With close to 40% of US total trade now conducted with the East Asia and Pacific region, the US has its corporate guns firmly aimed on the region for further exports of pesticides and genetically engineered foods. Smoothing the way is APEC’s support to actively participate in WTO negotiations to free up agricultural trade restrictions, which currently help to safeguard nations and the rural poor from the operations of powerful foreign transnational corporations (TNCs).

If not checked, the implications for Asia Pacific regional agricultural and food production systems are profound. More landlessness; increased hunger and malnutrition; increased chemical pollution of groundwater, crops and ecosystems; more control by foreign agrichemical TNCs; and increased threats to people's food security and health is the recipe that APEC would serve up.

When is this volatile agenda being cooked up? On November 15-16, 2000 at the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) Leaders’ Meeting at Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei Darussalam. Feeding into the process is a round of APEC Ministerial, Senior Officials and Business Advisory meetings during the preceding week.

To highlight the concerns of numerous non-governmental organisations, small farmers, landless peasants, farm workers, and anti-genetic engineering campaign groups, a People's Caravan is marching its cause across the region.

Advocating "Land and Food Without Poisons" the People’s Caravan, coordinated by the Pesticide Action Network Asia and the Pacific (PAN AP), will travel through India, Bangladesh and the Philippines from November 15-30. Simultaneous activities will be held in Japan, Korea and Indonesia.

Central to the Caravan’s concerns is the environmentally and socially unethical promotion of pesticides by the US and APEC to bolster national agriculture towards export-crop production for the world market.

This is an alarming trend. As far back as 1990, studies in the World Health Statistic Quarterly, a World Health Organisation (WHO) publication, showed that in the South alone an estimated 25 million workers and farmers suffered from pesticide poisoning. To make matters worse, the annual and growing agrochemical market—worth US$31 billion in 1998—fuels the increasing environmental crisis, as well as contributing to the depletion of oil which at current rates of consumption is set to run out within 40 years.

Obviously, the intensive agricultural system has too many problems and needs to be phased out. More sophisticated farming systems that work with nature and the people are the real recipe for a sustainable future.

As Sarojeni Rengam, Executive Director of PANAP comments: "Intensive agriculture and the current move to genetically engineered rice and other crops is corporate friendly, anti-people, anti-environment, and anti-long term sustainable development, and will only serve the short-term interests of profit and greed of an already excessively rich few. It has absolutely no benefit to the majority or to the region. Community and environmentally friendly agriculture has to be the only way forward".