Panama agriculture minister resigns over US talks ("free trade" vs food safety)

Reuters ^ | Jan 10, 2006 | Doug Palmer

[toddlintown]

"foot and mouth was last seen in the U.S. in 1929"

Really? I saw an example last Friday on the Senate floor.

[Muleteam1]

No, what you saw was the disease called Foot In Mouth. It's a close relative to the disease called Head Up A__.

Muleteam1

[junta]

Stick your "tin foilers." And it is all done with subsidy that ends up in a corparations pocket. Without the subsidy the corn and bean racket bellies up the "family" farmer goes to work as a greeter and the corparation cuts out the middle man and farms millions of acres for greater "effiencies." Which will be so important to America that it will become a synthesis of government and business otherwise known as Facism, price setting on a scale that the legacy air carries could have only wished for. I'll take the "hippie" Amish farmer and others who realize farming is a cultural based undertaking versus the industrial model anyday. I grew up on a farm in the Illinois I know the racket.

[Mase]

And it is all done with subsidy that ends up in a corparations pocket.

80% of all farm welfare ends up in the hands of the large farming cooperatives. They use the money to undercut the smaller farmers or to buy them out. It's a travesty that should be corrected.

Without the subsidy the corn and bean racket bellies up the "family" farmer goes to work as a greeter and the corparation cuts out the middle man and farms millions of acres for greater "effiencies.

Small family farms will have a hard time surviving unless they are successful in filling a niche. For the American farmer to compete worldwide, there will continue to be consolidation to achieve greater productivity.

Which will be so important to America that it will become a synthesis of government and business otherwise known as Fascism,

With 50,000 farms producing about 50% of the total production, I'd say we're a long way from any oligopoly, like the legacy carriers, or anything that can remotely be construed as Fascism. You and I will be long gone before anything like that can occur so you might want to remove the tin foil in the meantime. You'll be much more comfortable.

I'll take the "hippie" Amish farmer and others who realize farming is a cultural based undertaking versus the industrial model anyday

Not if you want to feed 300 million domestically and compete in the international market.

I grew up on a farm in the Illinois I know the racket.

Then you should know better. No excuses.

[junta]

You might want to rethink the pace in which consolidation is happening. As it has happened in my lifetime 42 years I have seen farms go from one section (640 acres) to no less than 2000 acres as large. With interest rate and subsidy changes these indebted land hogs would vanish faster than you think into larger better capitalized integrated corporations. If you think the Andreas/Dole connection is sleazy that is nothing compared to collective agribusiness that would happen once the family corporation is ingested by the multinationals.

[lucysmom]

Its called "sustainable farming practices", a subsidiary of their plan for "sustainable development"

Well if current farming practices rely heavily on petrochemicals for fertilizer, pesticides, and weed control and oil is a finite resource, then development of sustainable farming practices makes sense.

[hedgetrimmer]

"Sustainable" means nothing more than the central control of resources. The soviet union ran on such an organization. "Sustainable development" was created by Gro Harlem Brundtland, head of the World Socialist Party, in her Brundtland commission, and was adopted as policy by the UN. It came to the United States through Bush Sr and Bill Clinton. No free people should ever consider that sustainable development or sustainable farming has any legitimacy in a free world.

[WoofDog123]

bottom line here is that 'free traders' do not brook dissent. Multinationals want borderless trade and uniform trade laws, period.

[hedgetrimmer]

Multinationals want borderless trade and uniform trade laws, period.

Wanna see a perfect example? The UAE ports deal.

[WoofDog123]

NAFTA, CAFTA, the WTO and the trade-law origins of the EU are better examples of this I think.

[hedgetrimmer]

Foreign governments got access to our ports first through an OECD initiative that was reinforced when the WTO (vehicle for CAFTA and the FTAA) was created.