Canada raised 65 questions against India’s farm policies in WTO in 3 years

NEW DELHI: Canada raised 65 questions against India’s agricultural policies between 2017 and 2020 pertaining to New Delhi’s minimum support price-based market price support policies for agriculture products, public stockholding programmes for food security especially since March when India invoked the Bali Peace Clause for the first time, its trade policies on pulses, and input subsidies that are available to low-income and resource poor farmers.
Ottawa raised these questions at 14 meetings of the Committee on Agriculture at the World Trade Organization (WTO). The committee comprises all WTO members and meets three or four times a year.

“In a worrying development, there has been a narrative-push by some members including Canada, the US and EU to pin the blame for the growth in global levels of trade-distorting subsidies in agriculture on large developing countries such as China, India and Indonesia,” said an official.

Some key questions included the potential impact on the global market of India’s high volume of food stocks, and whether India is breaching its support limit for other farm goods, given it recently notified exceeding its de minimis support for rice in 2018-2019.

This assumes significance in the wake of Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau backing the ongoing farmers’ agitation in India, saying his country will always be there to defend the rights of peaceful protests and expressing concern over the situation.

Trade distorting subsidies
The official added that Canada, which is a member of the Cairns Group, along with other agriculture exporters seeks to further restrict the policy space available to countries like India to support their domestic farmers, in the interest of boosting their own potential exports to India.

On the other hand, India is proponent of a sequential approach where developed countries’ maximum permissible level of trade distorting farm subsidies (called final bound total AMS) entitlements are capped, reduced and eliminated first.
The AMS subsidies or Aggregate Measurement of Support are available to only 32 out of 164 WTO members including Canada.

The US, EU and Canada give $160 billion of trade-distorting form of farm subsidies to products including cotton, wool and tobacco, according to a submission by India and China.

India gave $22.5 billion as input subsidy including support for irrigation, fertilizers and electricity in the marketing year 2017-18. As per the Agricultural Census for year 2015-16, 99.43% of farm holdings are of low-income or resource poor farmers.

Besides seeking a reduction in the domestic agriculture subsidies provided by members such as India to their domestic producers, even if such subsidies are subsistence-level, Canada and other Cairns Group members have also sought a reduction in the tariffs on imports of agricultural products.

“A close scrutiny of these questions would reveal that far from being concerned or interested about the well-being of Indian farmers, the Canadian delegation to the WTO never loses an opportunity to try and corner India for whatever support we provide to our farmers, and attempts to build a narrative that tries to define such support as trade-distorting,” the official said, adding that Canada had “scarce interest” in the genuine well-being of Indian farmers and agriculture producers.

Besides, Canada has criticised India’s quantitative restrictions on the imports of pulses. India is the chief export destination for pulses-exports from WTO members such as Canada, Russia and Australia.