Farm ministers warn against trade concessions

Agriculture ministers from the EU’s main food-producing countries are expected to warn the European Commission against offering any further concessions should World Trade Organization (WTO) talks resume this weekend (27 January).

The entry of Romania and Bulgaria into the EU will add support to member states, led by France, which have resisted further reductions in tariffs and subsidies for European farmers and their produce.

The meeting of agriculture ministers (29 January) will come two days after 30 trade ministers meet in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum where they will discuss restarting talks for a world trade deal, which broke down last July.

Both Pascal Lamy, the WTO director-general, and Peter Mandelson, the European trade commissioner, warned this week that a slight chance remains for a successful end to negotiations but that all sides must be prepared to offer more.

"The EU is ready to show further flexibility if others do the same," Mandelson said in the European Parliament this week.

"On agriculture, we need a DDA [Doha Development Agenda] deal that strikes the balance between the need to advance decisively on farm trade liberalisation through lower tariffs and the reduction and disciplining of trade distorting farm support, and the need, on the other hand, to respect the reasonable agricultural sensitivities of WTO members, notably in the developing world," he added.

Lamy said a trade deal also had to address inequalities in the system. "Many of the advantages of the WTO remain with a few. Unless it is changed it is biased against developing countries’ interests," he said at a briefing in Brussels.

But France said it did not intend to allow the EU to go further on its offers on agriculture tariffs, despite press reports this week that this had already been done.

"The figures being cited as concessions which are supposed to have been made by European negotiators, according to Anglo-Saxon sources, all seem improbable to me and make the negotiating mandate impossible," said French Trade Minister Christine Lagarde ahead of a meeting with Mandelson in Brussels this week (23 January).

With elections looming in the main EU agriculture lobbying states - France in April, May and June and Ireland probably in June - their ministers will not want to appear to be softening this stance over the coming months.

There seems little doubt that Romania will lend its voice to this stance. "There are one million semi-subsistence farms in Romania and when you also take into consideration the restructuring process going on, we need stability [in agriculture] for at least a number of years," said one Romanian official.

Agriculture ministers from the EU’s main food-producing countries are expected to warn the European Commission against offering any further concessions should World Trade Organization (WTO) talks resume this weekend (27 January).