Cancùn: failure or turning point?

As usual, it is necessary to look at the facts from different angles: if we see things from the side of the great economic powers (the United States, Europe, Japan and Canada) then it can be seen as a failure; if we change the viewing angle and see it from the side of the poor countries (the so-called “poor front”) headed by China, Cancùn represents an historical turning point.

Nobody is against the WTO, but the idea that the rules of capitalism should be secondary to those of solidarity is an idea which is becoming increasingly widespread (and this is the great socioeconomic revolution of the third millennium).

Everyone knows the “famous” European law which gives incentives to the non-cultivation of some seed products like grain, barley, corn, rye, rape, sunflower, peas etc (the set aside) to support prices and the European market in the international panorama. I think that the entire General Directorate for European Agriculture (together with the parliament) should be called before an international tribunal for this criminal and unscrupulous policy.

Do you know how much the quantity of seed products annually retired through the Reg. EEC n. 1094/88 and its subsequent changes and variations amounts to? We have made an estimate on the low side: around 22.000.000 of tons of product, that annually would have been able to feed around 60.000.000 people (we repeat these figures are optimistically given and undervalued, hoping that someone proves us wrong).  Imagine how many human lives (above all children) could have been saved. Is this the European policy that we are proud of? 

After Auschwitz this is (together with others, still in progress) one of the great holocausts of our time and all of us are responsible for it. 

All that had to be done was to continue the production and give these excess products to the "poor countries", even at a political price. 

Cancùn has said no to this way of governing the world, perhaps without reflecting very much on these capitalistic aberrations. 

Cancùn has confirmed that such good values as the right to food, health, education, water and environment are "rights" that must be protected and not "commodities” governed by the merciless rules of the supply and demand. 

Cancùn has decreed the entry of conscience into capitalism. 

It is not so much the "the poor front" - the "G21" - with China, India and Brazil at its head – which drives this revolution, but history which asks for a different sense and a fulfilment for itself. The Berlin wall fell, decreeing the failure of communism; capitalism without a conscience is also collapsing; we are now waiting for an epoch where economy, society and the environment are reconsidered in a single equation. 

We are waiting for the birth of “Solidarity" as the only socioeconomic model that guarantees everything and everybody. 

At Cancùn, this path has found its start.  

Guido Bissanti