There is a need for constant reappraisal of global pacts. This is so on account of the liberalisation policies the country has adopted and also because India is one of the few developing countries with the clout and historical experience to creatively engage the rest of the world. Agriculture as apart of the WTO is clearly one such issue. Europe, Japan and South Korea, on the one hand, and America and the Cairns group, on the other, are the big protagonists and the real danger is that once they come to an understanding, we will be caught in the backlash — just like we were at Marrakesh in the early ’90s. Constant vigilance is therefore necessary.To recap, as the TV channels would put it, a few years ago the chambers of commerce and other gung-ho advocates of unilateral globalisation of Indian agriculture in assorted think-tanks argued that at ’80s prices India was taxing agriculture, so the negotiations would not restrict India’s flexibility in framing policy. It was pointed out, in this column for example, that the so-called negative AMS was falling drastically and in any case these definitions would be up for negotiation. More important, later when the WTO expert groups raised the question of subsidies to agricultural exports in India, the realisation soaked in that the turf was changing. To be fair, India’s negotiators at Doha kept the field open for a fair deal.On February 17, Stuart Harbinson, chairman of the special session of the committee on agriculture of the WTO, released the first draft of modalities for further commitments of the negotiations on agriculture. This was based on work carried out by the special session of the committee on agriculture and technical and other consultations following the mandate at Doha in March 2002.From the point of view of developing countries like India, it is a mixed document. First the bad news. Attachment 6 is on state trading enterprises. Since many OECD countries and others have moved away from direct government budgetary subsidies to working through commodity boards, etc, the effort is to bring such interventions under some discipline. But the Indian price intervention programmes are also through state trading enterprises and while all the disciplines won’t apply to developing country members, they will be required “to ensure that exports of a product by a governmental export enterprise do not take place at a price less than the price paid by such an enterprise to the domestic producers of the product concerned”.Now it is quite clear to me that India will trade in grain. Its northwestern regions have a comparative advantage and in certain varieties states like Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh are also picking up. Technologies with great potential like hybrid paddies are around the corner. I don’t agree with some influential international think-tanks and their local supporters that India in the future will be a large-scale food importer. Their imposition of the Chinese experience on India is a mistake because the Indian farmer has clearly demonstrated that, given the proper policy environment, (s)he can produce enough food to keep up with demand. I also believe it is a mistake to withdraw from grain trade as soon as we have a negative met forecast, even though lean season grain stocks are around 33 million tonnes. Some commentators who should know better have been writing that India never had a trade strategy. Way back in the Sixth Plan M.J. Manohar Rao, who unfortunately prematurely breathed his last last week, had in the annual plan shown that trade in food commodities — both export and import of grains, sugar and oil — was an optimal strategy for India. This is an option we will have to keep alive.On the growth aspects, many of our general propositions have been ignored, including the so-called livelihood clauses. But there is full recognition of a point we have been making — namely, that there has to be support for community-based institutions of farmers and producers’ associations for land and water development, development of markets, agro-processing and diversification of agriculture to support broad-based development of agriculture. We have been reporting in this column how some of these concepts have entered the post-Rio dialogues and now the arguments find a place in the WTO debates.Attachment 9 to the draft provides, for example, subsidies for concessional loans through established credit institutions or for the establishment of regional and community cooperatives, capacity-building measures with the objective of enhancing the competitiveness and marketing of low-income and resource-poor producers, government assistance for the establishment and operation of agricultural cooperatives and government assistance for risk management of agricultural producers and savings instruments to reduce year-to-year variations in farm incomes. As any reader of this column knows, these are Indian ideas and we must nurture them on a global plane.
