The United States and Europe have been negotiating since 2013 the most ambitious commercial treaty in history.
The Transatlantic Trade Investment Partnership, also known as TTIP...
Surrounded by secrecy and developed behind citizens' backs, the TTIP is the new Trojan horse of the neoliberal project.
...and drive growth and prosperity around the world...
Economic growth for the benefit of big business at the expense of social and environmental rights.
Huge economic benefits are expected from reducing red tape, avoiding divergent regulations for the future.
Behind TTIP there lies an undercover coup d'etat by corporations of the sovereignty of the countries.
...in shaping the way we work and the way we live our daily lives...
Although they say that free trade benefits local communities and the farmers
because they could sell their products freely and on an international scale, this is totally false.
Free trade basically benefits the large businesses with headquarters in Europe and North American
to the detriment of the small farmers, whether in the North or the South.
We want industrial activity and we want businesses on both continents.
What we don't want is that big businesses which have subsidiary companies everywhere
can have benefits that other industrial initiatives don't have.
The big transnational companies are trying to impose their standards
for making more trade all over the sea. And this is their problem.
They mean that the governments, the EU,
are going to be obliged to change their rules in their internal market.
Of the 560 meetings organized by the Commission before the beginning of the official negotiations,
the greatest number were for the agribusiness lobby,
which reflects how important the approval of the treaty is for this industry.
As the European lobby recognizes, their priority regarding the negotiations is the elimination of any legal obstacle,
harmonizing the regulations and standards on both sides of the Atlantic.
Their North American counterparts seem to share the same objectives,
emphasizing the Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures,
as well as the hormones and growth promoting agents or the GMOs,
which currently create obstacles for the exportation of their products to Europe.
The negotiators have made their position about this pressure from agribusiness clear.
A market access for industrial and agricultural products and, of course, the rules of origen for those products.
We have the regulatory and standards group which focuses on technical regulations,
sanitary and phytosanitary regulations, primarily in the area of food safety...
And they say so, they call it "reducing trade barriers", "reducing regulatory barriers",
"reducing non-tariff trade barriers". These are the things that regular people describe as
protection for our food, guarantees about clean air and water, making sure that our products are safe.
It's true, our production costs are higher
due to very stringent animal welfare requirements, very stringent environmental requirements...
The object of the TTIP is to lower food standards and dietary health in the Union
because if we compare the laws, those of the European Union are much more restrictive.
The EU biotechnology approval process is slow and often influenced more by politics than science.
EU market should provide consumer choice for biotech and non-biotech products.
What we are really afraid of is that our current rules on genetically modified organisms
and the traceability of those, the labelling of those will be really impacted.
The European Union requires all products derived from biotechnology to be labelled,
which prevents the entry of many North American products.
In spite of ever-more permissive regulations in Europe,
the number of hectares dedicated to the cultivation of these products is still a minority.
In the United States, however, the transgenic crops grown there represent 40% of all those grown throughout the world.
In the majority of the countries of the EU what is of prime importance regarding GMOs is the precautionary principle:
if we don't know what impact the consumption of a food might have in the future, it is not to be sold.
In some leaked documents, what we have seen is that the US
are putting into question the application of the precautionary principle in Europe.
And it will have to be the consumers through their associations who in the end, when the product is on the market,
show that it creates problems for health. Of course, this means going against a multinational business,
which without doubt is much more powerful than the ordinary citizen.
Yeah, I am for labelling, I mean, but what I am really for is eradication.
As the TTIP could identify the labelling of the GMOs as "trade barriers",
this would give the industry a new weapon to block the efforts of consumers to regulate them in the United States,
as well as threatening European security policies and opening their borders to these products.
We know that 70% of all food In the US supermarkets contains genetically modified ingredients.
We have said in Europe: We don't want them.
And yet, under these new rules, it will be impossible to keep them out.
Today in Europe basically what is produced on a large scale is only one type of GMOs, the MON810 corn of Monsanto.
If we compare this with the United States, there they produce 150 or more transgenic crops, mainly corn or soy beans.
A massive permissiveness of GMOs production will lead to environmental consequences because as has been demonstrated,
the coexistence of transgenic and conventional, and ecological farming is totally impossible, due to the contamination.
There are experiences of communities affected by the use of phytosanitary products
associated with the transgenic plants resistant to herbicides. Specifically, the application of the star herbicide Roundap,
which is used in plantations of transgenic soy beans.
This could lead to severe consequences for the environment and public health.
The standards in the European Union that establish the maximum levels of pollution
currently block 40% of North American food products.
Hence the efforts on the part of agribusiness to eliminate the standards and unblock the exportation of these products.
We can say that transgenics are the maximum expression of privatization of life
and of the manipulation of life for private and commercial objectives.
Ultimately, the pursuit of profit by the big seed companies and the biotechnological industries
goes way beyond the question of what the transgenics are, and leands to sequestering agriculture, seeds and common property
and relegating the farmer to the position of someone the big agricultural companies of the sector can do without.
