Losing Domestice Agriculture(2)

There is domestic worry about the trend of 'complete westernization' of the soybean processing industry and the hardship this causes for those whose lives depend on it. But the Agricultural Research Center considers this attitude unacceptable, arguing that 'if industry as a whole can withstand foreign investment and products, why can't the processing industry?' and 'if the automobile industry has so many joint-ventures, will it experience the same trend?' 

I'm worried that in a short period of time, dairy products, wheat, corn, or rice will also receive foreign investment. 

Labor-intensive agricultural products have been the mainland's traditional specialty, selling at 3.7 percent the cost of their Japanese counterparts, 4 percent of Korea's, and 5 percent of Taiwan's. After entering the WTO, the mainland's labor-intensive agricultural product exports increased rapidly, with around 12 percent growth year-on-year. Asia is our biggest market.  

Since entering the WTO, each year thousands of Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese agricultural businesses have come to the mainland to set up operations. They use our cheap land and labor to produce labor-intensive agricultural products and take foreign market share away from China. It can be forecasted that Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese firms will eventually become the driving force behind the mainland's agricultural industry. 

While inspecting Taiwan's south this journalist was told that when the US started to seize Taiwan's rice market share, the Taiwanese government began giving rice producers a yearly 30,000 yuan per-acre subsidy. They then went to mainland China where land costs 600-1,800 yuan per acre a year and built state-of-the-art agricultural parks, the labor-intensive products of which will be sold off in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, and European markets. 

Within the WTO framework, the idea of 'free and fair' trade in agricultural products is sheer nonsense. Whether it's conscious or not, we are basically allowing highly subsidized foreign agricultural firms to 'freely' seize markets that have traditionally been accessed by our farmers. 

In December of 2005, on the eve of the Hong Kong Ministerial's 'NGO Roundtable', WTO Secretary General Pascal Lamy and the Philippine delegation had this conversation: 

Lamy: Foreign investment in the Philippines has modernized your agricultural industry, turning peasants into farmers, increasing their income.. is this bad?