SASKATOON – Ray Ryland came to Saskatoon last week hoping to find out just what the much-ballyhooed GATT agreement might mean for his grain and oilseed farm at Plato, Sask.
Two days and 40 speakers later, he had heard lots of facts and speculation, but wasn’t sure if he was any further ahead.
“The uncertainty that I came to this conference with is something I’m going home with,” he said as the meeting came to an end.
An international line-up of academics, bureaucrats, lawyers, traders, business people and farm lobbyists trooped to the podium to give their opinion about how agriculture around the world will be affected by the new General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.
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They talked about everything from grain production in Hungary and the politics of rice in Japan to specific clauses and domestic policy reforms.
But for Ryland, one of 40 or 50 farmers among the 250 in attendance, it seemed that for every question that was answered, a new one was raised.
In the days leading up to the conference, Ryland had asked farmers in his area what they knew or wanted to know about GATT. The response was less than overwhelming.
“GATT is not a big topic of conversation for most farmers,” he told the meeting. After eight years of negotiations most producers have lost interest in the subject. And the fact that the Canada-U.S. free trade deal hasn’t prevented trade harassment has made them somewhat cynical about trade agreements generally.
“There seems to be a lot of difference between what’s signed on paper and what actually happens,” said Ryland.
Most speakers described the new GATT as a modest first step that must be followed by more negotiations aimed at getting rid of the remaining barriers to free trade.
As Washington-based trade lawyer Catherine Curtiss put it: “We are in the process of turning around the ocean liner of trade rules and protectionism.”
There was also a consensus that while farmers will be better off when the deal is fully implemented six years from now, it won’t provide any immediate, magic solution to the world’s farm trade woes.
The agreement will reduce the volume and value of export subsidies, open up previously closed markets and set up new rules for settling disputes.
Business as usual
But the details of how various countries will implement the new rules remain to be seen, and in the first few years it will to some extent be business as usual. There will still be nasty trade disputes and subsidy wars, especially in cereal grains.
“We’re going to have significant export subsidy competition for the next few years from the U.S. and European Union,” said Harvey Brooks, director of corporate policy for the Canadian Wheat Board.
“But there’s no question at the end point it will have significant benefits for Western Canadian farmers.”
Alex McCalla, a farm economist from the University of California, said people’s assessment of GATT is colored by a number of things: what they are comparing it to, what their expectations are, how they make their living (are they farmers, politicians, trade lawyers, bureaucrats)and their country of origin.
“Everybody says ‘we could have gained more if the bad guys had been hit worse’,” said the Alberta-born academic.
In his view, anyone assessing the success of GATT must look at the alternatives, and judged in that light, it looks pretty good.
“There are very few people prepared to argue that we’d have been better off without an agreement,” said McCalla.
Brian Paddock of Agriculture Canada said the GATT talks also prompted some major policy changes before the deal was finally signed, like reforms to the European Common Agriculture Policy.
