The long awaited sixth W.T.O. Ministerial Conference will be held in Hong Kong, China, next week (Dec. 13–18).
According to the W.T.O. webpage, “This sixth conference will be vital for enabling the four-year-old Doha Development Agenda (D.D.A.) negotiations forward sufficiently to conclude the round in 2006.”
Embedded within the trade talks is the increasingly controversial issue of American and European farm subsidies.
Recently, in separate individual cases before the W.T.O., the world body issued decisions finding that some U.S. cotton support programs, as well as parts of the EU’s domestic sugar policy, violated certain aspects of international trade agreements.
The outcome of these cases has under girded the current round of multi-party trade talks. As added negotiating leverage, some countries may imply that insufficient movement in current trade talks may result in other commodity specific litigation that could bring additional pressure for domestic farm policy reform.
In a report released last Wednesday, Oxfam International noted that programs impacting corn, rice and sorghum could potentially face a similar fate as cotton in a W.T.O. litigated process if the programs are not changed.
Similarly, the Cato Institute noted in a report released this week that, “U.S. farm programs for a variety of commodities may be suppressing market prices in violation of the WTO Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures.”
And just yesterday, DTN writer Chris Clayton reported that, “The United States runs the risk of domestic farm programs getting ‘picked apart’ by trade cases from other countries challenging U.S. ag subsidies if a deal isn’t struck in the Doha Round of World Trade Organizations talks, USDA’s chief economist said Monday.”
Legal and political pressure placed on U.S. domestic crop programs from abroad seems certain to be a key factor in the 2007 Farm Bill debate.
Keith Good writes The FarmPolicy.com News Summary, an Email newsletter containing a summary of news relating to U.S. farm policy which is published most weekdays. For more information, go to www.FarmPolicy.com.