Unless farmers from all regions and commodities work to find common ground, the next round of world trade talks could divide Canadian farmers with competing trade interests, a senior federal trade bureaucrat warned last week.
Mike Gifford, director general of trade policy for Agriculture Canada, told a Senate agriculture committee meeting the trade talks beginning in two years could pit Canadian grains and meat exporters looking for fewer trade barriers against import-sensitive sectors looking for protection.
“We’d better start thinking long and hard about how to reconcile these tensions between the sectors,” Gifford said.
Read Also
Agriculture ministers agree to AgriStability changes
federal government proposed several months ago to increase the compensation rate from 80 to 90 per cent and double the maximum payment from $3 million to $6 million
He said Ottawa will publish discussion papers this month on trade issues to be discussed at the next World Trade Organization talks that begin in late 1999.
“People may think it is early but this is when the work has to start,” Gifford said after the meeting. “We will be stronger if we can take a united and logical position that serves both exporters and import-sensitive sectors.”
He said Ottawa will sponsor a meeting between farm and food interests in spring 1999 to try to settle a final negotiating position.
It could be more difficult to reconcile export and import sectors this time than in the last trade talks because then, Ottawa was able to argue for an end to agricultural export subsidies on behalf of exporters while still defending the protectionist existing trade law in article 11 of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. It allowed border controls which protected supply-managed industries.
Volume import controls lost
However, the fight for article 11 was lost and tariffs replaced volume import controls.
Now it would be difficult to reconcile arguing for high tariffs to protect some Canadian products but low tariffs on items which Canada wants to export, said Gifford.
At the Senate committee Gifford fended off accusations that during the last GATT talks, negotiators like himself spent too much time defending supply management and too little time fighting for freer trade for western export-oriented farmers.
“I would disagree violently with the regional argument,” he said. “I can state categorically that Canada’s negotiating position did not result in tradeoffs (between Canadian sectors.)”
That is not the way Saskatchewan Conservative senator Len Gustafson saw it.
“We’ve been traded off in Western Canada for the protection of marketing boards in Eastern Canada,” he told Gifford.
That brought a harsh rejoinder from Liberal senator and former agriculture minister Eugene Whelan. Supply management is not a regional issue but a national issue, he said heatedly.
“Quit the malarkey,” he told Gustafson. “Don’t divide the country.”
But Gustafson said when the Conservatives were in power, he went with then-agriculture minister Bill McKnight to Geneva and was told by negotiators that the pressure was on to save article 11.
Gustafson said he was told the Americans had offered freer trade for grain and beef if Canada relented on supply management and allowed American firms more access to Canadian dairy, poultry and egg markets. He said the offer was refused and a chance was lost to help the West more.
