Agricultural dumping

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Agrardumping refers to the supply of agricultural products at dumping prices, i.e. significantly below production costs .

Criticisms

This criticism under the heading of “agricultural dumping” comes in particular from NGOs such as Oxfam , Germanwatch , FIAN and the former UN special rapporteur Jean Ziegler . The criticism is directed specifically against the agricultural market regulations of the industrialized countries - especially the USA , EU and Canada - but also against those of the emerging countries such as Brazil and Argentina .

Highly subsidized products from these countries, which with the help of subsidies ( export refunds ) come onto the world market at the lowest possible prices , damage agriculture in developing countries and destroy the livelihoods of small farmers . Rural impoverishment , urbanization , famine , world hunger and displacement are the consequences of this policy.

Critics of agricultural dumping also see disadvantages for the richer countries. In their agriculture, mass instead of quality would be promoted. This leads through increased fertilizer - and pesticide use to an unnecessary environmental impact . In addition, the subsidies would be distributed unfairly in favor of the large farms, while small organic farmers would also be inappropriately disadvantaged in rich countries.

Price dumping is a practice prohibited in the World Trade Organization (WTO) system of rules , which can be prevented by various trade barriers . In the agricultural sector, however, such regulations have so far not taken effect; instead, various special regulations such as export subsidies and dumping-promoting conditions of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank apply .

In Confessions of an Economic Hit Man , John Perkins describes, among other things, the strategy of agricultural dumping with the partial goal of bankruptcy of borrowers as a fulfillment condition for land grabbing and other structural adjustment programs (see also Washington Consensus ).

Changes in agricultural policy

Because of such criticism, the EU revised and partially changed its Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Since the last agricultural reform in 2003, it has been reducing export subsidies in favor of direct payments and, for example, has completely abolished export subsidies for dairy products since 2007. However, this decision was revised in January 2008 in view of the historically low milk prices of less than 20 cents / liter at some dairies. The Heinrich Böll Foundation criticizes the GAP because it puts smaller companies at a disadvantage.

Even after the abolition of export subsidies subsidize the OECD -Staaten, especially the EU and US agriculture in the order of 360 billion dollars in annual farm subsidies . This corresponds to seven times the volume of annual development cooperation . An end to export subsidies is by no means to be equated with an end to agricultural dumping.

The forms of subsidies that flow to producers in the industrialized countries are also being reviewed in the current negotiations on the WTO agricultural agreement .

literature

  • Germanwatch (Hrsg.): End dumping - secure food bases in the south! , May 2004, 111 pages

supporting documents

  1. ↑ G. Haverkate: Problems of the Subsidy Law in Individual Areas. In: Public Commercial Law. Special part 1. Berlin and Heidelberg 2013, p. 407.
  2. ↑ compacted to SAPs ( structural adjustment policies ) z. B. Liza Grandia (2011): Projecting Smallholders: Roads, the Puebla to Panama Plan and Land Grabbing in the Q'eqchi 'Lowlands of Northern Guatemala ( Memento from September 16, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF), p. 36: "When Third World countries began in the 1980s to default on this debt, the International Monetary Fund imposed structural adjustment policies (SAPs) which forced countries to privatize resources and promote exports over local food security (Danaher 1994). As we have seen in Guatemala's history of the coffee trade, export businesses demand externally-oriented, "pass-through" infrastructure, precipitating a vicious cycle in which a country applies for another development bank project, thereby falling ever deeper into debt. "
  3. ↑ Statistics of the EU Commission ( Memento from April 23, 2009 in the Internet Archive ).
  4. ↑ https://www.boell.de/de/2019/01/09/hoefesterben-wachsen-oder-haben
  5. ^ Daniel Goeudevert names the reasons for the hunger crises , Wirtschaft Zentral, February 9, 2015

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