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India firm on objections to WTO over food security
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Arul Louis | 24 Oct, 2014
Even as the World Trade Organisation's trade deal remained stalled due
to India's objections, an Indian envoy at the UN stood firm on them,
declaring a "permanent solution on food security with necessary changes
in World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules, if required, is a must and
cannot be kicked down the road."
Amit Narang, a Counsellor at
India's UN Mission, has said that the trade agreement cannot be "about
negotiating livelihood security and subsistence of hundreds of millions
of farmers."
While New Delhi was committed to the decisions
reached at a meeting of ministers last December in Bali that form the
core of the trade deal "and has no intention of going back on them," he
said, "the issue of food security is central to the pursuit of poverty
eradication and sustainable development in developing countries and must
be treated with the same urgency as other issues, if not more."
The
WTO's deal on global trade, known as the Doha Round for the place where
the current negotiations were launched in 2001, has been blocked almost
single-handedly by India over the agriculture issues.
On
Tuesday, in Geneva, WTO Director General Roberto Azevedo acknowledged
the impasse and announced that negotiations would continue. "I will be
convening meetings, but as always, the substance will be up to you.
Whether, and how, we make progress will be in your hands," he was quoted
as telling the 160-member organisation.
The crux of India's
objections are the WTO limits on agriculture subsidies at 10 per cent of
the total value of foodgrain production and on stockpiling foodgrains.
Complying with the Food Security Act passed last year that guarantees
subsidised foodgrains to about 70 percent of the nation's population
could result in breaching these limits leading to penalties for India.
Acknowledging
that concluding the Doha Round was urgent, Narang told the UN General
Assembly Committee that deals with finance and economics, "We must be
clear that this Round is not about the perpetuation of structural flaws
in global trade, especially in agriculture."
He added, "It is
indeed paradoxical that just as we assign a high priority to food
security as part of the Post-2015 Development Agenda and even as it has
been included as a prominent (UN) Sustainable Development Goal, there
seems reluctance in addressing this important issue as part of global
trade rules."
India has been under pressure from several
countries, particularly the US, to drop its objections to the deal known
formally as the Trade Facilitation Agreement.
Narang, Tuesday at
the same committee, raised a global financial issue that has been held
up by the US and suggested exploring options to end the impasse.
A
proposal to reform the governance of the International Monetary Fund
and change its votes quota that was agreed upon in 2010 and has the
support of President Obama's administration has been snagged in domestic
US politics, failing to gain the requisite votes to pass at the IMF.
"It
is important for these reforms to be completed by the end of this
year,” he said. “In case this does not happen due to non-ratification by
some members, we must explore every available option for completing the
current round of the quota reform process."
The reforms would
enhance the voting powers of India and emerging market and developing
countries to reflect that changes in the world economy.
Narang
said, "We need to have multilateral mechanisms that have full and
effective participation of developing countries, if genuine global
coordination is to be achieved."
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