to get richer.
Foreign investor rights--a typical pro-corporate, so-called "free trade," measure--would tighten the grip that large corporations have on the country's natural resources and launch a large-scale plundering of those resources such as timber and minerals. Without a government willing to nationalize such resources or, at the very least, make sure that the benefits of the commercial exploitation are widely spread, you can be sure that huge riches will flow to a handful of people, while most of the population is left with pennies.
Well who would have thought.
The plans would seem to encourage poorer farmers to grow coca rather than to get into other crops.
The FTA's grant of duty-free U.S. access for flowers and certain other commercial-scale agri-export crops will certainly put pressure on Colombia to expand agribusiness plantations for such exports. These plantations have been a disaster for the regular farmer. Indeed, under pressure in the 1990s from international lending organizations, Colombia implemented a program of "economic openness," which unleashed a tide of traditional cereals, rice and oats pouring into the country. As a result, 1.1 million hectares of cultivated land were lost. Arenas says that 300,000 farmers, then, turned to cultivating coca. "So, now, with FTA, they want to lower every tariff to zero which will devastate every farmer and make them grow coca,
So much of Americas foreign policy seems to be counter intuitive. What drugs were they on when this was all pulled together?
2 comments:
"So much of Americas foreign policy seems to be counter intuitive." - How right you are. I find it just as surprising as you do that there seems to be so little consideration of the consequences.
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