ROPPA

• Regional integration has always existed in West Africa. It was disrupted by colonization and the creation of state frontiers. The first post-independence attempts to promote integration were based on a liberalist approach, open to the outside but maintaining internal barriers to trade.
• The UEMOA CET is among the lowest in the world, far lower than the tariffs declared to the WTO. ROPPA has found it impossible to dialogue with UEMOA officials, blind to the reality of the diversified, family-based agriculture that characterizes West Africa and interested only in promoting export-oriented commodities. By opening the West African market to the world, the CET has further weakened the local economy and created poverty.  
• The centre of interest has now shifted to the larger regional grouping of ECOWAS, including the powerful and protectionist Nigeria. ROPPA has invested strongly in bringing farmers’ concerns to bear on the ECOWAS agricultural policy through a broad process of consultation, and has succeeded in enshrining food sovereignty among its objectives. The battle now is for a trade policy which supports this agricultural policy by establishing a more appropriate level of CET.

COPROFAM

• The MERCOSUR region is characterized by deep inequalities among the big and small countries that compose it and between the rich and the poor within them. Unlike West Africa, a single model of agricultural is not dominant: export-oriented industrial agriculture exists alongside of a vast majority of family farmers. Different policies are required to support these different models.
• Farmers were not consulted when MERCOSUR was created. The initial approach to regionalization was liberalist. COPROFAM was born from the concerns of rural and urban social organizations as they began to realize the impact that regionalization was having on peoples’ livelihoods. Since then there has been a radical change of the political context in some powerful MERCOSUR countries. The challenge now is to see how regionalization can be transformed, building alliances between governments and the social forces that helped bring them to power.

Asian Farmers Association

• As in the other two cases, ASEAN’s approach to regionalization is based on liberalism. Markets have been opened up beyond WTO requirements. A number of bilateral agreements have been concluded. The concern has been to promote exports rather than to create a privileged space for exchange within the region. The livelihoods of small farmers are being threatened as a result.
• Civil society has not been consulted thus far. CSOs have begun recently to dialogue with ASEAN, advancing proposals for the adoption of a framework of food sovereignty, the promotion of domestic and regional trade over exportation, and civil society participation in ASEAN processes.

Discussion - Summary of major points

• Incoherence and lack of transparency are introduced into regional integration processes when the regional intergovernmental institutions that manage them are put under pressure to negotiate free trade areas with external powers (e.g. EU/ACP Economic Partnership Agreements). FTAs invariably have a negative impact on family farming. 

• Farmers’ organizations need to build their own regional networks to face the challenges of regionalization. They require strengthened capacity for on-going analysis of national and regional trade issues in a proactive mode, and more capacity for continuous two-way communication with the base. It is necessary to understand to what degree and under what conditions it is possible for two models of agriculture to exist; to what degree liberalisation policies leave room for manoeuvre. Farmers’ organizations need to be able to propose regional policies which can ensure family farmers’ access to land, natural resources and credit and can promote their insertion into domestic/regional markets, within a framework of food sovereignty. Capacity building and facilitating FO/government dialogue are important areas for IFAD support.
• Farmers’ organization in various parts of the world have developed alternative approaches and experiences that merit validation and diffusion, such as supply management and collective marketing in Canada. This too is an important role for IFAD. Farmers need to build alliances with other sectors of civil society: consumers, trade unions, etc., starting locally with initiatives like alternative markets and building up to national/regional levels.
• It is essential to undertake evaluations of the impacts of liberalist approaches to regional integration. Existing evaluations of FTAs tend to look at macro data and such issues as loss of government revenue, but not at the impact on small farmer incomes and local economies.
• Europe is tending to export a model of regional integration which is not adapted to the realities of the developing world and does not even correspond to the recipe that Europe itself adopted to build its own integration: support for farmers’ incomes; regional food security and a protected regional market. It is useful for farmers’ organizations in other regions to be acquainted with the history of the EU CAP.
• Developing country governments tend to blame the WTO for forbidding them to take measures that support small farmers, but most often this is not the case. It is important to explore to what degree support policies can be “protected” from the impact of trade policies and to what degree they are blocked by other processes like the structural adjustment programmes of the IMF/WB. It is necessary to look not only at trade but to propose coherent packages of public policies and measures in favour of the family farming model of agriculture.