Manila will continue to push for the establishment of a scheme that would protect the farm sectors of developing countries and least-developed countries from harmful import surges during agriculture negotiations at the World Trade Organization (WTO) this year.
Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel F. Piñol told the BusinessMirror that the Philippine government would press for the setup of the special safeguard mechanism (SSM), even after talks at the WTO’s 11th Ministerial Conference (MC11) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, collapsed last month.
“Yes, of course,” Piñol said when asked if the government will push for the creation of SSM at the WTO this year.
“It [the SSM] is our gift to Filipino farmers. And we urged the WTO Secretariat [at MC11] that SSM should be part of the issues to be tackled this year,” he added.
Agriculture negotiations at the WTO are set to resume on February 20, with a meeting of an Informal Committee on Agriculture. This would be followed by the two-day meeting of the Committee on Agriculture on February 21 and 22.
Piñol was part of the Philippine delegation to MC11, which pushed for the creation of an SSM or an improved special safeguard (SSG) to protect small-scale farmers from the detrimental effects of cheap foreign agricultural imports.
However, as MC11 reached its conclusion last December 14, the 164 WTO member-countries failed to come up with a firm ministerial decision on agriculture as they expressed divergent views on issues, such as 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. 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.
Manila said the Philippines’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.
Jonathan Hepburn, agriculture senior program manager at Geneva-based International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development, told the BusinessMirror that the breakdown of agriculture talks at MC11 would mean that trade negotiators would have to double their efforts “to make global markets for
food and agriculture fairer and more sustainable.”
“The inability of WTO members to agree on a consensus on agriculture in Buenos Aires is definitely a setback for countries that had hoped to see outcomes on specific issues, including the SSM, but also on other issues such as trade-distorting farm subsidies and agricultural export restrictions,” Hepburn said in an e-mail interview.
“Progress in improving agricultural trade rules is critical if countries are serious about achieving Sustainable Development Goal 2, which commits governments to ending hunger and malnutrition by 2030. The poor outcome from Buenos Aires means trade negotiators must now redouble efforts to make global markets for food and agriculture fairer and more sustainable,” he added.