Free Trade?

Yellow Times -- The logic behind free trade is that prices are determined by supply and demand and that the most efficiently produced goods or services will always win out. In reality, subsidies, financing factors, and industrial oligopolies have created conditions that service only the needs of the powerful trans-national corporations. In the United States, just looking at the agricultural sector, the 2002 Farm Bill authorized farm subsidies totaling $248.6 billion, or about 40 percent of the net farm income. Much of that subsidy flows to major agricultural corporations rather than to farmers.

To put this in some perspective, according to the Institute for Agricultural and Trade Policy (IATP), it cost an average of $3.41 a bushel to produce corn in the United States and it sold internationally for $2.28 a bushel; it cost between $700-$800 an acre to produce rice which then sold internationally for $650 an acre. In economic parlance, this is called "dumping" and although it is supposedly illegal under NAFTA and the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO), it is a political expedient within the United States. According to the United Nations Development Program, U.S. farm subsidies cost poor countries around $50 billion annually in lost agricultural exports.