A similar story is unfolding in the case of tea. China already provides 80 per cent of the green tea traded on the international market. With growing interest in the health-giving properties of green and organic varieties in the West, China is gearing up to meet the upsurge in demand - even if this means flooding the market with tea at rock bottom prices to ward off competitors such as Sri Lanka and India.

Indians Demand Protection

And this is just one of the problems facing the world's biggest democracy India. Following a complaint by the United States, the World Trade Organisation decided in 2000 that India would have to remove trade barriers that previously protected its own, local producers. Ever since, Indian farmers have found it harder and harder to survive, as products that they had once produced for the home market are now undercut by cheaper imported alternatives. The country now ships in coconuts from Indonesia, and as a result prices have fallen 80 per cent. Likewise coffee prices have collapsed by over 60 per cent, and the price of pepper has plummeted by 45 per cent.

The most dramatic effects, however, have been felt in the market for edible oil, where India's domestic production has been effectively wiped out. Highly subsidised soya from the US and palm oil from Malaysia have flooded the market due to low import duties, and imports now account for 70 per cent of domestic consumption.

In response, activists from all over India have been at the forefront of demands regarded by most of the world's economists as the ultimate heresy - namely a call for the reintroduction of protective trade barriers. In September 2001, two former Indian Prime Ministers Shri VP Singh and Deve Gowda joined with political parties, trade unions, farmers' organisations, peoples' movements, and workers, to launch the Indian People's Movement Against the WTO, and to push for more protective controls on imports.

Trouble Brewing In Europe

While these demands for a return of tariffs are now being heard mainly in poorer countries, it is unlikely they will stop there. For just like their counterparts in India, the livelihoods of smaller farmers in the United States and Europe are also at risk.

Plans in the European Union to reform the Common Agricultural Policy may contain a welcome shift away from subsidising overproduction in favour of supporting greener farming methods. However, on its own this fails to address the central curse of the CAP, which is never adequately discussed, much less addressed in official circles. Namely that enforced global competitiveness is a curse. As a result European farmers are being asked to perform two mutually exclusive tasks at the same time. First they have to achieve ever greater levels of international competitiveness by increasing efficiency through larger scale, more intensive farming. But at the same time, they are being asked to maintain higher standards of social, environmental and animal welfare. The two simply can't go together.

Furthermore, this model of competitive, predominantly intensive agriculture is also being promoted in the countries of Eastern Europe that are currently seeking to join the European Union. In Poland, for example, the farmers are being forced into competition against the more 'efficient', large scale farmers of Western Europe. The result is that Poland will probably see the collapse of up to two million agricultural livelihoods.

Status Quo Arguments for 'Market Access' vs the 'Race to the Bottom' Reality

Export Models Only Success Story?

The one example that supporters of the export route to poverty eradication used to point to was the manufacturing and hi-tech sectors of the Asian Tigers.� Usually overlooked is the fact that their head start was only made possible by domestic protectionist policies in these countries, coinciding with the opening up of markets in the North. Nowadays, under the World Trade Organisation rules, such an approach by the South is impossible.

Even before the 1997 Asian crisis finally ended the region's 'miracle', relocation was beginning to threaten the domestic advantages of these original countries. Workers there had begun to earn higher wages and the response was for Japanese, Korean, Thai, Taiwanese, and other owners of factories to go offshore in search of cheaper labour.

Exporting Ruthless Job Competition

Those who think that more access to Northern markets for developing world exports will help the poor tend to highlight what they claim is the hypocrisy of the North in delaying opening up its markets like agriculture and textiles, compared with the South having been bullied into opening up its markets far more quickly.

However, even if� Northern opposition could be overcome and the last remaining barriers to the South's exports were removed, the international competitive pressures between these southern exporters would result in conditions worsening for the world's poor. Development priorities are and will be pushed aside in the race to the bottom in terms of price, and the suppression of workers' and environmental conditions necessary to grab these export markets.