In the United States, there's an expression: what goes around comes around. And just like a boomerang, that's how de-coupling-the de-linking of agricultural subsidies from production volumes or types-has made a ten year journey from the U.S. Senate through the Uruguay Round and has now solidly entrenched itself in U.S. agriculture policy. In 1985, the Senator from Minnesota, Rudy Boschwitz, with the support of staff on leave from Minnesota-based Cargill Corporation, presented a radically new farm bill proposal to the U.S. Senate during the drafting of the Farm Bill.

The Boschwitz bill, officially called Boschwitz-Boren bill, was based around the idea of de-coupling-the de-linking of farm programs from prices, production, and farming practices. It included the concept of lump-sum payments to farmers that would be phased out. Here is how Senator Boschwitz described his bill.

" Our bill phases down subsidies and makes those of other exporting nations potentially so expensive that they will have to consider more market-oriented policies or consider shutting down their export production. Furthermore, our bill give the United States the moral high ground in the multilateral trade negotiations to cool the heated arena of world agriculture subsidies. It is interesting to note that the Reagan Administration proposed "de-coupling" on a global scale through the GATT process. De-coupled payments would be the only form of producer support ultimately allowed by the Reagan proposal."

While Boschwitz was not successful the first time around in Congress, the Reagan Administration single-mindedly pursued the same concept in the GATT and ultimately forced Europe, Canada, and Australia to adopt more or less this policy through the GATT negotiations process, knowing that this would eventually lead to this change in policy back in the United States.

They were right. The 1996 farm bill, called the Freedom to Farm or the Federal Agricultural Improvement and Reform Act (FAIR), is structured precisely along the de-coupling concepts of Boschwitz, with a few variations that make it worse.

The FAIR Act replaces the traditional commodity support programs for wheat, feed grain, cotton and rice producers with "market transition" contracts from 1996 through 2002. Payments are fixed in advance and decline over the seven year period. The Conservation Reserve Program is the only set-aside that remains in effect. However, only 50 percent of the land in the CRP in 1995 was eligible for re-enrollment in 1996. The contracts for CRP are adjusted to expire in 2002. The total amount of subsidies decline from $5.6 billion in fiscal 1996 to $4 billion in fiscal 2002. The total amount of subsidy for which farmers are eligible per farm drops from $50,000 to $40,000. Individual farmers can receive up to $80,000 per year on contract payments on three separate farming operations.

While this approach will clearly be a terrible disaster for U.S. farmers, it may be even worse for European farmers. From the moment that former EU Agriculture Commissioner Ray MacSharry abandoned Europe's farmers with his de-coupling-based "MacSharry Plan" it was clear that the same corporations who largely determine US farm policy were now also setting European policy.

While in the United States we have been under these rules for a long time, this approach is new. In testimony before the European Parliament's Agriculture Committee, representatives from almost every food industry all had the same message-if the GATT is not changed in the new negotiations they will need "lower" raw material prices-meaning lower prices to Europe's farmers.

The good news is that the current GATT/WTO agriculture agreement expires in the year 2000. This should be a chance to re-write the rules of global agricultural trade to put food security, environmental protection, and rural economic development at the forefront. Unfortunately, the same corporations who wrote and then lobbied for the current disastrous rules are already gearing up their massive public relations and political machines to defend the current rules and to advocate for additional changes, like the abolition of state-trading enterprises, that would make things even worse.

The US government, at the urging of the major agribusiness firms based in North America, has already announced new set of negotiating objectives that would make the world market even more monopolized and manipulated. Although we only get a limit amount of news from Europe, it is clear that Trade Commissioner Brittan plans to continue using trade policy at the level of the WTO to squeeze farmers off the land. What little news we get from Agriculture Commissioner Franz Fischler it does not seem like he has a plan to do anything about the crisis that WTO has created.

Farmers, consumers, environment, farmworkers and others concerned with food safety and food security are already beginning to meet at the local, regional, national and international level to develop a consensus position so that citizens, not just corporations, set the rules of trade.