Cooperation, Not Competition, To Develop Each Country

Philippe Grégoire

[Print version of this article]

Mr. Grégoire is President of the Mouvement National des Eleveurs de nos régions (National Movement of Cattle Breeders of Our Regions) in France, and a milk producer. Subheads have been added.

Hello to all. Welcome. I want to say something about agriculture, and to summarize what I have to say, I will start not with the current situation—which everybody knows—but by my proposal that the simplest thing is to get inspired by the Havana Charter of March 24, 1948, which was a charter that wanted to recognize neither the neo-liberal American extreme liberal system, which destroyed industries and farmers, nor the Russian model—the Soviet system, which took lands away from farmers and their right to property, and which failed. I will quickly give a few points about the Havana Charter.

Its principle was that it was totally opposed to free trade, and to what has become the World Trade Organization. The Charter proposed an approach very different from the current system, which was the development of each country based on cooperation and not on competition.

These are the main points proposed by the Havana Charter: There should be an equilibrium of balance in payments; nobody should have a budget disequilibrium. This is very important if you see the disequilibrium today. For example, in the euro, there are targeted deficits, seen, for example, in the very large deficit between Italy and Germany.

The second point is to prioritize cooperation. United Nations member states will cooperate within the domain of social-economic health of the UN under a proposal to adopt labor norms which are honest and equitable on each continent; if not, exchange cannot be honest.

Then, capital control is very important. Member states should take all measures to prevent investments in foreign countries being used as tools for foreign intervention. The green light is for state interventions to stop fake competition. Preferential agreements are possible in a cooperative framework; subsidies in certain circumstances are allowed. There can be the outlawing of dumping of products. There can be possible restriction of production volumes; excess production can be eliminated in certain circumstances, and basic food production should be considered as a special category. Therefore, states can stabilize prices; and prices on the exchanges can be separated from prices on the international markets, in order to avoid subversive imports. It’s simple: no dumping policies allowed! We don’t accept the lowest bidder principle of [British economist David] Ricardo.

For me, we can even lift the overall framework of the Havana Charter, and make it better. The Charter gives the farmers an economic model today.

Don’t Allow Monopolies

From the 1940s until the 1980s, there was a strong restructuring of the farm labor sector. Between the 1980s and 2000, the productive tools were taken over by cooperatives and private companies. Since 2000, we have had the very rapid, complete financial takeover dominated by the multi-nationals and trade unions.

Farming should never have been industrialized, because now the sector has a negative phase. There is what is called the monopoly of the production factors. We work with living animals, not like politicians who live with wind. We work with the climate; we’re planting plants which are harvested only six to nine months later. We cannot industrialize an agricultural model. We have to deal with the monopoly of the production factors.

Then, the current policy is aggravating free trade with lies. We’re being told that Macron went to China, and that we in France got contracts to export milk or pork. That’s not a good thing. Each time this kind of thing is done, what we discover is that at the end, it’s not the producers who get rich or get the profit, but only the big companies.

The issue is really to increase the income of the producers. The volumes of production do exist; what we have to do, is to stop wasting. There is about 30% of everything produced which is wasted in the current system. So, the issue is not volume, we just have to make it more rational. We have to irrigate the lands which need it, and not do absurd projects as we see today in France.

Beware Diversionary Debates

The last point is diversion of attention. We’ve been manipulated over the last 40 years by a farm press which is putting out lies which tell us that each farmer has to become bigger and bigger, to manipulate us as if we are little soldiers in the army of the mega-agrobusinesses. Beware about the messages we receive. We’re being told that we should attack the Greenies. We should attack, of course, eating insects and synthetic meat. This is pushed by people, and the Greens are pushing unrealistic projects and dangerous projects.

We are being manipulated to create divisions among us. The real issue is not the Greenies, the real issue is the wages of the farmers. The real issue is not the Greenies who have unrealistic projects which take attention away from the real problems. This is all a diversion of the debate. So, dear farmers, don’t waste your time, this is not the debate.

Thank you for this short intervention. I just want to add one thing, which is the question of the currency in France, with the euro. The euro is a currency which cannot function for farm trade, because it is a weapon for exports and imports, nothing else.

Conclusion: The Havana Charter is the basis to keep farmers alive and we have to manage prices and volumes of production in each country by independent people, independent from trade unions and political parties. Thank you.