The Swadeshi Jagran Manch (SJM), the RSS’s economic policy wing, and a coalition of 80 civil society organisations have demanded top priority for sorting out the country’s food security concerns at the World Trade Organisation in their meetings with WTO Director-General Roberto Azevedo.

In two separate letters handed out to Azevedo, who is in India this week to discuss relevant issues for the WTO Ministerial Meeting in Buenos Aires in December, he was asked to ensure that a permanent solution to the problem of calculating food procurement subsidies and providing a special safeguard measure to protect farmers against import surges was reached at the meet.

“The ‘Peace Clause’ negotiated on the food security/stock piling front in the Agreement on Agriculture secured by India in the past meetings is something that is only tenuous with conditionalities that are not conducive to us and are difficult to implement,” the SJM pointed out in its letter.

The WTO needs to facilitate a permanent solution to the problem of ensuring that India’s food procurement programmes are not subject to disciplining, it said.

Reiterating the concerns underlined by SJM, the coalition of about 80 civil society organisations said that Indian farmers are threatened by the subsidy regime pushed by the WTO.

“On the one hand, it allows the rich countries to continue their huge domestic subsidies. On the other hand it is challenging even the minimal subsidies Indian farmers get through the MSP and input subsidies,” said Yudhvir Singh of All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements and Bhartiya Kisan Union.

India, as part of the G-33 forum of developing countries, has asked the WTO to exclude food procurement subsidies from being considered as trade distorting subsidies which are subject to a 10 per cent cap. As an alternative, the G-33 has proposed that the benchmark price for calculating the subsidies should not be the fixed reference price of 1986-88 when prices were much lower but current prices.

Vijoo Krishnan, from All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), which has 20 million farmer members, said, “Even the Special Safeguard Mechanism (SSM) which is essential to protect farmers from import surges is being outright denied to the country or being linked to tariff reduction commitments. It is clear that the outrageous subsidies given by the western countries are already distorting agricultural markets and threatening the very sustenance of our farmers and food security”.

‘No to new issues’

The SJM and the coalition of civil society organisations also underlined that the WTO should not take up new issues such as e-commerce and investments and instead needed to focus on pending issues from the Nairobi Round and rest of the Doha Development agenda.

The civil society organisations group also included Bharatiya Kisan Sangh, the South Indian Coordination Committee of Farmers’ Movements, the Right to Food Campaign, Forum on FTAs, and the National Working Group on Patent Laws & WTO.

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