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Dr. Cable: The right hon. Gentleman is quite right--protectionism always generates its own vested interests. Although, as I said, the European Union has an important historical reason for wanting to be protective, it could have, and should have, thought much earlier about the need to switch quotas to tariffs, for example, and gradually to level out the tariffs. Those issues were discussed more than a decade ago, but no action was taken on them.
It is important to stress that the British Government have a particular responsibility in the current dispute, as they are in a uniquely advantageous position to influence the outcome. Britain is generally recognised, both within the European Union and outside it, to be a relatively free-trading country. We also have the confidence of the United States, in a way in which most other European Union countries do not. We also have an historic responsibility for the Caribbean islands. Combining the three factors, it is an issue on which the British Government should be giving leadership. Although the Minister for Trade made sympathetic noises, I feel that such leadership has, so far, been absent from the dispute.
The Minister was quite right to put the dispute in its wider context. If the dispute is not dealt with quickly and properly, we are on a conveyor belt to a very serious international trade conflict. Other disputes are brewing. Only the other day, the House of Representatives passed very serious protectionist measures on steel, and many other measures are coming. The old principle applied by Jacques Delors in the context of the European Union applies also in the current context: trade is like a bicycle, we have to keep pedalling or fall off.
Truly proactive action has to be taken to keep the trading system open and free of disputes and discrimination. That is why I strongly support current
initiatives to launch another round of trade negotiations. That is partly to clear up some of the backlog of problems from the past, notably the limited progress on agriculture, but it is also to introduce new and difficult ideas. For example, international monopolies now apply not just in the banana trade, but in software and the media. The competition policies of individual countries are hopelessly inadequate and often incompatible. We need a global competition regime to manage the situation.
We have also seen an initially commendable effort to eliminate discrimination on foreign investment collapse pitifully in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, because it did not have full participation from all developing countries. The system has collapsed as a fiasco, and the World Trade Organisation has to take it on.
As the hon. Member for Middlesbrough (Mr. Bell) and others have said, another key issue is bringing into the World Trade Organisation key countries such as China and perhaps Russia, which are currently outside it. Probably the most difficult issue, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Mr. Baker) intends to refer, is the very tricky problem of reconciling different health and sanitation standards. We know from our experience of the single market in Europe that that is not easy. Either standards have to be harmonised or there has to be mutual recognition of standards; both involve a surrender of sovereignty, which is difficult, but there will be great friction unless the issue is dealt with.
Mr. Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South):
I have listened with amusement and sadness to the way in which the debate has unfolded. It reminded me of the parallels with a recently released film called "This Year's Love" which has had wonderful reviews. It is a film with Kathy Burke about a series of disastrous relationships, in which people hop in and out of bed with each other to no purpose and pursue ultimately futile and unsatisfying relationships into their common and individual disasters. The current obsession--this year's love for free trade--is embodied in the Uruguay GATT agreement that we have signed up to. We should take the fundamental issues that underpin the disputes about this agreement more seriously.
The Liberal Democrats' motion is sunk by the fact that it is based on the oxymoron of free and fair trade. There is nothing fair about free trade and there is precious little free about it. It is worth reflecting on the state of the world markets in some of the commodities that have been mentioned: three global corporations control 80 per cent. of world trade in bananas; three companies control 83 per cent. of world trade in cocoa; five companies control 77 per cent. of world trade in cereals; and fewer than 10 companies control 94 per cent. of the market in agrochemicals.
A corporate agenda of trade is increasingly overriding any notions of free trade. The powerful preside over the global economy. There is precious little that the weak or
those with a commitment to social equity can do to redress the imbalance when the rules are governed by such powerful vested interests.
History will judge the Uruguay round either as a corporate charter or--perhaps more appropriately--as a crooks' charter. It allows for the serious undermining of lines of democratic accountability within and between democratic states, in terms of what suits the needs of their citizens and the framework of internationalism that they wish to pursue. To those who say that the Uruguay round was a wonderful achievement that opened up world trade, it is worth reflecting on a comment from the World Wide Fund for Nature, which said:
Against all measures of sustainability, the regime has failed lamentably to have made the world a better place. It is driving us recklessly towards the illiberal, the irresponsible and the unsustainable. The disputes that we are addressing tonight deal with which corporations happen to control the biggest slice of today's markets; markets which themselves are riven by overcapacity, inequality and insecurity. The human and environmental casualties in the process simply do not matter. It is merely a matter of which corporate giants have their way today in relationships that they will abandon tomorrow.
