WORLD Trade Organization negotiators are wrestling this year with issues that will affect Canadian farmers directly – how much can their governments support them, protect them, give them access to new markets? Over four weeks, this column has explored some of the issues at WTO talks past and present and their impact on farmers. This week part four: Canada’s choices.
Don Stephenson, Canada’s ambassador to the World Trade Organization, has a theory about what appears to outsiders to be the glacial pace of world trade negotiations.
It’s not that they proceed slowly but steadily, he said during a chat at WTO headquarters in Geneva. Instead, there are long stretches of stalemate followed by “a lurch forward at almost breakneck speed.”
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Chief agriculture negotiator Steve Verheul was listening in on the conversation.
“We are probably due for one of those lurches,” he said wryly.
So, with talks heading into what many see as a make-or-break period in the months leading to a December ministerial meeting in Hong Kong, let’s assume enough pressure is building in the system to produce an autumn lurch.
It is Dec. 18, 2005, and the Hong Kong convention centre is humid, tense and politically charged.
The WTO meeting is into its final sleep-deprived hours and the pressure is on trade and agriculture ministers to agree at least to the outline of a trade deal to cut subsidies and open markets.
The credibility of the WTO, the credibility of the ministers, depends on a deal.
They cannot afford negotiation collapses like Brussels 1990, Seattle 1999 or Cancun 2003. They cannot afford to see the talks limp into 2006 without the outline of a deal because domestic politics become more volatile in many key countries next year, including the United States, the European Union and Japan.
At this late hour in Hong Kong, the time has come for compromises.
Unexpectedly, the Americans and the EU start the lurch by cutting a deal that goes some way toward reducing U.S. domestic subsides while lowering some European import barriers.
For supporters of dramatic trade liberalization, the EU-U.S. deal is discouragingly timid but it provides momentum.
Key developing countries China, Brazil and India see it as an opening they can embrace on the assumption more will come later.
Canada is being told by European and American negotiators, in no uncertain terms, that it is time to move, accepting a developing world proposal that the cap on sensitive product tariffs be far lower than many of Canada’s existing high over-quota tariffs for supply managed products.
And pressure has remained strong to concede some ground on the issue of the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly.
Trade minister Jim Peterson and agriculture minister Andy Mitchell are in a bind, months before an election in which any compromise on supply management could cost votes in Quebec and Ontario.
The CWB issue is less politically potent for the minority Liberals, since there are few western seats at play for them.
Typically, when the ministers turn to the dozens of farm lobbyists haunting the WTO halls, they receive conflicting advice.
If that turns out to be the scenario in Hong Kong, what should they do?
