PETER CAMEJO is chairperson of Earth Trade, a San Francisco-based import/export company specialising in environmentally sustainable development. He will be a featured guest speaker at the International Green Left Conference from March 31 to April 4 at the University of New South Wales. Camejo, formerly an activist in the movement against the Vietnam war, has also worked in campaigns promoting solidarity with Central and Latin America. He is currently a national executive member of the Committees of Correspondence, a left regroupment formation. He was interviewed for Green Left Weekly by PIP HINMAN.
Can you explain what Earth Trade does and how it has been going?
Earth Trade was established in 1992 to teach small farmers in Latin America how to farm organically. It has grown very rapidly and is now working in conjunction with small and medium producers in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico. This year, it will be importing hundreds of tonnes of new organic products into the US and Europe, and possibly also to Japan. Besides marketing better priced and better quality products, it is especially helping small farmers and worker-owned cooperatives in Nicaragua and El Salvador.
If peasants can make the switch to organics, we can offer a much higher price than they would otherwise get. Right now, in Nicaragua, peasants working with Earth Trade are receiving a 60% higher income for their products than a year ago.
Most of the small producers in Latin America are squeezed by wholesalers, distributors, the transportation and marketing people to the point where they have almost no margin on what they produce. By cutting across all these elements and connecting the producer to the final buyers, especially those in the organic market, Earth Trade is able to pass on a very large profit to these small producers.
For instance, the demand for organic sesame is currently twice the world production and about twice that of non-organic sesame. So where farmers can immediately switch their land to organic, they can start to receive these high prices. This year Earth Trade will become the largest importer of organic sesame into the US.
If the Democratic Convergence-FMLN candidate wins the Salvadoran elections in March, will this mean more opportunities for Earth Trade?
Earth Trade's business will grow regardless of who is in office, but it is better for us if governments are pro-environmental. In the case of El Salvador, the present president, Alfredo Cristiani, owns the country's agro-chemical business, and his party, ARENA, promotes it. In one particular instance, ARENA bribed a cooperative to spread pesticide on their organic crop because they don't want organic farming to take off. So there's a direct link between environmental and political issues.
While the US government preaches free trade to the Third World, it goes by a different set of rules, as evidenced by the recent threats levelled against Japan. What is your assessment of US-Japanese relations today?
Free trade doesn't exist. All governments try to defend their own corporate interests. The average Japanese citizen buys more US products, dollar for dollar, than vice versa. And yet the image that the average American has, is that Americans are buying Japanese, while the Japanese government is stopping its citizens from buying American. This is factually not true. It is true, however, that the Japanese are barring certain US products from entering Japan.
The US has been gaining on Japan in terms of productivity. But still, the US is manoeuvring to put Japan in a worse position in terms of trade by trying to lower the value of the dollar against the yen. This is something the US has tried to do over the last 10 years as a way of improving its balance of payments. So far it has failed to achieve its goals, so now the US wants Japan to agree to lower tariff barriers further and limit its exports.
I don't think there will be a trade war. I think that at this point, neither economy is suffering sufficiently to have the people who run them make the obvious error of provoking a trade war.
The US has recently lifted the 19-year-old economic embargo on Vietnam. What hope is there for the 32-year-old blockade on Cuba to be lifted?
The effort by the Clinton administration to end the Vietnam embargo clearly shows that a major wing of the powers that be want to move in the direction of normalising trade with Vietnam. The opposition to this is really not much more than a fringe layer inside the ruling circles in this country.
The main point being discussed in the US media was the 2000 US service people missing in action, something totally irrelevant to the trade issue. The point I made in the press is that there are no Vietnamese MIAs in the US, because the Vietnamese have never invaded the US, they have never bombed the US and they have never napalmed our children. When countries do this type of thing, they end up with MIAs.
The small effort — starting to grow — to demand the end of the embargo on Cuba has been given strength by this recent move. The question is posed: why maintain an embargo on Cuba when the US trades with China and Vietnam?
The Clinton administration claims it wants Cuba to have democracy, but it doesn't have an embargo on Saudi Arabia or a whole series of other countries which have a lot less democracy than Cuba. The UN voted against the US embargo with only three countries prepared to back the US: Albania, Romania and Israel.
The movement here is focusing on trying to change public opinion about whether the blockade is achieving its so-called objectives. Ending the blockade would make it easier for there to be additional democratic rights in Cuba. Cubans feel very threatened by the US, both militarily and economically, which has been part of the reason they have maintained certain limitations on their civil liberties.
Global Exchange, a non-profit organisation in San Francisco and the second largest provider of travel services to Cuba, has initiated the formation of an Association for Free Trade with Cuba. Some major firms, many of which have set up offices in Vietnam, have indicated that they would like to trade with Cuba, but do not want their names used for fear of retaliation. Some wings of the US business community are not necessarily opposed to lifting the blockade on Cuba. There is a division here, and it is important to take advantage of that to try to promote a more rational debate about this issue.