Trade and Sovereignty
Once upon a time there were great trading companies, such as the Hudson's Bay 
Company and the British East India Company, operating under crown charters as monopolies. These great and 'honourable' companies were engaged solely in trading raw commodities, not in manufacturing or producing anything other than profits for their owners. Of course, these companies were in effect engaged in a lot more than just trading, as they brought with them to foreign lands their assumptions about their superior culture and civilization. Over time this was elaborated and was called colonialism. Britain's relationship to India is the classic example, but Canadians can hardly overlook the Hudson's Bay Company in relation to North American "Indians".
Contemporary 'trade' talk still refers primarily to commodities, from potash to oil, timber and fish, but commodity trading now also includes abstractions such as currencies and derivatives as well as material goods such as components for manufactured goods and finished products including automobiles, electronics and clothing.
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The British East India Company was an early English joint-stock company formed initially to pursue trade with the East Indies. It was granted an English Royal Charter by Elizabeth I on 31 December 1600, making it the oldest among several similarly formed European East India Companies, the largest of which was the Dutch East India Company. The East India Company traded mainly in cotton, silk, indigo dye, saltpetre, tea, and opium. The Company also came to rule large areas of India, exercising military power and assuming administrative functions, to the exclusion, gradually, of its commercial pursuits. Company rule in India effectively began in 1757 and lasted until 1858, when the British Crown assumed direct administration of India in the new British Raj. The Company itself was finally dissolved in 1874. The Hudson's Bay Company was incorporated by English royal charter in 1670 as 'The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson's Bay'. The charter granted the company a monopoly over the Indian Trade, especially the fur trade, in the region watered by all rivers and streams flowing into Hudson Bay in northern Canada. It functioned as the de facto government in parts of North America before European states, and later the United States, laid claim to those territories and was at one time the largest landowner in the world, with Rupert's Land having 15% of North American land mass. Its network of trading posts formed the nucleus for later official authority in many areas of Western Canada and the United States. With the decline of the fur trade, the company evolved into a mercantile business selling vital goods to settlers in the Canadian West. Today Hudson's Bay Company, now US-owned, operates retail stores throughout Canada. |
Food crops such as wheat and canola, pork and beef are handled primarily as commodities and traded globally, along with crops with smaller volumes, many of which are consumed locally or processed for domestic and foreign consumption. It is an operating assumption and ideological fixture of capitalist economics that trade – between provinces, states, and nations – is essential for economic growth, if not for life itself; Canada's agriculture policy has always been export oriented, expected to make a positive contribution to Canada's 'balance of trade', i.e., more exports than imports. What is studiously ignored, however, is the 'balance' of human and environmental welfare. Trade, yesterday, as well as today, has played a major role in impoverishing peoples and their habitat.
During the 19th century colonization of much of the world by the same powers that were the sponsors and beneficiaries of the great trading companies, this activity was 'protected' by what came to be called international law. In fact, as Antony Anghie (Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, Cambridge, 2005) tells the story, 'international law' was constructed by the imperial powers in the 19th and 20th centuries to protect their commercial interests in their colonies and in the territories assigned ("mandated") to them by the League of Nations after World War I. These "Mandated Territories" were the remnants of the defeated empires, like the Austro-Hungarian, and were to be granted the status of sovereign states in due course, when they had become "civilized" and taught how to govern themselves.
By the mid-twentieth century most of these territories and colonies were recognized as sovereign states, at least in name, and found their place in the United Nations, though the UN remained firmly under the control of the imperial powers that constituted - and still constitute - the Security Council.
We assume that independent, sovereign states are natural and good. But what if their sovereignty is undermined, or at least limited by, the commercial interests of the old powers, with 'international law' being called upon to protect the 'right' of their corporations to trade'? Not only to trade, but to organize the economy to produce the commodities desired by the trading companies and their patrons. That is how the plantation economies exporting food produced by ill-fed slaves or indentured labour came to be.
It is worth observing that the idea and formation of sovereign states, established by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, came eight years after the chartering of the British East India Company. In other words, the rights of corporations were recognized prior to recognition of national states.
The current 'land grab' frenzy must be seen as a current expression of the old trading companies and colonialism. (See Tanzania, page 4)
This is the essential history of the International Financial Institutions - the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization - and the various multilateral and bilateral trade agreements (NAFTA etc.). It also illuminates the variety of interventions aimed at protecting the oil interests of the great powers, always under the implicit legal doctrine of the 'right to trade'. Now the new doctrine of 'Responsibility to Protect' or R2P, (authored by Canada) has been called upon in the cases of Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan to mask commercial interests behind these selective interventions.
I have a vivid memory of sitting in a class on economic development in the London School of Economics in 1964. The lecturer went on interminably about the groundnut (peanut) scheme in Kenya, which was Britain's economic development project for Kenya, its newly independent colony. The groundnut scheme, like other development schemes imposed on colonies and former colonies, had little to do with the well-being and sovereignty of Kenya and a lot to do with British commercial interests. One can see the same pattern all over Africa and in the nations of the Pacific, even though the countries might not have been officially designated as colonies or mandated states. In country after country international commercial interests shaped and imposed monoculture plantations of crops for export. While the states claimed and celebrated their political sovereignty, their economies remained largely controlled by foreign interests. For the people, this has usually meant a lack of food sovereignty, since the productive lands were used for export crops - such as cut flowers, a successor to peanuts in Kenya, or green beans, for export by air to Europe, or palm oil in Indonesia and Malaysia to be refined into food oil and biodiesel for export. (Here one could mention Cargill as a key actor.)
The trade agreements being pursued today are no more democratic in how they are achieved or who benefits from them than the WTO or colonialism ever was. This is not really surprising since the kind of commodity trade we are talking about never was about public benefit. At best it is defended as an essential aspect of 'development' - and we know that development has never been about equity and justice.
If all of this is effectively, and in some cases explicitly, undermining state sovereignty, where does that leave food sovereignty? The intended meaning of food sovereignty is that management of food - I prefer not to use the word 'control' - is in the hands of the people producing, distributing and eating it, with as little distance between these activities as possible. It differs from state sovereignty in that it is not just a formal, quasi-legal sovereignty, but a practical and practised social sovereignty, constructed in such a way, and with such a consciousness, as to exclude corporate traders.
Perhaps, just perhaps, it is the practise of food sovereignty, all over the world, with its insistence on inclusion, equity, and respect for natural elements and local knowledge, that will be the key to a system which can replace the colonial and imperial systems that are bankrupting the globe.