IT IS difficult to imagine why the prospect of a successful World Trade Organization negotiation would make the heart of Chicken Farmers of Canada go pitter-patter. Apparently it does.
After eight years of limping along since its launch in Doha, Qatar, WTO movers and shakers are trying to inject some life this year. Political leaders have called for a deal by the end of 2010.
While political promises have not so far translated into flexibility and compromises in Geneva negotiations, there clearly is pressure within the trade community to inject momentum and to achieve a result.
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The leadership of Canada’s supply-managed chicken industry is egging them on.
“What is needed at this stage is a clear action plan that would identify all remaining contentious issues and would spell out precise steps to address them,” says the lead article in the September issue of the CFC publication The Chicken Farmer. “The month of September is packed with opportunities to finally set things on the right track.”
Unless some alternate universe has descended, the “right track” for the chicken industry and its supply-managed brethren in Canada would be for the WTO train to fall off the track.
Based on meetings of the WTO since the 2001 launch, a consistent theme is that any deal would start the clock ticking toward demise of Canada’s system of protection for import-sensitive sectors like chicken, dairy and eggs.
In her excellent book on the evolution of Canadian agricultural policy in an age of globalization, University of Toronto scholar Grace Skogstad argues that while supply management has survived previous trade agreements and international pressure because of domestic political support and reforms in the system, a Doha deal would be a greater challenge.
“A successful conclusion of the Doha negotiations will most likely require far greater changes in supply management,” she writes in Internationalization and Canadian Agriculture: Policy and Governing Paradigms.
The reason for the prediction is clear.
Only Canada opposes cuts in tariffs and tariff-rate quota guaranteed-access increases to protect supply management. Every other WTO member, all 152 of them, have either endorsed across-the-board tariff cuts and access expansion or don’t care enough to oppose it.
The supply managed sector has spent millions of lobby dollars over the years insisting that any decrease in tariff protection, and certainly the double digit cuts envisioned in WTO working texts, would spell the end of the system.
So why would CFC sound optimistic about progress toward a conclusion?
Industry leaders may be convinced that, to get a deal, the rest of the world will hold its nose and allow Canada to gain greater access to export markets while continuing to insulate some sensitive domestic sectors.
Nothing in eight years of negotiation and proposed texts from the negotiating chairs points in that direction.
It may be that supply management’s warning of any diminution of protection being catastrophic is overblown. Over the years, they have made good arguments to the contrary.
So why does industry leadership want to be seen as in favour of a WTO deal that can only cause grief? It is a question chicken producers might want to ask.
