by Lewis Machipisa
HARARE, Mar 28 (IPS) - Developing countries should not be expected to compete on the same playing field as developed countries with regards to trade in agriculture, trade experts meeting here Tuesday said.
"There are stark differences between the agricultural sectors of the developed and developing countries," noted an informal paper circulated at the five-day (March 27-31) Southern and Eastern African Trade Information and Negotiations Initiative (SEATINI) conference being held in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare.
Trade experts from Africa and Asia are attending the conference which seeks to facilitate common negotiating positions in 2000 following the collapsed World Trade Organisation (WTO) third ministerial meeting in Seattle, United States in December.
The experts argued that leveling the playing field in the agricultural sector would be impossible until the economies of developing countries were on par with those of developed.
The third ministerial conference ended in chaos and confusion when some developing countries, enraged at being excluded from some of the meetings, refused to endorse the declaration.
"African governments need to strategise and seize the opportunity to contribute to the international agenda while they have the upper hand," says Professor Yash Tandon of Director of SEATINI, based in Harare
"The strategies chosen by African governments now will affect their own people for years to come... It's not just about selling goods across borders. Labour rights, indigenous knowledge and the rights to generic drugs are all on the table," he said.
"There is still a need to continue the fight against the pseudo trade issues and develop a positive agenda. The collapse of Seattle is a victory for African states but we now need to move forward," said Tandon.
The meeting noted that the current Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) contained some provisions which were unacceptable to developing countries such as the reduction of subsidies, particularly since developing countries generally did not subsidise their agricultural products.
A paper on the AoA accused the agreement of allowing developed countries continued levesl of protection while restricting developing countries from using these same tools of protection.
"The agreement on agriculture is very ambiguous. The cost of implementing the agreement is too high... it ignores food security.. allows dumping," says Lawrence Makumba, senior Assistant Director, ministry of Tourism, Trade and Industry in Kenya.
While only between five to 10 percent of the population of developed countries are involved in farming, agriculture is the source of employment for more between 50 to 80 percent of people in developing countries.
Food shortages are unheard of in the developed world. In contrast the Food and Agricultural Organisation, FAO, says for two thirds of the developing world, food insecurity is a reality for one third of the population.
"Any slight reduction in food supply and the lowering of tarrifs in developing countries, poses a threat to the livelihood of small farmers," says Martin Khor, director of the Third World Network (TWN) in Penang, Malaysia.
"Most of our farmers in developing countries don't have money to subsidise," he said.
Moses Tekere, economics lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe, says the WTO failed to achieve an objective outcome. "The fundamental ideology guiding the WTO is wrong. What we want is development and not just liberalisation." Tekere said.
Critics of the AoA, say its Special and Differential treatment appears to provide special concessions to developing countries by allowing them to implement only two-thirds of the commitment undertaken by developed countries.
For example, in the area of domestic support, the facility granted to developing countries to reduce the level of domestic support by two-thirds is not very meaningful since developed countries have traditionally provided very high levels of support to their agricultural sector.
A case in point is the fact that about 198 billion US dollars of support was provided by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to its member countries.
In contrast, 61 out of the 71 developing countries were unable to provide any form of domestic support.
Bhagirath L. Das, former Director of International Trade Programme of United Nations Conference on Trade And Development (UNCTAD) in Geneva, has described the agreement on agriculture as being full of inequalities.
"We should not be driven into this liberalisation thing, Those calling for liberalisation should offer some form of compensation," Das told the SEATINI conference. "It is very harsh to ask developing countries to liberalise."
"We have already lost our trousers, next we might lose our pants," says Chakravarthi Rhaghavan, advising countries not to open up to the new demands by the WTO that developing countries further prise open up their economies.
"The world is not the same so you can't thrust one model on each country.":
