Experience in recent decades has shown that non-subsidized small farms need agricultural prices that are sufficiently high for them not only to survive but also to invest and develop, a situation that free trade in agriculture clearly cannot offer the vast majority of the world's small farmers. On the contrary, continued free trade with its downward trend in real agricultural prices and its price fluctuations will condemn further hundreds of millions of small farmers and agricultural workers to stagnation, impoverishment, migration and hence to unemployment and low wages, especially in developing countries but also to some extent in developed countries.
Small farmer holdings on the point of collapse or perhaps only in difficulty need to be protected. This means organizing and regulating a universally viable international agricultural trade regime, if poverty and undernutrition in the poorer agricultural developing countries are to be eradicated, if currently inadequate global demand is to be boosted, if the world economy is to be revived and if global unemployment is to be reduced.
It is not a question of choosing between globalization and non-globalization but of choosing between blinkered liberal globalization that blocks and excludes the poor and a carefully considered, organized and regulated globalization that is beneficial to all and should receive broad-based support.