It can have a big impact on the rights also of small and medium size farmers
who are having it already difficult to compete now with big agribusiness
and that will it have even more difficult to compete after the trade deals.
The greater concentration of production in the hands of the corporations of agribusiness
has led to the reduction of the number of farms in the United States.
At the present time there are only 2 million North American farms versus 13 million in Europe
but the average size for a farm in the United States is 13 times that of European farms.
A lot of farmers will disappear. They will run out of their...
They will have to leave their farms because they cannot earn a decent living anymore.
This process is already going on. It has started since the markets have been more liberalized.
And this is also our concern. Who will produce our food in 15 years?
The same people who at the time made money with the real estate bubble, once the bubble burst,
looked for new sources of business in order to speculate and make money.
And what would be better than food since all of us have to eat every day.
We can say that we have gone from the real estate bubble to the food bubble.
The taking over of land by investment funds and international corporations of agribusiness
has greatly increased in the last years.
Just in 2008 gained control of 55 million hectares, a surface the equivalent to the size of France.
Every 6 days farmland the size of London is sold to foreign investors.
And in Europe we are witness to the disappearance every day of more than 1000 farms.
If the farmers disappear, we will have to ask who is going to feed us, who is going to ensure our food supply.
And the answer is clear: the big businesses of the biotechnological industry, of agribusiness,
the supermarkets, companies such as Monsanto, Bayern, Syngenta, Dupown, Nestle,
Procter & Gamble, Carrefour, Alcampo, El Corte Ingles, etc. And with these companies it is clear
that basically what they are looking for with seeds and with food
is to make money at the expense of the rights of farmers and of consumers.
Those big farms will produce mostly not food, but raw material for the processing industry.
Consumers can buy their food only in supermarkets. That will be processed food, is it healthy food?
Big farms need to produce for low costs so they use a lot of fertilizers, chemicals.
But, what is the quality of the food, what is the effect on the environment?
If the treaty were to be signed, it would also put an end to the small circuits
which have been created between producers and consumers, as well as the support necessary for local food systems.
And by promoting monocultures and intensive agricultural production methods,
it would endanger attempts to reform European agricultural policy
on the basis of a social, economic and environmental sustainable settlement.
A model that consumes 70% of the fresh water on the planet
and has led to the disappearance in the last century of 75% of the varieties of agricultural products
that human beings have been growing for millennia.
A system where a third of the arable land and 40% of cereal produced, enough for half the planet,
is used for intensive livestock production.
TTIP will undermine animal welfare standards. It will bring on an acceleration
of the intensification of animal farming in Europe and will lead to more animal suffering.
Using hormonal treatment to increase productivity and washing chickens with chlorine
could be examples of prohibitions that the European Union would have to suppress
to harmonize standards with the United States, without taking into account the concerns of European citizens.
One of the tricks in the EU bag has been the so called precautionary principle.
In 1997, the reason we were prohibited from the market was because we used...
excuse me... hyperchlorinated water.
Nutritious food will only be affordable for the rich people.
So what can happen now with this treaty is that a farmer in Slovenia (I have just spoken to him)
has to export his quality food for the rich Americans and the poor Slovenian people
have to eat the processed food that we import from the United States. That is a crazy system that we are creating.
We have witnessed for years the abduction of the previous model of agriculture and food consumption
by a few companies that control from the beginning to the end all the agri-food industry.
This has a very negative impact on the environment
as it involves food products travelling thousands of kilometres from the field to the plate
with the consequent dependence on petroleum and the production of gases with the greenhouse effect
and with the development of a model of irrational and superfluous consumerism.
The chain of production, distribution and consumption that the TTIP aims to promote even more with the transatlantic trade
is currently responsible for between 44% and 57% of all the CO2 emissions released into the environment.
A model in which one hamburger is made from the meat of 10,000 cows
and moves through 5 countries to get to the consumer.
A model in which food has to travel an average of 5000 kilometres from the farm to the plate.
We need a completely different paradigm of an ecological economy
which would relocate the processes of production and consumption, cutting the great distances
distances that are involved in transporting merchandise and natural resources.
The option of agroecology would do away with the huge agribusinesses.
And relocating the economy and agriculture would save greatly on fossil fuel but, above all,
it would create jobs in local communities where the added value would stay
and not go to the huge multinational companies with their production lines.
There are alternatives. Today there exist many initiatives on a local level - cooperatives of ecological consumption,
new ways of farming, urban gardens, ecological school cafeterias -
which support another type of agriculture and food consumption.
This is a real challenge for the future. Do the European citizens want to buy food from local farmers
who produce locally, who sell locally, who take care of the environment
or do they want to buy from very big enterprises with micro workers, monocultures and processed food?
That is what we are taking about.
Let us pursue food sovereignty, the right of the people to decide about what is grown and what is eaten.
In short, the pursuit of democracy, land and health.
It's big business versus citizens in both sides of the Atlantic.
The concerns are really about the rights of citizens and the rights of the environment.
And that is why it's important that the people from the US and from Europe
struggle together to have better standards.