Revised WTO draft for farm talks will not solve food crisis

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: The revised WTO draft for farm negotiations will not be able to solve the current food crisis, but will rather accentuate it, contrary to the claims made by the director-general, Pascal Lamy.

The draft released by the chair of the agriculture negotiating committee, Crawford Falconer on May 19, fell short of addressing the food crisis, both on short-term and long-term basis. Distribution problem is one of the short-term measures that could have been addressed if the draft could have cared to ensure free and fair trade.

On the contrary, the draft has attempted to protect the high subsidy and tariff regime in the developed world, not calling for the desirable level of cuts. It doesn’t provide for conversion of all the complex and specific tariffs in the developed countries into their ad valorem equivalent, which is necessary for transparency and effecting realistic reduction. Rather the draft has sought to weaken the defence of the developing countries in agriculture in relation to their demand for special products (SPs) and special safeguard mechanism (SSM).

Although it has recognised the developing countries’ right to self-designate their special products based on food and livelihood security and rural development, it has outlined the minimum limit of 8% of the tariff lines. A maximum limit of 20% of the tariff lines has been proposed, implying the need for future negotiations.

Capping SPs at a percentage of tariff lines may help some countries that grow few crops to protect their agriculture, but not many tropical countries, which grow multi-crops. Therefore, invocation SSM can be a solution for preventing any possible import surge. But the draft has weakened the SSM for developing countries by saying that it can be triggered only when the prices fall below 30% and that it cannot be invoked for more than three to eight products a year. The conditions for invoking SSM on volume-based triggers is so stringent that it becomes almost ineffective.