Farmers urge PM to reject developed nations’ WTO plans

G-33 countries,including India,Indonesia,and the Philippines,are lobbying hard to ensure that the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) is suitably amended at the ministerial meeting so that the limits on public stock holding and food aid is removed. The developing nations want that the acquisition of food stocks for food security for supporting poor people should not be treated as subsidies.

However,the AoA in its present form allows,what it calls,market distorting subsidies,up to a limit of 10 per cent of total production. The farmer groups have argued that the AoA was framed keeping in mind prices of 1986-88 when the prices were very low.

“It does not make any sense for India to trade off the very survival of its 600 million farmers and roughly 830 million hungry for the sake of a successful Doha round. India cannot dilute its position on the G 33 proposal and accept a Peace Clause which makes a travesty of the poverty and hunger faced my millions of Indians every day. Nor can India be allowed to mortgage its right to food and the right to livelihoods of the poor and the needy enshrined in the Constitution,” the letter said.

Once India implements the recently-passed Food Security Act,which entitles around 67 per cent of the population to 5 kg of subsidised foodgrains,the subsidies are likely to breach the 10 per cent limit.

While the WTO is working on a peace clause (PC) as an interim solution and India has conveyed that it is open to accepting it till an acceptable final solution is agreed to,farmers groups said that the clause provides only four year after which it will lapse. Further,“only a few crops can be supported under this provision. Also a large number of conditionalities are being imposed on this PC which will make it unusable and meaningless,” the letter said.

The letter also said that the US and the EU are openly continuing their domestic subsidies and export subsidies,with the US more than doubling it from $61 billion to $130 billion between 1995 and 2010,while resisting such moves from developing nations.