Box 1
Global finance dictates trade liberalization: A call to re-imagine trade between countries
The Washington Consensus—imposed by the IMF and World Bank through conditional lending—institutionalized neoliberalism. Its core policies included trade liberalization, privatization of state-owned enterprises, public spending cuts, deregulation and reregulation biased towards corporations. The World Trade Organization (WTO) further reinforces these principles through global trade agreements that favour transnational capital.
La Via Campesina (LVC) emerged as a global peasant resistance force to neoliberal reforms and the WTO. While peasant mobilizations have helped stall WTO progress since 2001, its 1995 Agreement on Agriculture still permits powerful nations like the U.S. and EU to push aggressive trade agendas that penalize support to small-scale food producers. Bilateral and regional trade deals have further deepened rural poverty. These trade regimes limit governments—North and South—from implementing food sovereignty policies. They classify domestic market regulation, price supports for small-scale food producers, and public procurement as “trade-distorting”, prioritizing corporate access over public interest.
In the past two years, peasant protests have erupted in over 65 countries, signalling the need for a new trading system. LVC is initiating a campaign to build a new, global framework for agricultural trade between countries that is rooted in principles of cooperation and transnational solidarity and defends each country’s food sovereignty. It is important that small-scale food producers’ and workers’ movements, and all those committed to food sovereignty join this collective effort to build a real economic alternative. For more: www.viacampesina.org
Box 2
The role of financialization in driving land grabs
Financialization plays a central role in the global surge of land and natural resource grabs, driving land concentration and undermining communities’ ability to feed themselves and others. Since the 2008–09 financial crisis, land has increasingly been treated as a financial asset. Around 65 million hectares have been acquired globally, with pension, insurance, and endowment funds investing approximately US$45 billion in farmland between 2005 and 2017. By 2018, these entities accounted for 45% of all farmland investments.
The current ecological crises—climate change, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem degradation—stem from capitalistic extraction. Yet financial and corporate actors now frame these crises as investment opportunities. Natural functions like carbon storage are rebranded as “ecosystem services,” assigned economic value, and traded. The estimated value of these so-called “natural assets” is US$4,000 trillion. Carbon and biodiversity markets, in particular, have fuelled a new wave of “green grabs,” with about 20% of large-scale land deals now linked to the bioeconomy. Carbon markets alone are projected to quadruple in value over the next ten years, intensifying pressure on land and dispossessing communities in the name of sustainability and “net zero emissions” claims.
Box 3
Deregulation and the neoliberal shift in global agriculture
The IMF and WB—through conditionalities attached to loans and other financing, and policy advice—have played central roles in increased financialisation, market deregulation and corporate friendly regulation in the food, agriculture and related sectors. These have resulted in land grabs, greater exposure of smallholder farmers to high price volatility, the concentration of markets and financial power by agribusinesses, and the expansion of polluting industrial agriculture.
Most recently, Pakistan’s deregulation of its wheat sector, in line with IMF conditionalities, has eliminated the Minimum Support Price and is winding down the Pakistan Agricultural Storage and Services Corporation (PASSCO)[1]. In Argentina, the IMF-endorsed austerity measures have led to mass layoffs and cuts in social services, food market deregulation and deregulation of the Law of the Rural Lands. In Ecuador WB-backed shrimp farming destroyed mangrove forests and displaced local communities, underscoring the environmental and social costs of such policies.
Such changes in regulatory environments are not limited to developing countries, nor are they enforced through lending institutions alone.
A case in point is the 1992 Blair House Agreement—a key bilateral deal between the United States and the European Union on agricultural subsidies. It led to the EU ending milk production quotas. Many small farmers in Europe faced increased competition and price instability. It is therefore no surprise that between 2007 and 2022 the number of small farms in the EU decreased by 44%, while the number of mega-farms increased by 56%.
The Blair House agreement later paved the way for the Agreement on Agriculture[2]—the first multilateral framework on agricultural trade, which dictated the contours of many subsequent FTA negotiations of the WTO—and enabled the globalization of agribusinesses, while marginalizing the peasantry.
In the United States too, deregulation policies have significantly impacted the agricultural sector, particularly the dismantling of the parity pricing model[3] and the supply management system based on quotas that once provided stability to small farmers.
Autonomous deregulation in wealthy countries has also contributed to the expanding power of financial markets and actors within food systems. This has led to speculative trading, record-high food prices, increased price volatility worldwide, and the opening of new markets for genetically modified seeds.
It is therefore quite clear that the neoliberal economic ideology that prioritizes financial markets over people is deepening inequality, imposing austerity measures that are weakening rural economies, and eroding public accountability. The ongoing protests in various countries reflect a growing resistance to the withdrawal of the state from its obligation to serve the people, not the markets.
If anything, we need more market regulation to protect people’s interest, not deregulation.
[1] Pakistan Agricultural Storage and Services Corporation (PASSCO), a government-owned entity which procures wheat and other staple crops at support prices to ensure fair returns to food producers, maintain strategic reserves, and stabilize market prices.
[2] The AoA is a WTO agreement aimed at reforming trade in agricultural products. It was established during the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and came into effect with the WTO’s establishment in 1995.
[3] Under Parity pricing the government set support prices—such as through price floors or subsidies—based on the cost of inputs and living standards from the base era, adjusted for inflation.