Geneva Moves to Multilateralise India-US Bilateral on Agro Subsidies

Trade negotiators in Geneva are set to meet on 22 November to begin WTO consultations aimed at “multilateralising” a US-India deal on farm subsidy rules and advancing the implementation of a separate pact aimed at easing customs procedures, officials have said.

WTO Director-General Roberto Azevêdo is convening the consultations after returning from various international gatherings, including the summit of G-20 major economies in Brisbane, Australia.

A breakthrough between the US and India last Thursday effectively resurrected the Bali package of trade agreements which had been concluded at the organisation’s ministerial conference one year ago.

New Delhi had told other members in July that it would only allow the treaty implementation to advance if negotiators agreed to extend indefinitely a commitment not to challenge its food stockholding schemes under WTO farm subsidy rules. This has been accepted indirectly by the US with indefinite “peace clause” under which subsidy violations are accepted till a final settlement on the subject is made.

Ambassadors to meet

Azevêdo was due to meet with heads of delegation from over a dozen members to see if the US-India accord would be acceptable to other countries.

Trade sources told that the initial meeting would include negotiators from a cross-section of the WTO membership. Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the EU, India, Indonesia, Japan, Kenya, Lesotho, Switzerland, Uganda, and the US had reportedly been invited to attend.

If there was no opposition from other countries, negotiators said they also expected that the WTO’s highest decision-making body outside of the ministerial conference, the General Council, would meet on Wednesday 26 November to finalise decisions in the two areas.

The trade body’s Preparatory Committee on Trade Facilitation would meet beforehand on the same day, sources said, with the goal of finalising the Protocol of Amendment text and associated draft General Council decision.

Trade officials told that, last week’s India-US agreement was expected simply to reconfirm the provisions of the Bali deal, while clarifying that an interim accord to refrain from challenging developing country food stockholding schemes would apply indefinitely until a permanent solution had been found to the problems that some countries had raised.

Previously, the Bali agreement had said that this “peace clause” would apply until the permanent solution was adopted, with the aim of doing so at the eleventh ministerial conference, expected to be held in 2017.

Other concerns that India had reportedly raised in talks since September are not believed to be part of the bilateral accord.

These include the possibility of relaxing existing requirements to notify more detailed information about stockholding schemes in order to be able to benefit from the Bali peace clause, and the possibility of extending the peace clause to cover legal challenges under the WTO’s agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures. At present, only the provisions of the trade body’s Agreement on Agriculture are covered by the deal.

The proposed clarification on the duration of the peace clause also means the agreement would still only cover “existing programmes” - a clause that some developing countries had objected to in Bali.

In particular, India was asked some 42 questions on its domestic support payments from 2004 to 2011, a seven-year period on which the government had submitted official figures to the WTO in September.

Caution urged

Delegates cautioned, however, that the breakthrough on the India-US stand-off did not necessarily mean that progress would immediately be achieved on the wider agenda of trade talks at the WTO, and in particular on the long-running Doha Round that was launched in 2001.

In Bali, ministers had instructed negotiators to establish a work programme within one year - in other words, by December 2014 – to address the remaining Doha issues. Azevêdo recently told trade officials that he thought the deadline would now be missed.