UNFAIR TRADE

What does the World Trade Organization's Free Trade Accord of the Americas have to do with the war on drugs, you may ask. I'm going to tell you.

The South American countries that are blocking the enactment of this smoke-n-mirrors agreement, designed to facilitate the take-over of their economies by multinational corporations, are also the source countries in the drug war.

Our government, in justifying its fumigation policies, claim the poor farmers can survive on the cultivation of legal crops, which is patently untrue unless US subsidies are eliminated. Read it for yourself.

The United States said it yielded on issues like investment and service-industry openings, but Brazil was not modifying its demand for an end to all export and production subsidies for U.S. crops.

Sources close to the talks also told The Associated Press that the United States had asked for a significant strengthening of protections for copyrights and patents.

The way I read that is, the US agreed to let the locals have a better percentage of the profits on outsourcing than they had originally proposed but will still be taking over the rest of the resources through multicorporate ownership. They will also control the market for imported technology and medicines, in addition to their monopoly on food supplies through subsidies - paid for by your tax dollars by the way.

Agricultural subsidies have been a sticking point in free trade negotiations around the globe, causing the collapse of World Trade Organization talks in September in Cancun.

...Nations like Brazil, which has a strong agricultural industry, say subsidies rob them of foreign markets, and make their own farmers unable to compete domestically.

AP reports a thousand protestors outside the talks. Considering their track record in accuracy on these things, I expect there could have been many more than that. Whatever the numbers, they were motivated by concern for their fellow Latinos.

Protesters in Mexico criticized the effects of their country's 1994 free trade pact with the United States and Canada, and said they didn't want other Latin American nations to suffer the same kind of job losses and economic displacement.

So I ask you, what legal crop is the Colombian farmer to grow on his tiny plot that will provide a decent life for himself and his family, particularly in earth that was never that fertile and is now poisoned?