The North Carolina Food and Water Watch, an organization that keeps track of agricultural practices within North Carolina and around the world, is lobbying congress to reject the Trans-Pacific Partnership along with over 160 other agriculture based organizations.
The TPP is a trade deal between the United States and many countries along the Pacific Ocean, including Japan and Australia. The Food and Water Watch said the TPP hurts independent farmers and the Agricultural Industry in America.
Renee Maas, a senior southern region organizer with Food and Water Watch, says the trade deal would hurt independent farmers.
“Independent families and farmers are the losers in these trade deals,” Maas said. “What happens is it allows these big transnational companies to work all around the world for agricultural products to find the cheapest [goods].”
According to the Food and Farmers Institute, independent farmers earn 16 cents for every dollar spent at the grocery store buying products grown on a farm and only seven cents after covering the expenses they have. Most of the money made by selling these products goes to bigger corporations, making it harder on independent farmers because they don’t receive sufficient money to cover the costs of constantly producing products.
Thomas Grennes, an economics professor at NC State, disagrees. According to Grennes, trade deals tend to only benefit economies as a whole, and the TPP would help the growth of the U.S. economy.
“What can you do to make the economy grow faster?” Grennes said. “More trade is one of the few things you can do, because all you’re doing is starting off with all these barriers, quotas, tariffs, it’s a mutually profitable trade so if you just take away some of those you have a really low cost way to improve the economy.”
Trade deals such as the North American Free Trade Agreement have promised a boost in exports of agricultural products, as well as many past trade deals. For the past 30 years, despite an addition of about 15 trade agreements, the export of U.S. corn, soybeans and wheat exports has stayed at approximately 100 million metric tons, showing there hasn’t been a huge boost in exports as promised.
Some independent farmers feel that big corporations will benefit most from the trade deal, as they tend to only look for the cheapest products from all around the world. Independent farmers believe the trade deals should benefit the environment and protect American farmers rather than help big businesses.
“In 2015 we had a 1 billion-pound beef trade deficit with TPP [countries], and we think we’ll see more of the same with this trade agreement,” Maas said.
Trade can benefit the U.S. by helping the country receive products that aren’t grown in America such as coffee beans and bananas, according to Greenes. However, Maas sees trade as more competition for U.S. farmers, namely due to differences in labor practices.
“We need to make sure that other countries where we do business there are some comparable labor-environmental standards, and make sure we’re not getting cheap imported food at the expense of workers in other countries and at the expense of environmental protection in other countries as well,” Maas said.
Some critics compare the deal to past trade deals such as NAFTA, but unlike NAFTA, the TPP does not include China or Russia, two economic superpowers.
The TPP features countries such as Japan, Canada, Vietnam and Australia, whose economies are growing rapidly, creating potential for them to be major trade partners with the US.
Grennes described how different and complicated it is to work with trade partners with growing economies.
“It’s a completely different region, it’s a vastly growing region and the other point is it’s a region that starts with very high trade barriers,” Grennes said. “Japan being an extreme case, the argument they use in Japan is, ‘We suffered after World War II, some of our people starved to death, so we must be food independent.’”
The Obama administration has also claimed that this will lessen the economic influence of China in the region of Southeast Asia, as they are not part of the trade agreement.
