For the first time since Canada agreed July 31 to designate the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly as a negotiable item at world trade talks, a skirmish over the future of the board has taken place in Geneva and it ended in stalemate.
Chief Canadian agriculture trade negotiator Steve Verheul said in an interview that the wheat board issue was raised in October.
Canada saw the talks as preliminary because real progress was not possible until after the United States election decided who will be in office for the next four years.
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The United States and the European Union raised the wheat board monopoly issue during a discussion of technical aspects of trying to design disciplines on export subsidy rules.
“It became clear most countries didn’t view the wheat board as a technical issue,” Verheul said.
“My intervention was that if we are addressing trade-distorting practices, the theory of monopoly is not evidence of trade distortion,” he said. “We need evidence of trade distortion that we can respond to.”
Verheul said Australia and New Zealand agreed, because they have their own state trading enterprises to defend in WTO talks.
The U.S. and EU were not impressed.
“They said they could not cite evidence because of the lack of evidence, the lack of transparency,” said Verheul.
The discussion ended there.
Serious negotiations on the agricultural issues are not likely to resume until next year, despite a looming deadline to make progress by the time world trade ministers meet in Hong Kong in December 2005.
