'WTO talks should focus on farmers', says Kamal Nath

India today articulated the view that protecting the interests of farmers and livelihood concerns of the vast farm-dependent rural population should be the primary focus of the talks on agriculture at the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

Speaking at the G-20 ministerial meeting at Sao Paulo on Saturday, Commerce and Industry Minister Kamal Nath said the United Progressive Alliance government would try to further strengthen and consolidate the grouping of developing countries.

"The new government attaches the highest priority to India's role and responsibilites in the grouping of countries, whose coming together on agriculture represents a major new development in the negotiating milieu of the WTO," Kamal Nath said.

Terming the G-20's recent paper on market access a tangible attempt on the part of the group to move the negotiations forward, the minister said the G-20 had offered a solution that would be acceptable to both exporting countries as well as those that were concerned over food and livelihood issues affecting the rural sector.

Asking the G-20 to come out with a paper on domestic support and export competition within the shortest possible time, Kamal Nath also said developed countries should adopt the same principle on domestic support as adopted in the market access proposal ie agree to deeper cuts on products with a higher level of domestic support.

Expressing concern about the proposed new blue box (which contains minimally trade distorting domestic support), the minister said, "We are of the view that it will be possible to endlessly maintain distortions by parking them in new slots within the agricultural framework."

In a similar manner, the criteria for the green box (domestic support, which is non-trade distorting) should be clarified to ensure that all trade distorting forms of green box subsidy were completely rooted out, he said.

In view of the European Commission's reluctance to eliminate even the direct export subsidies, Kamal Nath said greater clarification on the issue of parallelism between direct export subsidy and other forms of export support like export credits, guarantees, insurance programmes as well as food aid and state trading enterprises was needed.

Earlier in the day, the minister had a bilateral interaction with Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim, who is also the coordinator of the G-20.

Kamal Nath is slated to attend the non-group (NG-5), comprising the US, EU, China and Australia, besides India, meeting on Monday.