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PM urges FAO to back Indian cause at WTO

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PM urges FAO to back Indian cause at WTO

PM urges FAO to back Indian cause at WTO
Photo credit: PTI

Visiting director Jose da Silva briefed about subsidy stance

Prime minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday asked United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) to take the lead to protect the interests of the poor and farmers at the WTO as industrialised nations are stonewalling on the public procurement issue, a livelihood concern for the developing countries.

He told the visiting FAO director general Jose Graziano da Silva, who himself had championed a “no hunger project” in Brazil some years ago, that FAO should take the lead at the WTO to ensure that developed countries do not become adamant on the issue.

The WTO negotiations ran into rough weather in July last as India, articulating developing countries' concern, blocked the trade facilitation agreement (TFA) after United States and European Union dragged their feet in working out a permanent solution to food security and public procurement.

The food security programme, along with public procurement, are aimed at providing subsidised food grain to one billion poor in the world, including 300 million in India, and this was negotiated at the WTO general council as part of a single undertaking at the Bali trade talks last year. Instead, industrialised nations pushed only the TFA, which is of interest to them.

“India does not stand in the way of a rule-based global trade agreement, but cannot sacrifice the interests and food security of the poor and the farmers,” Modi told the FAO director general when he called on him.

Food security is part of the mandate of Doha Development Round of negotiations at the 160-member WTO, which began in 2001. It has missed several deadlines right from 2005 as developed countries refused to walk the talk.

Though developed countries have pledged support to the issue, they are unwilling to move forward when it comes to framing actual rules at the WTO on food security and public procurement.

Food security cannot be driven by the interests of Cargil and other multinationals involved in agri-products, trade analysts said, wondering how tiny subsidies given to poor farmers in developing countries would distort world trade.

In fact, long-term dumping of food grains by United States and developed countries distorts trade. Recently, the European Union provided $400 million to its farmers to burn farm products after Russia imposed a ban on food imports due to the standoff on Ukraine.

Even today, India’s food grain prices are 30 per cent less than world prices and yet the tiny subsidy given to poor and subsistence farmers are shown as trade-distorting subsidies, trade analysts told FC.

Food security is a compelling issue in poor countries like Zambia, Ghana, Zimbabwe Malawi Nigeria, Egypt, Botswana Tunisia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Jordan apart from India, China and Indonesia.

Public procurement is not something that had been invented by India and other developing countries, trade analyst Abhijit Das, who is a professor at the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, said recently. He pointed out that public procurement was a policy adopted by industrialised nations during early stages of their development in the middle of the last century.

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