Kyodo News / By Tim Johnson
BANGKOK -- U.S. agricultural trade negotiators hailed Tuesday an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) proposal to the World Trade Organization (WTO) on special treatment for developing countries in agricultural trade, but said significant differences remain on issues such as domestic supports.
"I'm very encouraged about the proposal," U.S. Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) official Debra Henke told a press conference in Bangkok, alluding to an ASEAN paper on special and differential treatment for developing countries that was submitted to the WTO on Nov. 10.
"While we don't agree with everything in the paper, I think there is beginning to develop a common understanding on the things we can negotiate," said Henke, who directs the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Multilateral Trade Negotiations Division.
Henke and FAS trade analyst Brian Goggin spoke to reporters after consultative meetings around the region with Thai, Malaysian, Singaporean and Philippine negotiators on WTO agricultural issues.
Talks on launching a new round of multilateral trade negotiations under the WTO remain stalled, partly due to wide divergences of opinion between developed and developing countries over what should be on the agenda.
But mandated WTO agriculture negotiations began last March under a deal struck at the end of the 1984-1994 Uruguay Round of multilateral trade talks. WTO members have already submitted their proposals on issues such as export competition, domestic supports, market access, special and differential treatment for developing countries, and food security, and negotiators plan to meet again next month in Geneva to discuss them.
ASEAN, which comprises Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, is also calling for developed countries to eliminate all forms of agricultural export subsidies in the next round of WTO negotiations, Henke noted.
Goggin, meanwhile, pointed out the European Union accounts for 90.3% of global agricultural export subsidies, compared to only 2.2% for the U.S., 4.4% for Switzerland, 1.2% for Norway and 1.9% for the rest of the world. "The way to make it fair for everyone is to simply eliminate them," he said.
Henke said their meetings in Southeast Asia also touched on a number of areas of difference, such as agricultural domestic supports. "They (ASEAN) talk about eliminating trade-distorting domestic support in this round, and we're talking about equalizing it in this round, with the eventual goal of elimination -- so they want to go a little faster."
The ASEAN paper complained that the current rules and disciplines on domestic supports unfairly favor richer countries by allowing them to spend large amounts subsidizing agriculture at the expense of poorer ones. Under WTO rules, it said, developing countries can subsidize no more than 10% of the total value of agricultural production, while developed ones face no upper limit and are merely required to bring down subsidies to 20%.
The U.S. proposal, which the FAS officials said was a bipartisan one, lays out a formula that would reduce the level of disparity in money spent on subsidies among WTO members by gradually lowering significantly trade-distorting subsidies to levels no greater than the fixed percentage of a member's total agricultural production.
It also proposes creation of additional criteria for exempt support measures deemed essential to the development and food security objectives of developing countries, which Henke said "would encourage countries to invest in agricultural and rural economies and support their farms in non-trade-distorting ways."
Henke called the ASEAN paper "a step forward in clarity and in substance for negotiations," praising it for focusing on the domestic support issue and making "for the first time some very concrete proposals."
"We believe that we need to work diligently to maintain the momentum in agriculture talks as a foundation for building support for a larger round," she said.:
