The Hindu Business Line : `G-20 has the interests of all developing nations'

THE just concluded ministerial meeting of the G-20 marks a milestone, particularly when the negotiations on agriculture are reaching a critical point in Geneva, says the Egyptian Ambassador to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), Dr Magdi A. Farahat.

Talking to Business Line here on the sidelines of the G-20 meeting which concluded here on March 19, the Egyptian trade envoy to WTO said that "we have not met at the ministerial level for a quite long time and it was essential to meet at the highest possible level to send a message to our counterparts that we are aware of what is happening and that we are engaged and firm so that when the negotiations restart in Geneva, there is a different atmosphere to the negotiation itself."

Asked how other developing countries from African and Caribbean region too were roped into G-20 meeting as observers, he said there needed to be a meeting with other developing countries simply because there have been some misunderstanding on the part of some of these countries as to what G-20 represents and how it is trying to take on board their interests.

"So this meeting in a sense brought them to our table. They saw us working closely and how we speak frankly to each other about interests of theirs. We have a paragraph on cotton in the declaration which is different from the one we started with from Geneva," Mr Farahat said.

To a query as to the convergence of position in the G-20, Mr Farahat said, "There is almost universal convergence on the subsidy maintained by the developed countries cannot be sustained for ever and that they are doing a lot of damage to other Asian, African and Latin American agriculture but more so to our farmers who are very poor."

Endorsing the Commerce and Industry Minister, Mr Kamal Nath's plea for a new world trade order, the Egyptian envoy said that "the global trade order has to be a fair one and fairness comes from the fact that the rich should not use their rich status and their richness to undermine those who do not have the same capacity" particularly when they are efficient producers without the capacity to dole out subsidy.

Mr Farahat said that there are divergences within the G-20 as "we have different level of economic development, trade regime and economic regime and there is bound to be slight differences but where we are agreed 150 per cent is that subsidies have to go, whether it is for farmers or exporters, with serious reform in the process of negotiations".

When his attention was drawn to Egypt's path-breaking contribution to the Non-Aligned Movement in the 1960s and its active engagement with developing countries, Dr Farahat said that even after the advent of WTO and also in its predecessor, GATT, Egypt played an important role. He said the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing (ATC) that ended in 2004 following the phase-out of the quota regime in textiles and clothing was arrived at by pressures from a number of developing countries such as Egypt, India and Pakistan who all had vital interests in textile business. Again, in the WTO Agreement on Agriculture, "a lot of work was from Egypt as well as from other developing countries".

He said Egypt now plays a key role in various groupings in WTO and in the "lead to the Hong Kong Ministerial in December 2005 Egypt will be the coordinator for the African group".

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