WHAT IS MEANT BY AGRIBUSINESS?

Agribusiness as used in this paper refers to very big corporations that produce, process, trade, and market agricultural food products and agricultural inputs. Examples are corporations that produce inputs, such as seeds and fertilizers, and those that produce for supermarkets and retail chains. Transnational agribusiness companies are those that operate in the agriculture sector of many countries, usually with a huge volume of business.

Our unsustainable way of life is causing a crisis in our environment at a global scale. Climate change is threatening the future of our planet. The crisis is largely our own doing, and we also have the means to solve it, if we are willing to act on it. Farmers, fishers, and indigenous peoples, who live close to nature for their survival, are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. But they also have a special role to play in addressing climate change. What they need for survival - sustainable and ecological friendly practices - are also what are needed to heal our planet.

The agri food system across the globe is fast restructuring. While smallholder farmers remain to be a major stakeholder, situation changes from where “the farm producing what the household consumes and consumes what the farm produce” to “the farm sourcing inputs outside the farms and producing beyond the farm for other households/communities/cities as well”.

Rising food prices, increasing climate instability and food riots have sparked profound political changes around the world and put agriculture high on the international agenda. What kind of agriculture is best suited to respond to those challenges, however, is the subject of profound disagreement. Too much of the current policy debate on food security, climate change and agriculture assumes that industrial agriculture and related biotechnology are the only options for feeding a growing global population.

There is a need to distinguish between small-scale, subsistence family-based farming, small to medium scale businesses in the agriculture sector that is the predominant mode in the global south on one hand and; the operations of agribusiness (whether a large local corporation or transnational corporation) found in the agricultural sector of many countries that are typically large in size and capital on the other.

This research is intended to help contribute to this articulation process by identifying and consolidating small farmers' trade agenda in five countries, namely Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. These countries represent a good mix of both net agricultural exporters and importers, providing the paper with a balanced perspective of looking at trade and its impact on small farmers. The agenda of small farmers in these countries formed the bases for the formulation of their trade agenda in ASEAN. The research is divided into three parts.

A Special Product (SP) is an agricultural product “out of the WTO” in that they are not subject to tariff reductions, i. e. Countries can keep the right to maintain protective tariffs on certain agricultural products that are essential for food security, rural development, and farmers’ livelihoods. The G33 proposal is for 10% of developing country products to be exempt from tariff reductions, with an additional 10% of product lines to have limited tariff reductions. This would be somewhere in the range of 300 products. The US counter-proposal is for a mere 5 products!

The World Trade Organization (WTO) hailed the recent Hong Kong Sixth Ministerial Meeting last December 2005 as a positive movement towards the conclusion of the Doha Development Round. The round was supposedly geared towards ensuring that trade contributes to the development objectives of least developed and developing countries.

Agrarian reform, or AR, is the redistribution of public and private agricultural lands, regardless of produce and tenurial arrangement, to landless farmers and regular farm workers, to include support services and other arrangements alternative to distribution of land such as production/profi t sharing, labor organization, or distribution of shares of stock.

What is the GATT-WTO?

The World Trade Organization (WTO) describes itself as “the only international organization dealing with the global rules of trade between nations. Its main function is to ensure that trade fl ows as smoothly, predictably and freely as possible.”

During the Millennium Summit of the United Nations (UN) in September 2000, 147 Head of States and Governments and 191 member-states adopted the Millennium Declaration. The Declaration embodies structured development goals and targets. The adopting countries committed to achieve its targets to reduce poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation and discrimination against women by 2015. Expert studies projected the resources required to attain the goals and what are expected to be available.

Rice is a very important commodity in our lives, as it is the staple food of about 3 billion, or three quarters, of the people in the world. Two hundred fi fty million farmers depend on rice cultivation. Ninety percent of the world’s rice is produced and consumed in Asia.