The contention of right to food security to protect the farmers has been doing the round in the centre stage of world trade talks for sometime now. The contention is whether developing countries are entitled to enjoy the right and in that regard whether those countries would be allowed cheaper imports that is likely to overwhelm local agriculture when the farmers' livelihood and food security are most important than the so-called free trade or 'market access'

This controversy has been raging the WTO. This issue is being challenged by the US which does not want a want a brake to be on its farm products which are heavily subsidized and thus 'artificially' cheap. No doubt, it is a big issue because the fate of hundreds of millions of farmers is going to hang in balance. Countries like Indonesia, Phiilipines, Ghana, Senegal and the Caribbean region where cheap and often subsidized food are dumped by the US, Thiland etc. have already raised their voices.

Developing countries want to be able to designate 20% of their agricultural imports as 'special products'(SP) which will be subject to no or very low tariff reduction as a measure. These are products designated as food security, farmers' livelihoods and rural develpoment. They also propose a 'special safeguard mechanism'(SSM) to allow the developing countries to impose higher duty on some imports in case of an increase in volume and fall in price which are likely to put pressure on the local production.

The SP and SSM have already been reached a deala few years ago. The question is how to get them implemented.

Categories: Opinion [t]

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