Press release

Paris, 19th April 2006

WTO: How to avoid traps in the negotiations

QJust a few days before April 30th 2006, the target date for concluding the negotiations on the “disciplines”1 set by the Hong Kong agreement, WOAgri has published on its website www.woagri.org a special release of strategic analyses and proposals for carrying out the negotiations in order to prevent the Doha round from leading to a dead end or to irreversible decisions.

This special release is made up of four reports designed to rally political leaders, professionals and associations around a new and much more vigilant approach to agricultural negotiations.

Otherwise there is a great risk of making unacceptable concessions that will jeopardize the future of millions of farmers in Europe and in developing countries. Let us not forget that agriculture provides employment and revenues for around 40% of the world’s population!

So, for the first time we are issuing an “Alert”, a precursor of one of the methods the simulation and grading agency WOAgri decided to create for 2007 will use to inform the public. The most difficult items on the negotiation agenda are presented, on the one hand, with the risks of an unsatisfactory agreement in terms of sound regulation of agricultural activities in the world, and on the other hand, the proposals of WOAgri.

Three other themes are developed:

- « Concerning the multilateral trade negotiations within the WTO »,
by Michel Jacquot, lawyer at Gide Loyrette Nouel
- « Doha: a strategy for the European Union to counter the United States? »,
by Jacques Carles, Delegate-General of WOAgri
- « One model can hide another, or the evasive strategy of the United State via the
Carnegie Foundation ».

Christine Lagarde, Minister for Foreign Trade provides insight in an interview about her point of view on the necessary renovation of the system of analysis that determines the course of international negotiations. This commitment to greater precision in dealing with different realities seems essential to us and encourages us to believe that France, and by extension Europe, will defend more vehemently, not only our agricultural independence, but also the future of agriculture in developing countries without which sustainable balance cannot be envisaged in the short or medium term.

And Pierre Pagesse, President of WOAgri reminds us of our fervent obligation not to let ourselves be blinded by the illusion that agriculture, services and industry are just a pack of cards that can be shuffled from one hand to the other like a poker game where the only wagers are good intentions.

Three months after using as proof the so-called highly encouraging results of the World Bank model to flaunt the merits of the liberalization of agricultural exchanges, many people have recently recognized that this model has overestimated the gains for the poor countries. Better still, many believe these countries would have a lot to lose.

As early as the beginning of last December we denounced these results and we can demonstrate today that the Carnegie model, presented in Geneva and used last March in London during the latest simulations of the WTO is just a “dressed up” adaptation of the World Bank model. Other substitute models of the same caliber are bound to appear with the “discrediting” of the official models. The goal is always the same: to advocate the continued liberalization of exchanges without asking too many questions as to the consequences and without taking the time for concerted action in order to set up a worldwide regulatory system for agriculture which is the most sensitive of human activities.

This is why WOAgri has made its top priority the elaboration of a new economic model based on totally new principles of construction that integrate fundamental criteria such as effects on poverty, climatic and marketing risks, and innovation, while casting aside textbook hypotheses like pure and perfect competition or the illusion of an “average consumer” on a global level. It’s more difficult but so very necessary!

At any rate, leading economists have joined us and are working with a true sense of urgency on a planetary level.

Finally, after deciphering the American system of agricultural subsidies2 WOAgri has demonstrated that marketing loans and counter-cyclical payments are the main factors that are destabilizing agricultural markets throughout the world and that it is possible and essential that they be treated according to article 6 of the Hong Kong agreement that provides for “the parallel elimination of all forms of export subsidies and disciplines on all export measures with equivalent effect”!

It is high time to reveal that the Americans are moving forward disguised in camouflage and that the WTO negotiations are totally skewed.

This strategic option is the only one that will allow Europe and the developing countries to lift the negotiations out of the fools’ game they have become submerged in. The article “Doha: a strategy for the European Union to counter the United States?” describes the mechanisms and methods to find a way out, like the creation of a “brown box” that would consolidate the amber and blue boxes. This is the only condition that will allow us to escape from the divisions that work as traps when each country, and especially the United States, uses them as “loopholes for protectionism”.

1 This is the moment of convergence for the often very different intentions painstakingly united in the text of the Hong Kong agreement.
2 « X-Ray of US subsidies to agriculture », www.woagri.org.

Press contact: Dominique Lasserre
+33 1 43 06 42 70
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World Organization for Agriculture
5, rue Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois - 75001 Paris
www.woagri.org