Two of the largest farm policy players in the United States and Canada have joined forces to urge more liberalized trade rules.
The American Farm Bureau and Prairie Pools Inc., representing the three prairie pools, last week issued a joint trade statement.
It is aimed at influencing both governments as they prepare positions for the 1999 start of agricultural talks in the World Trade Organization.
“It is a joint call for more open trade, for a reduction in trade-distorting subsidies,” said Saskatchewan Wheat Pool vice-president Marvin Shauf.
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“Our organizations are committed to working towards fairer and more open trade in North America and around the world,” Manitoba Pool Elevators vice-president Ken Edie said in a statement issued in Winnipeg. “We urge the governments of Canada and the United States to approach their negotiations with the same goal in mind.”
The joint statement calls for sanitary and phytosanitary rules to be based on science rather than politics.
It says export subsidies should be eliminated, but the American view is that they will scrap theirs only when the European Union ends its export subsidies.
It calls for tariff reductions and “significant further reductions in the level of permissible spending on trade-distorting domestic subsidies and the elimination in the next WTO round of the ‘blue box’ category of domestic subsidies.”
The blue box is trade jargon for programs which admittedly distort production patterns and trade but are permissible.
Shauf said he considers all subsidies to be trade distorting and he figures Canada goes into the talks with far fewer subsidies to defend than most others.
The statement was issued the same week the farm bureau was supporting an American congressional proposal for a $4.2 billion (U.S.) ad hoc subsidy program for American farmers.
“Do I personally see some irony in it?” asked Shauf. “Yes. Does it break the U.S. trade agreement commitments? Probably not.”
The pool vice-president said the problem is that Canada has cut support much more than it has to under trade agreements.
While other governments have tried to help their farmers as much as possible within the rules, Canada has used the rules to cut as much as possible.
“I think the result is that the government has left Canadian farmers at a real competitive disadvantage and it is starting to be evident now,” he said.
