Australian Financial Review | By Mark Davis | Sept. 13, 2003
Nine countries form a wall against Australia's desire for freer world farm trade, writes Mark Davis in Cancun.
Liechtenstein has only 150 farmers left most of them herding cattle in the Alps. But the tiny principality between Austria and Switzerland is determined that those farmers stay in business.
"This is not a question of quotas, it's a question of identity. It's a question of culture," Liechtenstein's Foreign Affairs Minister, Ernst Walch, told journalists during the week at the World Trade Organisation ministerial meeting in Cancun.
"If we don't have men farming, the villages and the towns in the valleys could not survive.
"The alpine pastures must be tended."
In the poor west African nations of Mali, Chad, Benin and Burkina Faso, hundreds of thousands of cotton farmers struggle not to maintain a cultural heritage but simply to feed their families.
Lodging a proposal to eliminate the subsidies rich countries such as the United States pay their cotton producers, Benin's Industry and Commerce Minister, Fatiou Vihotogbe Akplogan, called on the WTO to "cut out the gangrene that is eating at the strategic fibre of our economies".
Agricultural trade is dominating the WTO meeting and these two positions represent the extremes in the debate.
With negotiations for reforming world farm trade stalled, the four west African nations want the WTO, which sets and enforces world trade rules for its member countries, to take an urgent initiative for the cotton sector.
They want ministers to agree that all cotton subsidies will be phased out and that subsidising nations will have to compensate other nations for the economic damage caused by the payments.
At the other end of the spectrum, Liechtenstein is part of an unusually diverse bloc of nine arch-protectionist countries which is adopting a stance on farm trade that makes even the European Union look friendly towards agriculture reform.
This group, known by detractors as the "nasty nine", is an alliance of small industrialised countries with economically unviable farm sectors. Their governments insist they have a right to use tariffs, quotas and subsidies to protect their farmers because agriculture is not just about economics but also about national culture and heritage, food security and animal welfare.
The nine comprise Switzerland, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Norway, Iceland, Bulgaria, Israel and, of course, Liechstenstein.
Here is how Norway's Minister of Trade and Industry, Ansgar Gabrielsen, explained his country's stance: "Norway is a beautiful country but we have unusually difficult conditions for agriculture. We have a harsh climate, difficult topography and small farms.
"High tariffs are essential to ensure a minimum level of domestic agriculture. Maintaining a viable agriculture sector with marginal areas is an important priority in my country.
"Domestic agriculture production is needed to ensure long-term food security, viable rural communities, cultural landscapes, biodiversity and our cultural heritage."
ON THE TABLE
The World Trade Organisation is trying to reduce farm protectionism in three key areas: market access; export subsidies; domestic subsidies.
* Japan has a tariff of 778 per cent on imported rice. The EU's tariff on sugar is 228 per cent, while the US imposes a 96 per cent tariff on butter.
* Domestic subsidies distort trade by encouraging farmers to produce more than markets need, driving down prices and hurting non-subsidised farmers on world markets.
* Poor countries suffer the most. Their economies rely more heavily on agriculture, their governments cannot match the subsidies and their farmers are shut out of markets like the US and Europe by tariff and quota barriers."The average European cow receives more subsidies than the entire average income of a person in Africa." James Wolfensohn, President, World Bank.
Sources: WTO, DFAT, OECD, Oxfam, World BankAustralian Financial Review:
