Ahead of the visit of World Trade Organization chief Roberto Azevedo to India, an RSS outfit has appealed to the government not to initiate discussions on new agreements until pending issues with regard to food security and farm livelihoods are addressed.
The Swadeshi Jagran Manch, an RSS-affiliated outfit, has written to Commerce Minister Nirmala Sitharaman asking her not to engage with the WTO chief on fresh issues but ensure resolution of pending issues.
"This letter is to urge you to not initiate discussions on new agreements until long pending issues with regard to farm livelihoods are addressed and resolved first.
"Kindly do prioritise the matters of a permanent solution for our food security issues, Special Safeguard Mechanism in agricultural imports and the Doha Development Agenda as non-negotiable key matters that need to be addressed before anything else," SJM's national co-convener Ashwani Mahajan wrote to the minister.
He urged the minister to ensure that Indian government presents its evidence and arguments clearly and strongly to resolve all the pending issues with regard to the country's farmers and their livelihood security and the nation's food security that have been pending issues in WTO negotiations.
Mahajan said since WTO Director-General Roberto Azevedo is visiting India on February 8 and 9, it gives an opportunity to the government to firmly reiterate the sovereign concerns in the realm of international trade, livelihood security and development.
He told the minister that the Swadeshi Jagran Manch has been continuously and consistently raising various issues pertaining to multilateral and bilateral trade agreements that are directly affecting livelihoods and other basic rights of citizens including IPRs that often deny basic rights to dignified livelihoods and healthcare.
The SJM said in the Peace Clause negotiated on food security/stock piling front in the Agreement on Agriculture, "we have secured something that is only tenuous in the past meetings, with conditionalities that are not conducive to us and are difficult to implement".
Moreover, he said, the WTO has not been able to ensure that the "cleverly disguised, large and increasing subsidies that are given by several developed countries (mainly OECD) to their farm sector can be controlled and regulated in a manner that free trade indeed does not get distorted".
The WTO has failed massively on this front, and this
meant that our farmers (and other farmers in the developing world) get priced out on various commodities, whereas our meagre support and subsidies get challenged again and again by these very countries," the Manch said.
"We need to find a permanent solution on this front, and not be content with the Peace Clause in place right now. We need to do this for our farmers and consumers as well as for those in other developing countries too," Mahajan said.
He said that there is no progress seen on the Special Safeguard Mechanism that will protect India's farmers from import surges of agricultural products. "We need to negotiate firmly for this too," he said.
"While the Doha Development Agenda has not seen any progress unfortunately, it is a matter of immense concern that negotiations on other agricultural sectors (like fisheries) as well as new agreements on investment and e-commerce are being pushed at the WTO which were to be taken up only after Doha Development Agenda finally resolved," he said.
He also said that the proposed agreement on investment will result in rural communities being affected by resource grabbing in various forms, which are crucial livelihood resources for the communities.
