AIKS Demands Safeguarding the Interests of Farmers in the WTO Negotiations
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THE All India Kisan Sabha, in a statement issued on February 28, said the on-going 13th Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) at Abu Dhabi clearly demonstrates that its entire mechanism is inherently against the interests of the developing countries in general and against the interests of farmers and the poor producing classes in particular. In the realm of agriculture, the WTO is trying to impose harsh, illogical, and unjust policies at the behest of predatory agribusinesses that will accelerate the agrarian crisis, worsen the food security situation, and sufferings of crores of working people in India. The entire framework of policies under WTO is aimed at corporatising agriculture and is detrimental to farmers. AIKS reiterates its position that the WTO is an unequal trade environment against the interests of our people. AIKS calls upon the union government to unequivocally reject any attempts to cut agricultural subsidies; dismantle public procurement, stockholding and distribution. India should reserve its right to impose duties, tariffs and quantitative restrictions to safeguard farmers.
The Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) – often described as one of the “most iniquitous agreements” of WTO – has worked completely against the farmers of India. Engineered by the United States of America (USA) and the European Union (EU), the AoA ensures their unending domination, severely constraining our sovereign rights. Subsidies given to producers through administered price support on purchases for public food programmes are seen to be trade-distorting by AoA rules. This position is untenable and unacceptable for countries like ours must be clear. It is significant that WTO is manoeuvring to dismantle MSP mechanism, public stockholding, and public distribution system at a time when the ruling BJP government is going all out to corporatise Indian agriculture and the peasantry is heroically resisting it. The BJP government which is doing lip service to farmers at WTO is actually pursuing exactly the same policies domestically, the efforts to privatise the Food Corporation of India, dismantle PDS and the three Farm Acts are all WTO prescriptions.
Given the fact that India’s National Food Security System (including the system of MSP, public procurement, and the distribution of grain through the National Food Security Act) has been a subject of recurrent disputes at the WTO, the All India Kisan Sabha warns Narendra Modi led BJP regime of dire consequences if it sacrifices the interests of farmers and poor at the behest of international finance capital. The fundamental demand of AoA is to make the federal governments in developing and least developed countries to stay away from supporting agriculture and open agriculture to the brutal logic of the market, heavily dominated by highly concentrated monopolies. Any pro-farmer intervention by the concerned government is termed as “market distorting” or “trade distorting” and India is dragged into multiple disputes by countries like USA.
While there is an increasing consensus that unfair AoA rules have contributed to heavy market concentration and generated inequitable impacts on agricultural production and trade, the USA and EU is aggressively campaigning to impose AoA terms on India and other developing countries. The tall talk by the US and EU to minimise subsidies to the farmers in India is hypocritical to the core; most of the western countries have maintained high subsidies. For instance, the per farmer support in USA in 2016 was $61,286 while in India it is as low as $282 per farmer according to 2018-19 figures. Global prices for agricultural commodities have risen steeply since the AoA was negotiated. In 2021-23, the FAO food price index was more than 2.54 times the prices in 1986-88, the reference years used in AoA for computing the level of support. Given that current world prices are much higher than the 1986-88 reference prices, any price support provided at prices anywhere near current world market prices results in the violation of the “de minimis” restrictions under the current WTO rules. AIKS is of the firm opinion that, to safeguard interests of the petty producers, the union government should raise the question of compensation for “excessive inflation” as a major political demand in the on-going deliberations.
AIKS also notes that there are well designed attempts to impose harsh terms and conditions on fisheries subsidies to small scale fishers. Different terms in the name of sustainable management of fishing stocks are inherently favouring developed countries, big business and are completely against small scale fishers. This is undermining the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and is against sovereign rights of countries to manage their fisheries resources. AIKS demands that the union government should take every possible step to safeguard the interests of the farmers and fishers in the WTO negotiations. AIKS calls upon all units and affiliated federations to be vigilant and rise up in protest if our interests are harmed.
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