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Laying down India’s stand on World Trade Organisation negotiations, cabinet secretary Ajit Seth on Thursday said the country’s food security concerns cannot be relegated to the back-burner, but should be addressed up front.
“Addressing the food security concerns is important, as India still has 190 million hungry people,” Seth said at an event organised by a global think-tank, The Club of Rome.
“This issue is too important to be relegated to the back and it must be addressed up front in the WTO,” he said, adding that public stockholding is a widely used tool to ensure food security in any developing country where agriculture is largely rainfed.
Seth said developing countries, including India, should have ample freedom to guarantee some minimum returns to farmers so that they are able to produce enough for themselves and for domestic food security. Emphasising the need to address India’s food security concerns in view of high prevalence of low nutrition and hunger in India, Seth said, “The WTO agreement on agriculture does not recognise food security as the overarching objective of international cooperation but rather as a deviation from primary objective of agriculture trade liberalisation. Many WTO rules are ambiguous and leads to uncertainty...”
India took a tough stand over food security at the WTO Geneva talks in July, refusing to ratify WTO’s Trade Facilitation Agreement — which is dear to the developed world — without any concrete movement in finding a permanent solution to its public food stock-holding issue for food security purposes.
India has asked the WTO to amend the norms for calculating agriculture subsidies to procure food grains from farmers at minimum support price and sell that to the poor at cheaper rates.
The current WTO norms limit the value of food subsidies at 10 per cent of the total value of food grain production. However, the support is calculated at prices that are over two decades old.
Seth further said while steps have been taken to provide food security, high food inflation, climate change, lower crop yields and depleting natural resources for agriculture are certain challenges that need to be addressed.
So far, 11 states have implemented the food law, which gives two-thirds of the country's population the right to subsidised food grains. The Centre has extended the deadline given to states for implementing the Food Act.
