Nath: Road bloc

New Delhi, Oct. 20: The trade talks at Geneva collapsed on Wednesday with the two-day ministerial meetings being called off mid-way as the US and EU refused to cut subsidies provided to their farmers and developing nations stood firm on protecting their peasantry.

Commerce minister Kamal Nath is reported to have insisted that India could not offer any deeper tariff cuts in agriculture than what was already proposed in the paper tabled by the G-20 alliance of developing countries.

Nath has made it clear that developing countries would not, at any cost, commit to reducing tariffs by more than two-thirds of the cuts that developed countries concede.

With the hardening of positions and the inability of the EU to better its offer due to extreme pressures from member nations like France, the talks have ended in a deadlock.

The ministerial talks, originally scheduled for two days, ended abruptly on Wednesday and the session for Thursday was cancelled. The negotiations were expected to pave the way for the Hong Kong ministerial in December, but this now appears to be an uphill task.

India effectively blocked a move by the US-EU combine to widen the scope of talks and establish linkages of agriculture with non-agricultural market access (NAMA) and services.

The strategy of the developed countries was to join hands to get ambitious results in NAMA and thus take the pressure off the US and EU to cut the high import tariffs on farm goods. Nath also staunchly resisted a move by the EU to link the treatment of sensitive products and special products for developing countries. He pointed out that some products are sensitive commercially, while special products are important for the food and livelihood security of poor farmers. These products have been identified for no or minimal tariff cuts.

Domestic political pressures are building up in both the developed and the developing countries. Hence, it is becoming much more difficult to move ahead with the multilateral trade talks.