Farmers will be protected, Nath tells Parliament

Commerce and Industry Minister Kamal Nath today assured Parliament that the interests of Indian farmers would be fully protected at the Hong Kong ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

He was replying to a discussion on the "current state of play and issues at the Hong Kong ministerial conference of WTO member countries", moved by Prabodh Panda of the CPI.

Admitting that agriculture was the most important issue under negotiation at the Hong Kong meet, Nath said it was also the most structurally imbalanced among all the trading sectors, primarily due to the huge subsidies given to the developed world.

"India's priority is to obtain substantial reduction of trade distorting subsidies and domestic support by the developed countries. The G-20 has put forward its position, inter alia indicating that the overall trade distorting support be reduced by 83 per cent, highlighting the importance of agriculture," said the minister.

"We have also stated categorically that developing countries like India which allocates almost all its domestic subsidies to subsistence and resource poor farmers should not be called upon to make any reduction in their de minimus entitlements," he added.

India has a strong comparative advantage in the services sector, but it has also been a disappointing sector as far as negotiations are concerned.

"In making our conditional offers, we have not gone beyond the level of autonomous liberalisation in any of the sectors, while expanding sectoral and modal coverage as compared to our Uruguay round commitments," he said.

The minister also emphasised that the issue of preference erosion had to be addressed in the Hong Kong round. "There are several countries that are dependent on a majority of their exports to the developed markets through systems of unilateral preferential tariffs."

Earlier, Panda and others, including Mohan Singh from the Samajwadi Party, Roop Chand Pal of CPM, Madhusudan Mistry of the Congress and Kharabela Swain of the BJP, said India should throw in its lot with other developing countries.

"Only by preserving the unity of the developing world can there be strength in our negotiations," said Panda. He also reiterated the Left's demand that a white paper on the WTO be prepared by the commerce ministry.

Roop Chand Pal said when it came to Non-Agricultural Market Access (Nama), the average and not a line-by-line enumeration should be taken as a yardstick for access. The minister leaves for Hong Kong on Thursday for the meetings, which will be held on December 13-19.