Canada and the United States have criticized as too timid a world trade talks proposal by the European Union last week to cut tariffs and farm supports while eliminating export subsidies.
But Canadian trade minister Jim Peterson said Oct. 31 an inadequate EU proposal will not derail talks or doom the World Trade Organization December summit in Hong Kong to failure.
“We are disappointed with the proposal but we’re not ready to give up,” he said in Toronto. “We are still looking for an ambitious outcome and we’re going to keep working with our WTO partners and the EU to try to make this happen.”
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Peterson, along with federal agriculture minister Andy Mitchell, said the EU is offering too little access to its own market while demanding too much from Canada: a sharp lowering of over-quota tariffs for supply managed sectors and elimination of the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly.
In Geneva, the EU tabled its negotiating position, claiming that it was an adequate response to earlier American proposals and a significant contribution to the negotiations in their final weeks before the Hong Kong meeting of ministers.
The EU proposed that tariffs be capped at 100 percent with individual cuts of up to 60 percent, a 70 percent cut in allowable farm subsidies and the elimination of export subsidies.
In Washington, trade representative Rob Portman complained that the European proposals were too tepid.
“Overall, we are disappointed in the level of the tariff cuts and with the exclusions from those cuts,” he said.
But in Ottawa, trade consultant Peter Clark said in a Nov. 1 speech that the world should not expect significant new market access proposals from the EU.
Clark has studied EU agricultural policy reforms for Dairy Farmers of Canada and he said Europeans think they have done enough through internal reforms.
“The seemingly immovable bottleneck is that European farmers consider they have adjusted more than enough,” he said in a speech at the National Press Club.
“And they have little faith in promises from Congress to discipline U.S. domestic support in the 2007 farm bill after the shape of the agricultural package has been determined.”
