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India has insisted that a permanent solution for public stockholding and special safeguard measures to prevent import surges need to be priority for any farm deal that may be worked out at the WTO Ministerial meet scheduled later this year, a Geneva-based trade official has said.
At a recent meet of the WTO Committee on agriculture, India also said that elimination of unfair farm subsidy entitlements (Aggregate Measurement of Support) of some members needs to be part of the agenda to ensure fair playing field for all.
Some others, such as the EU, Switzerland and Japan, however, pushed for a different agenda altogether including a resolution for exempting World Food Programme (WFP) procurements from export restrictions and bringing about greater transparency in farm support measures.
“Now that it is becoming clear that some sort of a deal in agriculture is possible at the Ministerial Conference (MC 12), members are pushing their own agenda. India wants the long pending issues of permanent solution for public procurement, SSM and huge AMS (non-permissible subsidy) entitlements of a few countries to be addressed first,” the official said.
Meeting in Nov
The MC12, to be attended by Trade Ministers of WTO member countries, is scheduled to begin in Geneva on November 29.
Apart from India, many other developing members too, including China, the LDC group, the G-33 alliance of developing countries and the African group, demanded that priority should be given to issues that already have existing mandate, including public stockholding, SSM and cotton.
India has been fighting to ensure that its MSP programmes for various farm produce should not be mandatorily capped at the WTO as public stockholding was necessary for food security.
Although, there is an existing peace clause that stops members from challenging India's MSP subsidies when they exceed the prescribed caps, it is subjected to numerous conditions, and New Delhi, therefore, wants WTO to urgently deliver on its promise of a permanent solution to the problem.
India's demand for a SSM that will allow it to increase import tariffs on farm products beyond bound levels in case of import surges is also long pending at the multilateral forum.
“At the meeting, India said it remained unconvinced of the need for a WFP exemption resolution as it had not seen any evidence of the programme facing a problem due to export restrictions,” the official said.
Food security issue
It added that there was a need to have a safeguard mechanism such an exemption commitment so that food security issue does not arise in the supplying country.
New Delhi also made a case for including purchases from supplying country’s public stockholding stocks in humanitarian aid programmes.
Eliminating unfair subsidy entitlements of a handful of countries, mostly developed, should also be a priority at the WTO as it gave their farmers an unfair edge over others and also distorted world market, India said.
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