The South Korea-US FTA is the coffin nail for South Korean agriculture. Will Taiwan, China be next?
Citing "Taiwan's survival," President Ma Ying-jeou, under pressure from the United States, pushed to open Taiwan to imports of lean beef from cattle fed ractopamine, as the starting point for Taiwan and the United States to resume negotiations on TIFA (Trade and Investment Framework Agreement, Trade and Investment Framework Agreement), and also to pave the way for the two countries to move toward signing an FTA (Free Trade Agreement, Free Trade Agreement) and joining the TPP (Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership, Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement).
Ma Ying-jeou worried that once the Korea-U.S. FTA took effect it would deal a blow to Taiwan's foreign trade, and domestic economic and trade circles, the business community and the media also loudly championed the necessity and benefits of signing an FTA. But is that really the case? The voices in Korea opposing and questioning the FTA deserve our attention even more (to read the series related to this article, please click here).
The crisis behind the Korean food wave
Anders Riel Müller is a Dane of Korean descent, born in a rural village in North Gyeongsang, Korea, and moved with his family to Denmark as a young child, where he also grew up in the countryside. His work experience spans Denmark, Canada, the United States and Korea, and he has long focused on issues such as agricultural trade, energy autonomy, food sovereignty, climate change and sustainable rural development.
In recent years Korean cuisine has swept the globe along with the Korean wave, and the Korean government has poured huge sums into promoting Korean food overseas, for example through TV series such as "Dae Jang Geum" and the travel-and-food program "Kimchi Chronicles" or YouTube, giving many foreigners who previously knew nothing about Korean cuisine a beautiful longing and imagination for Korean food, and also marketing Seoul as the capital of Korean cuisine.
Yet after living abroad for many years, Anders, on the recommendation of friends in his Korean hometown, went to dine at a famous Korean barbecue restaurant in Seoul, only to be greatly disappointed, as it was utterly different from the Korean cuisine in his childhood memories.
In contrast to the Korean government pouring large amounts of money into promoting Korean cuisine overseas, Anders found that it was becoming harder and harder to eat authentic Korean food in Seoul. That is because the vast majority of ingredients used in Korean cuisine are not produced in Korea: chicken comes from the Philippines, beef from Australia and the United States, soybeans from Argentina, and wheat from Russia.
↑Korean civic groups, through ascetic practices, demand that Korean President Lee Myung-bak stop the "Four Major Rivers Restoration Project."
Local farmers, environmental NGO groups and religious groups launched protests and refused to relocate, and even the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) threatened that if the Korean government did not stop the forced relocations, it would cancel plans to hold its 2011 world congress in Korea. Even in the face of the protests, Lee Myung-bak remained unmoved.
Paldang was not the only case. Anders said that in recent years Korea has faced a food crisis, and the solution has been to subsidize and encourage big conglomerates to acquire land in developing countries overseas to grow crops and ship them back home, hoping thereby to stabilize food sources and secure food autonomy, but ironically, the area of overseas land Korea has acquired is about 900,000 hectares, roughly equal to the million hectares of farmland that have disappeared in Korea itself over the past thirty years.
FTA backroom dealings GMO crops enter the door
During the FTA consultations between the Korean and U.S. governments, the Korean government did not provide relevant interest groups and civil society with the opportunity for democratic discussion, and Korean civic groups completely lacked channels to participate and speak out in the FTA process. Therefore, one month before the Korea-U.S. FTA took effect on February 11 of this year, the Korean Alliance Against the KORUS FTA, composed of representatives of 270 civic groups representing millions of workers, farmers, scholars and artists, held a candlelight vigil in the square beside Seoul City Hall, holding up banners reading "Abolish the KORUS FTA, Lee Myung-bak step down."
For the United States, the KORUS FTA can be said to be the largest international trade and economic agreement the U.S. has signed since NAFTA. This agreement deregulates to the greatest extent the two countries' financial services, manufacturing, agriculture and health care industries, and in particular further loosens Korea's environmental protection and public health legal restrictions.
"This lets the GMO crop seeds produced by Monsanto, DuPont and Dow Chemical enter Korea's food supply chain directly," said Jae Jun Joo (transliterated) of the National Task Force Against the KORUS FTA.
Jae Jun Joo said that multinational giants such as Cargill and Monsanto have even greater power to manipulate agricultural product prices. The FTA is not fair trade; the profits are not shared with farmers but all earned by multinational corporations.
This is also the point of the KORUS FTA most criticized by Korean farmers, as it creates extremely unfair competition for Korea's small farmers against large U.S. agribusinesses. The Korean independent media outlet the hankyoreh reported that Korea, because of the massive opening of agricultural imports, is estimated to suffer about two trillion Korean won (about 52 billion Taiwan dollars) in agricultural losses each year; of Korea's three million farmers, about 10% each year, roughly 300,000 farmers, will be forced out of farming. This means Korean agriculture will be finished.
Will Korea's today be Taiwan's tomorrow?
The Council of Agriculture dares not say: A Taiwan-U.S. FTA would shake the agricultural foundation
Chen Chi-chung, a distinguished professor in the Department of Applied Economics at National Chung Hsing University, said that when Taiwan discusses the FTA domestically, it mostly looks only at how much GDP can grow, how many jobs can be created, and how marginalization can be avoided, while neglecting to discuss the possible impact, and the agricultural sector also keeps silent and cannot propose supporting measures.
Chen Chi-chung said that according to a report the Council of Agriculture is unwilling to make public, if Taiwan and the United States sign an FTA, the annual losses would run as high as "tens of billions of Taiwan dollars" (because the Council of Agriculture classifies the data as "classified," the detailed impact cannot be known). If we examine our country's agricultural structure, Taiwan has 2.8 million farming household population, and if only 1% to 2% are affected, that is fifty or sixty thousand agricultural people hit hard.
"We have not seen the government propose any countermeasures for the impact on the agricultural sector," Chen Chi-chung pointed out. When Taiwan joined the WTO back then, the government still set up a 100 billion Taiwan dollar import damage relief fund, and the current Council of Agriculture Minister Chen Bao-ji, then head of the livestock department, even proposed a policy of leaving livestock farming in response to the impact on the livestock industry. But now, whether it is TIFA or FTA, the agricultural sector is not prepared for how to negotiate, and there are even no agricultural response measures for joining the TPP in the future.
"Compared with Korean farmers actively opposing the WTO and the FTA, Taiwanese farmers really need to stand up," Chen Chi-chung sighed. Korea's experience with the FTA is worth Taiwan learning from. If Taiwanese farmers do not wake up and the agricultural sector does not actively propose policy responses, the future of Taiwan's agriculture is very worrying.
References
Anders Riel Müller, "The Fight For Real Food In Korea," Korean Quarterly, Winter Issue 2012
Ben Cooper and Kellyn Gross, "Our Sister's Garden and the KORUS FTA," the hankyoreh, May.18,2012
IFOAM Issues Declaration of Support for Organic Management of the Paldang Land, October 14, 2011