Farm reform 'would reduce disease risk'

Radical reforms of world agriculture are being called for

By BBC News Online's environment correspondent Alex Kirby

A UK conservation group says radical reform of the rules governing world agriculture would help to reduce the threat from diseases such as foot-and-mouth.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) says current policies have contributed to the present outbreak in the UK.

This round of WTO talks is a rare opportunity to put world agriculture on a sustainable basis

Tom Crompton
RSPB

It wants export subsidies on agricultural products phased out. And it says countries should be allowed to discriminate in favour of environmentally friendly farm imports.

The RSPB's call comes on the first day of talks to renegotiate the World Trade Organisation's agreement on agriculture.

The opening round of the negotiations, in the Swiss city of Geneva, will last until 30 March, but the entire round is expected to last for several years.

The RSPB says the discussions will "determine whether the environmental costs of intensive agriculture will worsen, whether countries will be free to promote more socially and environmentally sustainable agricultural practices, and whether the world's small-scale farmers will survive or go to the wall".

Marginalisation of farmers

It says the present rules, agreed in 1993, "dictate and restrict the extent to which member states of the WTO - around 140 countries - can control their own food imports and production, and the environmental and social impacts of their farming sectors".

With more than 800m people worldwide - about one person in seven - threatened by domestic food insecurity, an RSPB report says, it is the failure to compete with cheap imports that has undermined the production of staple foods in many developing countries.

The report is entitled Eat this: Fresh ideas on the WTO Agreement on Agriculture.

It says: "Shifts in agricultural practice, required under WTO rules, have led to the marginalisation of small farmers, the expansion of large farms, and increased use of monoculture, pesticides and fertilisers.

"Clearly, there is no one way to reform the agreement on agriculture. The RSPB has a series of concrete suggestions for the direction such reform might take."

'Social justice'

Its recommendations include:

• Changing trade policies so that they no longer prevent countries from choosing sustainable local production for their own food security instead of producing commodities for world markets.
• Ending export subsidies, which are largely "environmentally damaging and socially iniquitous". But there should still be safeguards for developing countries that have become dependent on subsidised imported food.
• Payments to support domestic production, totalling hundreds of billions of dollars in OECD countries, "should be more clearly targeted at environmental and rural development goals. Subsidies which merely promote increased production should be abolished".
• Finding ways to let countries discriminate between imports according to how sustainably they were produced. Again, there would need to be concessions to protect developing countries which incurred extra costs from sustainable agriculture.

Foot-and-mouth cases in the UK now exceed 600

Tom Crompton, the RSPB's global agriculture policy officer, told BBC News Online: "What we are calling for amounts to root-and-branch reform of the European Union's common agricultural policy, and of similar OECD and other schemes, like the export credits system in the US.

"This round of WTO talks is a rare opportunity to put world agriculture on a sustainable basis that will address the needs of social justice and also reduce the speed with which pests and diseases can spread, like this foot-and-mouth outbreak.

"Current policies, whether they're interventionist or liberal, lead to an intensification of agriculture, to an increase in the size of the average farm and the average herd or flock.

"They also contribute to an expansion of international trade in livestock and other farm produce. So they have certainly contributed to the spread of foot-and-mouth within the UK and beyond."