As India aims to double its farm exports by 2022, Commerce Secretary Rita Teaotia today said the government is working on an institutional mechanism to deal with sanitary and phytosanitary issues hampering agricultural shipments.
Speaking after releasing a report here, she said the draft agricultural export policy, released some months back, aims to double exports from the sector in next five years.
"We would double our agricultural exports by 2022. This is not a quantum jump...We are trying to focus on high value products, the value added agricultural products, focusing on some perishable commodities that need to be stored and transported properly.
"We are also looking at the indigenous, ethnic and some non-ethnic categories," she said.
The Secretary said the commerce ministry was looking through the agriculture export policy to provide an institutional mechanism for addressing market access barriers and to deal with sanitary and phyto sanitary issues "which certainly are the biggest barriers in global food trade".
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The Centre, she added, was working with state governments to enhance outward shipments of agricultural produce.
She also noted that there is a need to look at the issue of disproportionate large subsidies to agriculture by developed countries and the product-specific concentration of subsidies that the measures of support permit under the WTO agreement on agriculture.
Under the global trade norms, a WTO member country's food subsidy bill should not breach the limit of 10 per cent of the value of production based on the reference price of 1986-88.
Apprehending that full implementation of food security programme may result in breach of the WTO cap, India has been seeking amendments in the formula to calculate the food subsidy cap
"When we looked at the prices, the prices that are obtained by Indian consumers whether less or high, this also factors in the effect on global prices of distortionary policies of other countries, so global prices are a function of that as well," Teaotia said.
According to her, recent times have witnessed "very perverse efforts" to target minimal support extended to poorest farmers in developing countries and to make efforts to undermine the core principles of special and differential treatment for such countries, which is at the heart of multilateralism.
"These short-sighted efforts would further aggravate the kind of imbalances we have already seen in the agreement on agriculture and also undercut one of the key objectives of WTO which is to improve living standards of populations around the world," Teaotia said.
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