When we read headlines about NAFTA 2.0 and trade policy, generally, the official narrative centers around exports and tariffs.  But if you were to ask a small farmer, you would hear a much different story that sadly includes an unimaginable number of farmer suicides following the advent of free trade agreements.

Food and agriculture giants write farmers and sustainable production out of free trade agreements in the same way that North American factory workers were written out of NAFTA.

Free trade negotiators have, behind the scenes, managed to legitimize monopoly industrial agriculture’s takeover of global food supply chains, and in the process, have obliterated the rights of farmers to determine best farming practices, along with the ability to support their families and contribute to their communities.

Global trade powers have, with great purpose, set about plowing under our treasured producer’s  rights, including their necessary control of seeds, land ownership, and the ability to choose production and distribution practices.

Overproduction at below-market prices, subsidies, GMO seeds and crops, dumping, unsafe and cruel farm-animal treatment and agricultural pollution, are all the legacies of globalized factory farming.  

The results are devastating not only to human and environmental health, but to the well-being of farming families and cultural communities the world over.  

We have a responsibility to demand better!

Trade Justice Alliance is pleased to welcome Timothy A. Wise, Senior Researcher and director of the Land and Food Rights Program at Small Planet Institute. He also directed the Research and Policy Program at Tufts University’s Global Development and Environment Institute. With a background as an economic journalist and an international development practitioner, Wise’s research and writing have covered U.S. farm policies, trade and agricultural development, agricultural biodiversity, food prices and biofuels, and Mexico’s maize economy under the threat of genetically modified maize. With a prestigious fellowship from the Open Society Foundations, Tim Wise’s recent book is titled: Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers and the Battle for the Future of Food, on small versus large-scale agriculture in the battle to feed the world, drawing on field work in Mexico, Malawi, Tanzania, Mozambique, Zambia, and India.  

Timothy A Wise has spoken and written extensively on the devastation NAFTA has rained on Mexico’s farmers.

Jim Goodman is the President National Family Farm Coalition, whose goal is to promote socially just farm and food policies and to empower family farmers in order to reduce corporate control of agriculture.  Jim is an organic dairy farmer in Wonewoc, Wisconsin, and a long-time member of Family Farm Defenders.

Family Farm Defenders (FFD) has worked for many years to support sustainable agriculture, farm worker rights, animal welfare, consumer safety, fair trade, and food sovereignty.

Timothy A. Wise, author of Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers and the Battle for the Future of Food

Jim Goodman, Author, Farmer, Activist: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/12/23/dairy-farming-dying-after-40-years-im-done

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