WTO, Farmers, rice, and Korea

One of the things my stepson runs is packaging locally grown organic rice. We are now looking into exporting his milled brown rice, which we mill in a way that allows some of the bran but is not as bitter as normal brown rice.

So they asked me to google Korea...

Ah, remember back when the WTO was meeting in HongKong, that aside from the usual moonbats and anarchists, there were a lot of polite Korean farmers there demonstrating?
Well, although CNNI showed lots of nice films of the demonstrations, they didn't put it into context.

What was going on is that the WTO doesn't allow protectionist...So the Korean gov't can't subsidize their own rice farmers...and of course this means that these farmers will go broke because Thailand and Vietnam will now export their cheap rice to Korea.

Is this good or bad? Well, destroying one's farm industry is bad...But I'm an Okie...One of these days watch Grapes of Wrath, about the Okies displaced by...catepiller and other machinery during the dust bowl days of drought...that was bad...but fifty years later, it was good....because their grandchildren no longer are forced to plow behind a mule 15 hours a day, but live in condos in California...and the local farmers have more efficient farms...

But globalization is hard for the people displaced by change...Here in the Philippines, our local chicken raising farm never made a profit thanks to cheap imports from Vietnam...(well, we still have chickens...It breaks even because we sell the manure for fertilizer)...

The problem in the Philippines is that we have a higher standard of living...(another thing rarely discussed: The exploitation of the average Chinese worker...because they are very poorly paid...however, their pay and work is better than working like their peasant grandparents)...

Because of the low wages in China, much of our manufacturing has gone to China, (partly due to local corruption and instability too, of course).

As for rice: We live in the rice bowl area of the Philippines.

Alas, there is no way we can export mere rice to Korea and underprice these poorer countries...but we might be able to get a slice of the gormet/natural rice market...(No artificial fertilizer, no chemicals, no herbicides)...