India’s trade minister Anand Sharma listens during a news conference at the ninth World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference in Nusa Dua, on the Indonesian resort island of Bali December 5, 2013. (Reuters Photo/Edgar Su)
Nusa Dua, Bali. As the World Trade Organization meeting concludes today, India stands firm on its view of global commerce.
Indian Trade Minister Anand Sharma, who is often blamed for the stalled trade talks, insists that his demand for food stockpiling is reasonable.
“We are most reasonable. We are only asking, ‘please change the price, please have an agreement which is fair, which is balanced,’ ” Sharma said on Thursday, while addressing a large group of journalists at the WTO Ninth Ministerial Conference (MC9) in Bali.
Sharma was referring to the price reference for grain crops, established between 1986 and 1988, as one of the references to value subsidies to the country’s farmers. The price was set in the Uruguay Round, which Sharma described as “inherently flawed and unfairly balanced against the poor and developing countries.”
India, the third-largest economy in Asia after China and Japan, has recently passed a food security act, which allows it to purchase staple foods at an administered minimum price in order to support its farmers and ensure the domestic availability of food.
According to Sharma, about 700 million Indians are entitled to support under the country’s food security program.
“We have been pleading that these prices need to be updated,” Sharma said, adding that he believes other members of the WTO would agree with him that the price reference was no longer relevant to the current price of staple foods.
He said he believed he was not alone in his plea and that he represented the G-33 coalition, which makes up the vast majority of developing and poor nations.
However, in the corridors of the MC9 meeting, remarks were often heard that India was truly alone in its stance. The United States and Pakistan have been noted as the countries said to oppose India.
Failure to reach an agreement may mean that negotiating such trade would have to be conducted on a regional level, in talks among nations bilaterally or regionally such as through the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
“If we don’t see an agreement here, we will see more and more bilateral trade agreements. But at the end of the day I would argue that we still need a multilateral trade agreement,” said Alexander Stubb, foreign trade and European affair minister of Finland. “If in the end we don’t get a deal in Bali, don’t blame the DG [director-general] of WTO, don’t blame the trade minister of Indonesia because they have done their utmost.
“In many ways this is a test for India,” Stubb said. “I hope all of them [India, the United States and Pakistan] will move simultaneously and hand-in-hand [to reach a deal].”
But Sharma said India was as committed as anybody else in reaching an agreement. He said out of 10 texts being discussed in the Bali Package, India has endorsed eight and was willing to negotiate the outstanding issues in the trade facilitation chapter.
Still, he said, the agriculture cluster in the Bali Package was “not negotiable.”
“Can we barter away or compromise when it comes to a fundamental right to food security? This is a fundamental issue and we will never compromise,” Sharma said. “Should it only be for the developing and the poor countries to keep on compromising?”
Sharma denied that India’s stance was motivated by an election at home next year, adding that it was “an old issue.”
On Wednesday, US Trade Representative Michael Froman said his country had shown enough flexibility on the trade discussion.
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