As they defended their refusal to offer deeper farm subsidy cuts as part of a World Trade Organization negotiation last weekend, United States officials criticized the tactics others were using to protect their farmers.
Several of the verbal grenades landed in or close to Canada.
At a June 29 briefing, U.S. trade representative Susan Schwab said Canada and Australia could help the negotiations if they “give up the ghost there on the monopoly” held by their respective wheat boards. The issue did not come up during negotiator meetings.
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Agriculture secretary Mike Johanns later complained that countries looking to preserve tariff protections for sensitive and special products really were looking to maintain protection under a different name.
Although protection for an agreed number of special products in developing countries and sensitive products in many countries including Canada, the European Union and Japan were written into the rules of the negotiating round, Johanns called them loopholes that diluted any agreement on market access.
He said a developing country proposal to reduce agricultural tariffs by an average 54 percent really would be an average 40 percent reduction when the exemptions are taken into consideration.
He called those loopholes a black box in the WTO negotiations that diminished the impression of how much other countries were offering in market access.
For Canadian agriculture minister Chuck Strahl, it was partly American bargaining tactic and partly American suspicion of the complicated farm programs in jurisdictions like the EU.
The farm policy reforms in Europe during the past few years have left the Americans puzzled, he said. Commodity-specific supports have been diminished, but various rural, ecological and other support programs have been set up to make sure money keeps flowing to farmers.
“The Americans are just bottom line people. ‘I’m going to give my farmers $10 billion. What’s it to you?’ ” Strahl said.
“In Europe, it’s that they give some money in price support, some farm friendly thing, some rural initiative, some pesticide break, some GMO cover and at the end you say, ‘I just don’t know how to get around all those rules to get into the market.’ That’s what frustrates the Americans. That’s what makes them suspicious of all this.”
