India on Saturday put up a tough stance at the World Trade Organization to ensure a permanent solution to the public stock holding of grains to feed the poor along with other contentious issues like special safeguard mechanism to shield domestic farmers and industry.
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The on-going World Trade Organisation’s ministerial meet in Nairobi is in choppy waters as key members find it hard to narrow differences on issues including agriculture and the future of the Doha round. The agreement also recognizes developing countries’ right to special safeguard mechanism aimed at protecting their farmers.
This and other decisions contained in the ministerial statement are meant to promote the Doha Development Round, though developing economies like India, Cuba and Venezuela feared that it didn’t go far enough and could have “serious consequences” for those countries. “Fingers crossed!”, she said in her tweets.
According to the draft decision on cotton, the members chose to phase out export subsidies for developed nations immediately, while it has been marked for developing countries not later January 1, 2017.
“We are hoping to have a Nairobi Declaration that will prepare us for a more serious negotiating round such as the one in 2001 when we agreed on the Doha Round”.
Credit Corporation in the United States is very powerful and developing countries can not compete with them, she added. Sitharaman said that some countries are pushing their agenda with undue haste.
During the talks, India had made a strong pitch on protecting its farmers.
Public food stockholding is crucial for India’s food security programme.
Coming after the launch of the TAPI gas pipeline linking Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, the WTO deal is the second big economic agreement for the government this week but the obstacles to growth remain daunting.
It was learnt that India was also not impressed with the way talks were happening as these were going on only between five countries – India, the US, EU, China and Brazil.
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The meeting, the first ministerial meeting to be held in Africa, had earlier hailed an agreement to remove import tariffs on 201 information technology products, marking the first major global tariff-cutting deal in 19 years.
