The president of the trade liberalization lobby group Canadian Agri-Food Trade Alliance says it is time Canadian cabinet ministers got directly involved in trade negotiations.
World Trade Organization talks are heading into their make-or-break weeks and Liam
McCreery said Canadian trade minister David Emerson and agriculture minister Chuck Strahl should not wait until they are called to Geneva for a final ministerial attempt to negotiate a deal, probably in June or July.
“We believe there is a consensus that all the elements are there for a deal,” he said from
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Geneva May 1 where a CAFTA delegation had spent days meeting negotiators and agriculture negotiations chair Crawford Falconer. “But we are at a very critical stage and I believe our ministers must get here to meet people informally, to get their faces known.”
The Ontario grains and oilseeds producer said a logical time to book an informal visit to Geneva and WTO headquarters would be the week of May 22 when Canada will be represented at a ministerial meeting of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris.
“If our ministers come in here cold at the 11th hour, will they be able to engage productively and influence the outcome? We have a new government and new ministers. They need to get directly involved and get known.”
McCreery said that with the failure to meet the April 30 deadline for the outline of a deal, the real “drop dead date” is July 31 with intensive negotiations and a couple of ministerial meetings likely before then.
On May 1, WTO director general Pascal Lamy told the trade negotiating committee in Geneva that some progress has been made on key agricultural issues of export competition and domestic subsidies.
“Although there is still much to do in a short time, it is encouraging that delegations now appear ready to engage fully in this process.”
However, Lamy said less progress has been made on market access in sensitive product areas and he identified it as a tariff-reduction issue and not a tariff rate quota issue as Canada insists.