The dispute strikes at the core of big questions that we must address about democracy and sustainability. The banana dispute is not about the shape or size of bananas, and it was a travesty for it to be misrepresented in that way when the dispute between the European Union and the United States emerged. It is about the right of countries to act individually or collectively to protect those who live and work in vulnerable economies.
Some think that free trade will bring the best of all worlds to all people. Anyone who has looked at the vulnerable Caribbean banana-growing economies knows that, if the US has its way and the dollar bananas dominate the whole market, those economies will be virtually destroyed.
It is tongue-in-cheek for the Conservatives to sing the praises of such free trade, because they never want to accept the consequences of it. When an economy is devastated by having all the rules removed, the only thing that can be guaranteed is what the UN consistently warns us about--that destroying the basis of sustainable economies in any one part of the world will mean that the people who live there flee in search of somewhere to survive.
It always amuses me to hear rallying cries about the free movement of capital, but when we have to deal with the consequences--the free movement of labour which goes in search of survival--the first thing that we hear, particularly from the Conservatives, is, "Not to our shores. These are just economic migrants. Let them fend for themselves somewhere else." Yet, time after time, we have been the ones who have removed the barriers that allowed those people to have sustainable economies and gave them a breathing space within which they could
produce a sense of diversity. Those who want to take away the trade barriers also want to throw up higher and higher human barriers against the floodtide of refugees that those policies create.
Mr. Wells:
If the small Caribbean islands cannot export bananas, the islanders' only other way of earning a living is to grow drugs, which they are increasingly doing because of the dispute. Is that a desirable outcome?
Mr. Simpson:
No, but it is a predictable outcome. Susan George, a social scientist, wrote in "The Debt Boomerang" about the way in which the poorest nations repay us in kind for all the damage that we do. We shift those countries from sustainable subsistence agricultures to industries that destroy the lives of many in our own northern industrial towns and cities. The hon. Gentleman is right to caution us about the hidden consequences of going recklessly down that path.
There is also a massive threat to democracy. Why should the United States threaten a trade war over banana regimes? The United States does not grow bananas, but it may well be a relevant factor that Carl Lindner, the head of Chiquita, just happens to be one of the biggest bankrollers of the American political process. Post-Uruguay, the corporate view is that one can expect the best democratic decisions that one is prepared to pay for. At every level of governance, corporations are increasingly insinuating themselves into the channels of democratic decision making, subverting accountability to the electorate and establishing a financial line of accountability to the corporation.
The history of Monsanto's interests in bovine somatotropin milk and genetically modified crops is littered with the company buying its way into public policy decisions in its favour. Last week, evidence was published to show that the science on BST milk is wretched, the politics corrupt and the consequences for human and environmental health potentially devastating. Monsanto faces a ruling either from us or from the European Union collectively that says that we are deeply unhappy about removing the ban on BST milk, because of the damage to livestock and the potential damage to human beings.
There are public movements against genetically modified crops. When Monsanto threatens to take us and the EU to the World Trade Organisation in pursuit of the free trade rights that it claims, it overlooks the fact that it has systematically sought to hide from politicians and the public the downside of all the magic science that it is sailing past us.
Monsanto has failed even to conduct the necessary broader-based research on environmental damage. It wants the right to pursue new monopolies in monocultures that it controls and that will be fundamentally self-destructive. It is an irony that, in the pursuit of free trade rights, Monsanto does not happily own up to the fact that it is invoking the part of the Uruguay agreement that gave it closed markets: the TRIPS agreements on trade in intellectual property rights. Those agreements allow the company to take out patents on the crops that it modifies and, in some parts of the developing world, it slaps patents on crops that it has found. Its rights to patent life are attempts to remove from common ownership things that we have had since civilisation has existed. The
company also seeks to take away rights from democratically elected Governments to protect the diversity of their environments and adequately to protect the health needs of their citizens.
