Deadlocked: WTO talks head for failure

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Geneva, Jul 29 : As the marathon ministerial level talks attempting to clinch a global trade deal entered the ninth day on Tuesday, the possibility of a breakdown of discussions appeared imminent with India refusing to give in to attempts to weaken a measure called the special safeguard mechanism meant to protect poor farmers, despite enormous pressure from developed countries, especially the US.

The SSM enables developing countries like India to hike agricultural tariffs by imposing additional duties to protect the livelihood of its hundreds of millions of poor farmers from import surges and price declines of sensitive agricultural products like wheat and rice.

But it is a contingency measure and therefore used only when imports are substantive.

However, the SSM proposal available to developing countries continued to be weaker than a similar mechanism available to rich countries to protect the interests of their rich farmers from such cheap imports.

Meanwhile, India was backed by China at a crucial juncture when India suffered a blow to its efforts to protect the interests of its poor farmers after Brazil broke ranks with other developing allies due to their interests in farm export business. China had said it would not offer any concessions on special products (SPs farm products that are subjected to minimum or no duty cuts) and SSMs as it directly affect their livelihood of poor farmers. It wanted to demarcate rice, cotton and sugar as SPs.

Besides, India also had the backing of around 100 countries, including the G-33 (group of countries which has India, Indonesia, Cuba, Philippines and Venezuela, all with defensive interests in agriculture), the African Group, the ACP group including African, Carribean and Pacific nations, and the SVEs (or small and vulnerable economies).

Though there are major differences between the developed and developing countries over market opening commitments on agriculture and industrial goods, the stubborn attitude of the US made it tough for any progress on resolution of the SSM issue, officials said.

Despite tw-day efforts to resolve the issue using different formulations, including a proposal by WTO director- general Pascal Lamy and another one by the EU, the US rejected all new proposals saying SSMs would disrupt normal trade, than protect poor farmers. Claiming a “very high level of convergence on many issues", the WTO had said it would come out with revised negotiating texts on agriculture and industrial goods late Monday.