BKU urges PM to reject draft on agriculture at WTO talks

Farmers outfit Bhartiya Kisan Union (BKU) today urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to reject the draft on agriculture released at WTO talks in Nairobi, saying the interest of Indian farmers have been totally "ignored" in the text.
"We are deeply shocked to see that issues of keen interest to Indian farmers have been totally ignored in this text. Repeated proposals on public food stockholding and Special Safeguard Mechanism (SSM) submitted by the G-33, which has been driven by India among other developing countries, have been totally ignored in this draft," BKU (Punjab) Ajmer Singh Lakhowal said in the letter to the PM.

Pointing towards public stockholding, Lakhowal said the draft mentions nothing more than the earlier commitments and fails to clearly reaffirm even the 2014 affirmation that the Peace Clause will extend until a permanent solution is found.
"More shocking is the fact that there is no effort at all to look at options for a permanent solution in this draft.
"And while the text says it will be taken up after the Ministerial, even the time deadline of 2017 is mentioned in the decision/operative part of the text. If this is the situation even after the G-33 proposals, what guarantee is there that it will be taken up after the Ministerial?" he said.

He also expressed concerns about the text related to special safeguard mechanism (SSM).

"Indian farmers have serious concerns about import surges and that is why we need to have this mechanism right now. Not only the text does not yield anything on special safeguards, it actually links the safeguards to market access.
"This clearly indicates that if we have to get the SSM in the future, we need to give further market access. The text refuses to recognize that because of the huge subsidies given by the developed countries and we are already facing threat of import surges. The text clearly makes it easy to extract further punishments from us in the form of tariff cuts," he said.

"We are also not happy with the Declaration draft text which tries to bring in new issues issues such as investment, government procurement and competition policy and issues such as Global Value Chains (GVCs) under the multilateral framework of the WTO will have major adverse impacts on agriculture and we ask the leaders to reject the declaration text on new issues," BKU leader said.