 "Why is India correct in seeking ‘permanent solution’ for food security at WTO")
The agricultural revolution is often considered a great leap forward for humanity as it is believed to have facilitated a settled life from which social and political institutions grew up.
However, author-historian Yuval Noah Harari disagrees; he thinks that a shift from foraging to farming ended up with humans working harder, habiting in crowded dwellings, being infected by diseases, suffering from the anxiety of their crops, and serving the feudal class.
This might be a never-ending debate, and acknowledging this development as inalterable, the only optimal option is to make agricultural practices, processes, and trade sustainable for the environment—and yet in the greatest good for the greatest number.
The World Trade Organisation’s 13th Ministerial Conference from February 26 to 29 this year in Abu Dhabi, UAE, can be yet another opportunity to do that. In cooperation with the United Nations system, the WTO, as an organisation, facilitates establishing, revising, and enforcing the rules that govern international trade.
The 164-member Geneva-headquartered intergovernmental body accounts for 98 per cent of global trade.
The biennial high-level meeting of the 29-year-old body has been marred by the confrontation of the contrary interests of the developed and developing countries (including nations such as India and China).
This time the meeting has varied issues to debate, including fishing, e-commerce, reforms in dispute adjudication mechanisms, etc. However, the most heated one is expected to be on agriculture—here the divide between the developed and the developing is perhaps most prominent.
India’s case
New Delhi has been facing pressure for a legal guarantee of the Minimum Support Price. However, as the farmers’ protests seek to insist the Indian government domestically, the Cairns Group—an interest group of 19 agricultural exporting countries, comprising Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, the Philippines, South Africa, Thailand, Uruguay, and Vietnam—has accused India of distorting global food prices and hurting the food security of the other countries through its farm support. They say India’s public stockholding programme is highly subsidised.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsLast year, in November, a proposal was set forth to slash trade-distorting farm support among WTO members. This aimed to halve the total global entitlement to subsidise. This led to a strong reaction from developing countries like India.
Some experts say Cairns Group is trying to “dismantle” the MSP scheme or “reduce its scope”.
For its subsidies, India is protected by a “Peace Clause"—agreed by the WTO members in 2013 at the ninth ministerial meeting held in Bali—that stipulates that “no country would be legally barred from food security programmes for its own people even if the subsidy breached the limits specified in the WTO Agreement on Agriculture”.
Further, India’s per-farmer subsidy is considerably lower than in developed countries; for example, a news report suggests that India’s subsidy to farmers comes in at $300 per farmer, compared to $40,000 per farmer in the US. But WTO rules are not based on a per-farmer basis.
Hence, as per experts, if a new scheme has to be implemented, then it has to be compliant with the 10 per cent subsidy ceiling, as they will not be covered under the ‘Peace Clause’ discussed above.
This means that if India agrees to the legislation guaranteeing the MSP, it might not be protected under the ‘Peace Clause’. Also, the ambiguity that it possesses also remains an issue of concern.
Moreover, the issue of dispute adjudication is there to be resolved, the US’ opposition to new judge appointments has mothballed the WTO’s top court for four years, virtually rendering it dysfunctional, leaving trade disputes worth billions of dollars unresolved.
Among all this, the path ahead looks hazy, particularly when the world is facing multiple economic and geopolitical crises and is extremely turbulent amidst wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
Therefore, India’s stance to seek a ‘permanent solution’ to the problem of public stockholding for food security and towards negotiations on other agriculture-related issues is correct and well-appreciated. Further, New Delhi has rightly pushed for measures to amend the formula calculating the food subsidy cap and to include programmes implemented after 2013 under the ‘Peace Clause'.
So while we agree or not whether the agricultural revolution served the good of humankind, it has indeed been a part of human existence all these years. In these times when we confront tragedies of the commons—whether in climate change or in agrarian subsidies—it is time we understood that we are all aboard a single ship. The developed West must understand the needs of the Global South.
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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