THE Philippines’s request for a scheme that would protect agriculture from harmful import surges did not merit a draft decision from the World Trade Organization (WTO), effectively sending home the country’s negotiators from Argentina empty-handed.
As the 11th WTO Ministerial Conference (MC11) reached its conclusion, 164 member-countries failed to come up with a firm ministerial decision on agriculture as they expressed divergent views on issues, such as special safeguard mechanism (SSM) and public stockholding (PSH).
“I think there was clearly no outcome here on agriculture. Those are very, very difficult issues; we knew that from the very beginning,” WTO Director General Roberto Azevêdo said in a news briefing on December 14 (Philippine time).
Azevêdo recalled that previous ministerial conferences—in Bali, Indonesia and Nairobi, Kenya—made breakthrough outcomes on agriculture, including a temporary solution on PSH and elimination of export subsidies.
In a statement dated December 12, the Philippines said that it is “deeply regretful and disappointed” that there was no draft decision on SSM, despite the priority accorded to it under the Nairobi Declaration of 2015. At the same time, the Philippines stood firm on its decision to reject any substantive decision on agriculture sans the SSM.
“The Philippines reiterates that it could not join any consensus for adopting any draft substantive decision in the absence of a solution on SSM or through an improved SSG [special safeguard]. There simply is no sufficient political basis for us to do so,” the statement read.
The Philippines emphasized that the approval of SSM is vital for its farm sector as the present SSG proves to be inefficient and ineffective to protect its small-scale framers from import surges and price depressions.
It explained that the country’s current trigger price for corn is 5 cents per kilogram (kg), but the import price for the last three years average 31 cents. Another example, it noted, is that the trigger price for pork imports is pegged at $36 per kg compared to $1.65 per kg average price in the past three years.