Ah Sugar Sugar

An editorial on the LA Times op-ed page last Sunday (8/28/05) provided a quick lesson in the ways “free trade,” as enforced by the World Trade Organization, is free for rich manufacturers and exporters while at the same time enslaving third-world workers trying to make a decent living.

The WTO has ruled that Mexico must repeal a tax levied against Mexican soft drink and juice products bottlers that use American-made high fructose corn syrup. The 20 percent tax on the imported syrup followed President Vicente Fox’s decision, in 2001, to nationalize many of Mexico’s sugar mills while simultaneously establishing a minimum price the mills paid the small farmers who grow and harvest the sugar cane.

Fox’s action protected the incomes of the many thousands of peasants making a bare living cutting sugar cane. Most of them still harvest with machetes, pursuing a way of life that hasn’t changed in hundreds of years. However, U.S. manufacturers and exporters, unable to abide Mexico’s protectionist stance, filed a claim with the WTO and easily won their case, since Mexico’s new rules were clearly protectionist and a violation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. As a result, Mexico must not only abandon her protectionist policies, but pay 300 million dollars in fines and penalties as well.

The Times editorial pointed out that while Vicente Fox has been forced to cease and desist from protecting peasant cane cutters in Mexico, U.S. taxpayers are coughing up about 1.2 billion dollars a year in subsidies to the corporations who control the sugar industry here. At the same time, our domestic producers have raised sugar prices at a rate two to three times greater than the rest of the world has experienced, which has netted them billions more on top of the subsidies.

It seems clear that U.S. business interests intend to use the World Trade Organization and the North American Free Trade Agreement as a tool to force others to “Do as we say, not as we do.”