This year saw some fantastic sessions organised by a variety of international NGOS, all of which can be downloaded as MP3 audio files here.

To save you some time, I’ve picked out the ones I think are probably of most interest to readers of this blog:

• Climate-change policies and trade rules: Conflict or coherence? – Organised by the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), and Friends of the Earth Europe (FOEE).  Download the audio here.

• A new global contract for food and agriculture: What can the WTO contribute? – Organised by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP). Download the audio here.

• Human rights impact assessment (HRIA): A pertinent tool for informing and improving trade governance? – Organised by 3D for Trade — Human Rights — Equitable Economy. Download the audio here.

• Labour and environment provisions in bilateral and regional agreements: Challenges for the multilateral trading system

• - Organised by the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD). Download the audio here.

• Multilateralism, our global crises and strategies for the future – Organised by the South Centre and the Global Development and Environment Institute, Tufts University.  Download the audio here.

• How do agreements on trade in services have a role in the financial crisis and the measures to deal with the economic crisis? – Organised by the Third World Network (TWN) and Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO). Download the audio here.

• Fundamental human rights at work and the role of the WTO:  operational routes – Organised by the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC). Download the audio here.

That should keep you listening for a few hours!

Over the last 15 or so years (and going back to the collapse of the international commodities agreements in the 1980s), WTO, bilateral and regional free trade agreements have brought down the barriers to subsidised US & EU produce in most of the world’s nations.  The effect has been to progressively driven down the price of legal commodities in most countries, and force farmers into debt and off their land, as they find their own produce unable to compete with the cheap imports.

How many have reacted to this situation by switching to drug crops like coca for cocaine?  Seems a pretty logical choice, from their perspective.

One answer (the one proposed in the film) is to buy fair trade products, and support fair prices for the few million farmers who are certified to produce Fair Trade commoditeis.

Another – more serious – answer would be to push governments to re-negotiate international agreements to ensure that the prices of (legal) commodities support the billions of farmers around the world who grow them. (About 50% of the world’s population currentlyt depend on agriculture for their livelihoods.)

Have a look and tell us what you think in the comments below.

Reporter Bronwyn Herbert uses the program to examine some of the issues around the global food trade, and the broader globalisation of food and food production.

Unfortuntaley the focus of the program is mostly on food safety and nutrition, from a consumer perspective: “who polices the safety and freshness, the nutrition and additives?”

It doesn’t touch on many of the arguably more important and controversial issues around globalised, industrial food production: the environmental impacts and the impacts on the world’s poorest people – the farmers struggling to survive on their traditional lands in the face of this corporate-controlled, global food system.

But for what it does cover, it does so really quite well – have a read/listen.

We need the World Bank, we need the International Monetary Fund, we need all the big foundations, we need all the governments to admit that for 30 years we all blew it, including me, when I was president.  We blew it. We were wrong to believe that food is like some other product in international trade. And we all have to go back to a more environmentally responsible, sustainable form of agriculture.

Frankly, this is an extraordinary admission from someone like Clinton, and completely vindicates the work of so many organisations around the world which have worked tirelessly for years making this same point, but to governments which have refused to listen.

Why has the media almost completely failed to report such a revolutionary statement from the ex-leader of the world?

UPDATE: The link above to the UN report is dead, but the full text of Clinton’s original speech can be found at the Clinton Foundation site here.