Federal agriculture minister Gerry Ritz says despite the latest attempts to push World Trade Organization talks forward, he sees little chance.
“I don’t see a ground swell,” he told the Dairy Farmers of Canada annual policy convention Feb. 3. “I think the best-before date is gone. I just don’t see it happening.”
Pascal Lamy, WTO director general, has been promoting the possibility of a 2011 deal and has been urging governments to begin to make compromises necessary to make it happen.
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Ritz said those predicting an imminent deal “are the same people who saw a deal coming in 2003.”
And with dairy farmers in the audience nervous that the government will agree to reduce protection for supply management in the interests of a deal, the minister promised there will be no compromise.
“We have no intention of moving an inch on supply management,” he said to audience applause. “They (the Europeans) get it.”
Unwillingness to compromise on supply management also is a key factor in Canada’s reluctance to join Trans-Pacific Partnership trade negotiations now underway between Pacific Rim countries.
New Zealand has insisted that a pre-condition for Canada entering the talks is that it agree to open its dairy market to more imports.
David Plunkett, monitoring the negotiations for the foreign affairs department, said Canada is “not prepared to make a down payment for the privilege of going to the table.”
After his speech, Ritz said in an interview the only thing “holding it all together” is that countries do not want to give up compromise agreements already agreed to during nine years of talks and included in the current working draft. They include the phasing out of export subsidies.
In the past decade since talks launched, the major advances in agricultural production have come in Brazil, China and India, said Ritz. “But they are still self-proscribed developing countries that give them an advantage over my farmers that starts to concern me.”
Chief agricultural trade negotiator Gilles Gauthier reinforced the point that a WTO deal is not on the horizon, despite an ambitious agenda of meetings during the next several months.
“The gaps between the major players remain extremely wide,” he said .
Adding to the pessimism was a prediction from Cornell University American farm policy expert Andrew Novakovic that the Republicandominated House of Representatives is in no mood to give U.S. president Barack Obama “fast track authority” to negotiate a WTO deal with the promise that Congress would vote for it or against it as a package but would not have power to amend parts of any deal.