Wheat grower Ted Menzies of Claresholm, Alta., is in Geneva this week to tell World Trade Organization negotiators that Canadian farmers are not united in demanding preservation of high tariffs to protect “sensitive” sectors.
The president of the Canadian Agri-Food Trade Association said WTO trade proposals to reduce domestic tariffs by at least 45 percent on each item with a sector-wide average of 60 percent are too timid and should be deepened and accelerated.
Meanwhile, defenders of supply management, including the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, denounced the proposal from WTO agriculture negotiating committee chair Stuart Harbinson as a prescription for the death of supply management.
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“We’re going to explain, probably for the first time to a lot of these countries, that Canada is not totally made up of supply management,” Menzies said in a Feb. 17 interview on the eve of his trip to Geneva to meet various negotiators and Harbinson.
“CAFTA represents 80 percent of production in this country and almost all the agriculture exports, and these proposals are weighted too much to the protectionists.”
Geneva’s WTO community will be seeing the face of Canada’s divided agricultural lobby.
Menzies, a former president of the Western Canadian Wheat Growers’ Association, also said a Harbinson proposal to strip state trading enterprises like the Canadian Wheat Board of their monopoly and ability to guarantee financing for export contracts may make sense.
“The question is whether STEs, and there are many of them around the world beyond the wheat board, distort prices through loan guarantees, under pricing or whatever,” he said. “If they do, then it is proper to consider them as trade irritants to be addressed.”
CFA president Bob Friesen was in Tokyo last week as part of a coalition of farm groups that demonstrated outside a WTO ministerial meeting. The coalition of farm groups from countries as diverse as the European Union, Japan, Norway, South Korea and a number of African states supports “fair and equitable agricultural trade rules” that allow for protection of sensitive sectors and developing country agriculture.
Last week, the American National Farmers Union joined the coalition of “like-minded farmers’ organizations” that pronounced the Harbinson text too radical.
Menzies dismissed it as a “funny little alliance” of protectionist farmers outside the mainstream of export-oriented producers.
“You can find protectionists anywhere if you look hard enough,” he said.
