Canada is proposing an agricultural trade deal for the western hemisphere that could be a dry run for a future global deal.
It would end use of export subsidies in trade between countries in the Americas, as long as that trade was not competing with export-subsidized products from offshore.
It would include creation of a committee to help plan a hemisphere-wide agreement on science-based food safety rules in trade.
But when leaders from nations throughout North, South and Central America gather in Quebec City in April to embrace, among other things, agricultural negotiations, Canada also will insist that key domestic policies not be negotiable.
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Domestic supports, including farm aid and tariff protection for domestically sensitive industries, would not be subject to negotiation in the Americas talks, according to Canadian negotiating positions published late in December by the federal government. These would be left to the next round of World Trade Organization negotiations.
The cautious approach won the approval of Canadian Federation of Agriculture president Bob Friesen.
“Our position on the FTAA (Free Trade of the Americas) is that Canada should go no further there than it has gone in the WTO,” he said Dec. 21.
It is on the issue of export subsidies that FTAA talks could be most interesting, since the group contains a number of nations that say they support the end of such subsidies, including the United States and members of the Cairns group – Canada, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay.
Canada is proposing that export subsidies between all countries of the Americas be phased out by a negotiated date.
Countries of the hemisphere would agree not to use export subsidies for goods being shipped offshore in competition with goods from another country of the Americas, unless there was prior consent. In other words, the U.S. could not use export subsidies or a form of them to sell to Indonesia if that also was a country in Canada’s trade sphere.
However, if an FTAA country was importing subsidized goods from an offshore country, other countries of the hemisphere could compete with subsidies for that same market.
In other words, if Brazil was prepared to import subsidized product from the European Union, Canada could offer a similar subsidy to compete for the Brazilian market.
