Radio Workshop

It's a Small World After All (Transcript)

by Gretchen Wilson

At the Union Square Farmer's Market in New York City, one stand is operated by Breezy Hill Orchards, a family-owned farm in New York's Hudson Valley. On a cold day last week, a handful of customers approach the tables loaded with baked goods, baskets of apples, and steaming pots of apple cider.

DOC SOUND - Unidentified man: "Small cider and ginger snap." Sound of apple cider. (fade under background noise.)

Martin Fuentes is one of the apple growers at Breezy Hill Orchards.

TAPE - FUENTES - Uh, the reason that they come to the farmer's market is for the fresh apples, the fresh cider. That's why they come for in here, the freshness, you know?

It's a freshness Fuentes says can only be found in apples grown locally. In the United States, growers face greater competition from apples produced overseas. These days, it is more and more likely to find apples produced on other side of the world than in the next county.

Peter Gregg is a representative of the New York Apple Association. He said that in order to gain access to U.S. markets, other countries have begun to sell apple products below the cost of production, a practice that economists call "dumping."

TAPE - Gregg - For the past five or six years, very cheap apple juice concentrate from China has been flooding the U.S. market place. And as a result, it's driven down the price for juice apples in the U.S. way way down. To the point where it's almost not worth picking 'em.

To allow U.S. apple producers to compete with the imports, three years ago the U.S. Commerce Department imposed a 51 percent tariff - or import tax - on the apple concentrate from China.

Here is the problem: The tariff on juice concentrate will likely be revoked under regulations of the World Trade Organization, the international body that seeks to liberalize trade. But without it, local producers can't compete with imported products.

The problem facing small-scale apple producers here is typical of the situation of many small-scale producers around the world. It is also at the heart of the impasse in WTO negotiations. Member nations disagree with how substantial trade liberalization should be, which is why negotiations have stalled.

On one side of the negotiations is the United States and the Cairns Group, a group of 17 countries, including Canada, Australia and Brazil. These countries want to drastically reduce tariffs in developed nations. They also want to reduce the use of subsidies - the government money used to support local farmers.

But other WTO members, including Japan, the European Union, and developing countries, say that without some tariffs and subsidies, other countries will dump products in their markets.

This is why the situation facing small-scale farmers in the United States is unique. While the United States has relatively low tariffs, it supports many producers with billions of dollars in subsidies in the form of disaster relief. And these subsidies make the United States one of the worst culprits of dumping in other markets.

Sophia Murphy is the director of the trade program at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. She says tariffs are the only leverage developing nations have to fend off agricultural imports from heavily subsidized countries.

TAPE - MURPHY - One of the slogans expressions that you hear often is that tariffs are a poor country's subsidy.

Murphy says that agricultural trade policy too often reflects the interests of the exporters and ignores the interests of the producers. This means that small-scale U.S. farmers have begun to share the same concerns as small-scale growers in other countries.

TAPE - MURPHY - And so, U.S. farmers, many of them, are identifying with farmers in the Philippines and farmers in Brazil, where their concern is access to their local market at fair prices. And the globalization of the food system has made it harder for everybody to access their local market at a fair price.

For growers like Fuentes who do not export their goods, selling produce locally remains difficult.

TAPE - FUENTES - I wish we are more successful than we are right now, but hopefully we will come better days than this.

Some U.S. apple growers argue that they can no longer afford to harvest the apples they grow. Ripe apples fall from their trees, only to rot on the ground. As talks on trade liberalization consider how best to create access for exporters, local producers will continue to find it harder reach the markets closest to home.

For Columbia Radio News, I'm Gretchen Wilson.