The government has done India proud with its principled stand at the general council meeting of the World Trade Organisation in Geneva by insisting that the talks on the Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) and other issues, including the food security programme, should be taken up simultaneously as a single package. This was agreed to at the December 2013 Bali ministerial meeting, when the then Manmohan Singh government agreed on what is called the “Bali package”, under which the TFA, food security and nine others issues would be implemented as part of a single undertaking.
However, the developed countries showed that their intentions were not sincere as there has been no progress in the discussions on the food security issue since December, and their whole focus was on getting the TFA ratified as they are the major beneficiaries. It is clear that the trust deficit between developed and developing countries has not been rectified. India is, in fact, being more than fair in keeping the door open for the developed countries to save the Doha Development Round by saying it would watch the progress of the talks on food security and review the situation at the next general council meeting in October.
The general council is the WTO’s highest decision-making body. It has also suggested that it must immediately call a dedicated special session of the committee on agriculture to find a permanent solution to the public stockholding of food security. It has suggested the setting set up of an institutional mechanism which could find a permanent solution to the stockholding problem by the end of this year. In fact, there are several issues on agriculture that need to be discussed like the developed countries using the WTO’s Codex Alimentarius, which defines food standards, to reject exports from India and other developing countries, their unfair trade practices like non-trade barriers, besides the huge subsidies given to farmers under different names like the agricultural commodity export guarantee programmes and the United States’ latest crop insurance programme.
The US has, for instance, been subsidising its cotton farmers to the tune of $4.6 billion annually, and as former Union commerce minister Kamal Nath had pointed out, Indian farmers are fighting against the US Treasury. The US has been waging a running battle with Brazil, a big cotton exporter, and has had to pay Brazil $147 million a year since 2010 as assistance fund to that country’s cotton farmers after Brazil won a challenge against US cotton subsidies at the WTO in 2004.
