AS MINISTERS from key trading nations gather in Geneva this week looking for enough common ground to forge a World Trade Organization deal, Canada typically will be flashing its domestic dirty undies for all to see.
Free traders will be there in force to insist that Canada abandon its defence of over-quota supply management tariffs in the interests of a broader trade liberalizing deal.
Supply management defenders will be there in force to insist Canada not accept any deal that lowers over-quota tariffs because it will leave them vulnerable to unpredictable imports.
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No other country sends the scores of competing farm lobbyists to WTO meetings that Canada does.
Is there a way to end this predictable spectacle?
Flash back to a Parliament Hill meeting June 15 when both Canadian sides made their pitch to MPs on the House of Commons agriculture committee. The divide was obvious and several MPs wondered if reconciliation is possible.
“How do we come to some sensible common ground,” asked Liberal Paul Steckle.
John Masswohl, Ottawa-based director of international relations for the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association, said he also wonders if there is common ground.
“I guess that’s the question that I often struggle with, why can’t we find some common ground? Why are we entrenched in our positions domestically at one extreme or the other?”
The simple answer is that the two sides see the other in caricature terms, willing to sacrifice other sectors for their own advancement.
The extreme traders, to use Masswohl’s term, see the protectionists as unwilling or unable to embrace the new global economy.
The extreme protectionists see the traders as entrepreneurs who would sell out their grandmothers, never mind supply management, to gain access for one more tonne of grain, even if it is sold at a loss.
But there is common ground in goals if not in tactics and policy needs.
Both sides are looking for the same thing –
trade and access predictability.
The exporters want trade rules that guarantee them access to markets if their products are competitive. They want the unpredictability of politics and escalating tariffs out of the system so they can develop business plans that can predict foreign market access.
The importers want predictability in import levels so they can operate their managed production system. It is why they would prefer predictable access at the bottom – for instance, a five or seven percent portion of the domestic market available to imports – than tariff lowering at the top that leaves the system vulnerable to unplanned imports from large companies willing to pay the short-term price to jump the tariff wall.
Exporters scoff at dairy product tariffs of 300 percent. Dairy leaders, whose goal is a quota high enough to let them plan production by knowing exactly how much product will be in the marketplace, note that the beef industry also is protected by a quota for offshore imports.
Their common ground is that they all want to operate in a predictable world.
Their needs and view of how to achieve that are so estranged that bridging the gap seems like a non-starter.