If Monsanto obtains the rights to introduce the terminator technology as part of any WTO ruling, it will have the right not only to take ownership of life itself, but to take out a patent on death. The company says that it has encountered no problems in its experiments in the United States, but one should look at the vast acreage of GM crops on the prairies of Arizona where, apart from the Monsanto crops, the land is sterile. It has been soaked in the company's herbicide. It does not have a weed problem because nothing else can grow. When Monsanto is asked about the impact of its actions on biodiversity, its representatives throw up their hands and say that it is not an issue for them.
The company has manipulated the rules of the vetting agencies in a way that is technically brilliant, but ethically corrupt and degrading for humanity. We have to be prepared to make a stand against that. We easily forget, in this country and in Europe, that there is no public demand for GM foods and no agricultural need for them. The GM process has been driven past the advisory committees on the basis that it is the science that will save humanity, but it is the science that will turn bad research into huge corporate profits at huge social cost.
As a Parliament, we have been slow to catch up with the public's understanding of the issue. They know, in ways that we are only beginning to acknowledge, that Monsanto's claims about safety are bogus. The public know now that Monsanto's research on milk was fiddled. They know that the inclusion of GM soya with the rest of the soya crop was the result of calculated efforts by Monsanto to discover whether the public would buy GM produce if it were clearly identified. The company knew that the public would not do so, and it manipulated the regulatory regime in the USA so that it did not have to meet the obligation to identify it. The environmental damage falls outside the terms of the monitoring agencies in the USA.
As we debate the relationship between Britain, Europe, the USA and the World Trade Organisation, we must understand that people have given up waiting for a parliamentary lead. There are good reasons for that: we have a 200-year history of the public taking food safety disputes into our own hands. It was about 200 years ago when the first of Britain's food riots was caused by the adulteration of food. Farmers adulterated flour with sawdust and supplied the flour as part of the workers' wages. The riots were about whether anyone had the right to adulterate food in that way and I say with some pride that that was the momentum behind the Rochdale co-operative. The people wanted to be able to provide food that was safe for themselves and their children to eat. The same is happening now in the riots in India.
The "Cremate Monsanto" campaign is not waiting for a Government lead before burning the fields of GM crops that it does not want. The campaign is led by farmers and villagers who foresee the destruction of biodiversity in pursuit of corporate greed. It is echoed by the coalition of developing world countries who, at the Cartagena biosafety convention, said that they wanted the right to say no to such produce in order to protect their biodiversity.
Any international trade agreement that fails to deal with workers' rights or environmental and food sustainability will not be worth adhering to. Social movements in France and Canada are attempting to take direct action to challenge the corporate rights assumed by today's global giants.
When I talked to my family about this problem, it was lovely to discover that my mother had been a food freedom fighter during my childhood. She put me in a shopping trolley when we went around supermarkets when there was a food scare about Argentinean corned beef. My mother insisted that nothing should cross the front line of her fully loaded trolley that might poison her children, and she was absolutely right.
We should bear in mind the public movements staking similar claims in relation to genetically modified foods in today's supermarkets. If the United States of America and the food corporations are to threaten us with a trade war and World Trade Organisation rulings that define our actions as illegal, we must reply that the British public would probably deem a trade war to feed safe food to ourselves and our children a war worth fighting.
Those who want to open up the market without ethical or safety constraints are backing a horse that the public will not bet on. Rulings may go in their favour, but, if Monsanto and the USA win the right to dump unsafe foods in United Kingdom markets, we can overrule that right with a civic right to dump those products in the sea or leave them stockpiled at supermarket check-outs. We can assert our right not to buy something that we believe to be endangering our health, the environmental viability of our country and the international sustainability of relationships in vulnerable economies.
"the current pattern of trade and investment liberalisation has been accompanied by a worsening of all unsustainable trends--greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, biodiversity loss--as well as growing inequality, both within and between nations."
What follows is not only huge social undermining, but huge social protest.
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