Agriculture still the toughest WTO nut to crack - Opinion

LIKE the farmer who has never lost a crop in the spring, a trade agreement never is lost half way through the negotiation. Still, a dry spring and lack of snow cover on the farm can be a harbinger of disaster if the weather doesn’t change and the rains don’t come.

So it is with trade negotiations. Early progress isn’t essential to a final deal but it clearly helps.

Three years into World Trade Organization agricultural talks, the progress is, as the money managers who called losses ‘negative profits’ would say, all negative.

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Talks began in March 2000 and in 36 months, countries have managed to table their initial positions and stick to them with the tenacity of a southern preacher hanging onto the Word.

This week in Geneva, negotiators are making one last attempt before a March 31 deadline that was supposed to produce the broad outline of a deal.

The negotiators will almost surely get nowhere this week. It raises the spectre of a September ministerial meeting in Mexico filled with tough political decisions.

The last time such a scenario unfolded, at a 1990 Brussels ministerial meeting that was supposed to seal a deal during the last round of trade negotiations, the meeting collapsed in acrimony over agriculture.

The same thing happened in Montreal in 1988, a “mid-term” meeting comparable to Mexico.

Already, nervous negotiators mutter about “another Brussels” in the making, even as agriculture committee chair Stuart Harbinson urges compromise.

Of course, they will start compromising when their political masters tell them to and that does not appear imminent.

Even agriculture minister Lyle Vanclief has signaled that Canada is prepared to play the entrenchment game, insisting last week that Canada will not budge from its opening position and that “no deal is better than a bad deal.” That is as close as any Canadian minister has come to suggesting Canada would be prepared to walk away from a negotiation.

So what’s the problem that has kept agriculture as one of the toughest WTO nuts to crack? Essentially, it is the nature of the industry and the way nations look at it. The WTO negotiation is not so much a back-and-forth over the rules for commodity trade as it is a clash of visions, leavened by a healthy dose of hypocrisy.

All countries want to sell more of what they are efficient at producing while preserving domestic markets for economically or politically sensitive sectors.

All countries are trying to serve the needs of food industries that reflect both the exporters and the protectionists.

The Europeans are more up front about it, happy to identify farm support and rural protection as goals of the talks. The free-trade faction led by the United States and the Cairns Group stresses the economic more than the social, but most also have protectionist skeletons in their closets.

And the longer the politicians stay dug in with their original positions that do all things for all their people, the more their farm lobbies become accustomed to the idea that they may not have to give in order to get.

That makes it all the more difficult for governments to later make concessions.

It is a vicious circle in action.