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With the US softening its position on India’s food security concerns at the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the Prime Minister’s Office will now take a final call on what could be an “acceptable” solution for India on the issue.
Top officials from the Commerce Ministry are scheduled to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday to finalise the country’s position in Geneva, a Government official told BusinessLine .
“The US has indicated its willingness to compromise. Everybody is now waiting for us to reveal what is acceptable to us. We want a solution before WTO breaks for Christmas,” said a Commerce Ministry official.
New Delhi may be ready to accept a “peace clause” protecting it against retaliatory action from other members in case its food procurement subsidies breach the given cap of 10 per cent of total production. However, it would want the “peace clause” to be permanent, with no deadline for replacing it with a new formula for calculating actionable subsidies.
Additionally, it also wants restrictive clauses attached to the peace clause to be dropped. These include the requirement to prove that the procurement subsidies are non-trade distortive and the need to submit various documents and data to be dropped, the official said.
“We are ready to give documents and data that are supplied by those giving ‘green-box’ or non-trade distorting subsidies that are not capped. It is unfair to ask us for more data and commitments,” the official added. India has refused to support a protocol on trade facilitation being pushed by a number of developed countries including the US without a solution to its concerns about breaching food subsidy caps. If the present rules on agriculture are not changed, India is likely to over-shoot the subsidy cap for rice in the next few years.
Although India had agreed to support the trade facilitation protocol – for facilitating movement of goods across borders – by July 31 this year at the WTO’s Bali Ministerial, it had not realised that the ‘peace clause’ being offered in return came with an expiry date of 2017.
In July, India had agreed to support trade facilitation if the ‘peace clause’ was made permanent. The US, however, did not agree. But, unable to garner much support against India at the WTO, it recently relented and agreed to make the ‘peace clause’ permanent. “With most countries not ready to sign a plurilateral trade facilitation agreement without India at the WTO, our bargaining position has become stronger,” the official said.
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