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Newspapers yesterday heralded the collapse of the latest round of WTO talks due to the impasse between India and the US over tariffs and farming subsidies. The US agreed to reduce its farming subsidies, government money that helps farmers sell food at lower-than-cost-of-production prices the world over. However, it did not agree to India’s (and China’s among other developing nations) proposal that the developing nations be able to impose a temporary tariff on imported food if they determine that a glut of imported food was making its way into their countries. Farmers in countries from India and China to Ireland and Japan heaved a sigh of relief.

The Guardian carried a story two days ago about Haitians eating mud cakes to stave off hunger. Haiti, the first country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, has languished in the bottom of UN’s Human Development Index (HDI) for years. Earlier this year, Haiti featured in the news, this time due to food riots over the increasing cost of food and the inability of the vast majority of the country’s population to afford even basic food items. Mud cakes cost 1.3 pence and are the only inflation protected item in the country. Mixed with traces of margarine and salt, these cakes are made of clay and water baked together in the sun. For years, poor pregnant women in Haiti consumed these cakes for calcium and now the rest of the country is increasingly turning to this so called food. It is reported that Haiti’s food bill will leap by 80%, the largest for any country.

One big factor for the impoverishment comes from the collapse of agriculture, specifically rice, when Haiti liberalized it’s economy and allowed foreign food with the lowest tariffs of any country in the Americas. American rice flooded the country and destroyed farming in Artibonite valley, the country’s breadbasket. Farming sugarcane (as a cash crop for export) was another factor fueling the dependence on food imports, along with destroying the topsoil. Topsoil is a scarce commodity, virtually non-renewable as it grows only an inch or two over hundreds of years. In the Green History of the Earth, Clive Ponting writes: “Countries that had been largely self-sufficient in food and which grew crops mainly for local markets had become part of the world economy dominated by Europe, its white colonies and the United States. … A diverse agriculture was increasingly displaced over large areas by a monoculture, with harmful environmental effects, particularly in terms of damage to the soil and loss of biodiversity.” He writes that food production for local consumption grew slower than the rise in population and the rise in cash crop production causing the countries to rely increasingly on food imports to feed the local population. He further writes that there is hardly any quality topsoil left in Haiti.

About three weeks ago, the Guardian carried another story, this one a leaked report from the WTO that biofuels have been a major contributor to the global rise in the cost of food. The Bush government blamed increased demand from India and China as the cause for the increase in food prices and that biofuels were not the cause. The main reason that this report was suppressed was allegedly to avoid embarrassing the Bush government. While there has been much back and forth about whether the report was leaked or a work in progress, another report, this time by OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) arrived at the same conclusion.

I’m outraged. We suppress reports to avoid embarrassing people in power who hold false ideas and ignore contrarian facts to push their ideologies while people die of starvation or are forced to eat mud! We want to push policies in the name of “liberalization” and how this benefits everyone everywhere while evidence after evidence indicates that the only people it benefits are the agrobusinesses in developed countries. This worship of ideologies over evidence has caused so much damage in the world, whether the ideologies be religion, nation state or economics. Yet, we continue to believe in them, nay even trumpet their illusory success.

Well alas we’ve seen it all before
Knights in armour, days of yore
The same old fears and the same old crimes
We haven’t changed since ancient times – Mark Knopfler

Update: Thw WTO report has been officially published and if anything, it appears to be worse than what Guardian reported. See also this opinion by Devinder Sharma on the collapse of the WTO talks.