Agriculture issues top G-20 agenda: Meeting on Friday
By Mubarak Zeb Khan
ISLAMABAD, Sept 6: Pakistan will host the first G-20 meeting on Friday to prepare a joint position, articulating developing countries’ stand for the upcoming ministerial conference on various issues, including the contentious agricultural issue.
The two-day meeting will also take stock of the state of play in the negotiations in various areas of developing countries’ interests in Geneva since the WTO framework agreement was signed in July last year.
“The G-20 will have an open agenda, but the main focus will be on agriculture issues,” Commerce Minister Humayun Akhtar Khan told Dawn on Tuesday.
He said the G-20 would formulate strategies to ensure a level-playing field for developing countries. Mr Khan said this meeting would be an important event after the mini-ministerial meeting held in China and the planned October ministerial conference in Geneva.
The minister said that during the meeting representatives from G-20 member countries would take stock of future strategies for the upcoming Hong Kong ministerial conference.
“I hope that with the appointment of the new WTO director-general, things will move at a faster track,” the minister said. He agreed that no tangible breakthrough had been made in the July framework agreement signed last year.
The G-20 meeting will look at critical areas like formula for tariffs reduction in the agriculture sector and criteria for the selection of special and sensitive products that needed to be pushed at the upcoming ministerial conference. It would also look at an end date for export subsidies which resulted in artificial prices of farm products of developed countries, denying market access to developing countries.
According to an Oxfam study, six European countries’ farm producers were given $1 billion subsidy in 2003 so that their products could be dumped in the world markets because of artificially low prices.
The G-20 is an informal group of developing countries that came into being in Geneva during the final stages of the preparation for Cancun. The group represents a cross-section of the WTO membership and comprises a substantial share of world agricultural population, production and trade — 63 per cent of all farmers live in the 20-member group of countries and 51 per cent of the world population.
It also represents around 20 per cent of the world agricultural production, 26 per cent of total agricultural exports and 17 per cent of all world imports of agricultural products.
The G-20 group has a wide and balanced geographical representation, being currently integrated by 19-member countries — five from Africa (Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Zimbabwe), six from Asia (China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Philippines and Thailand), and eight from Latin America (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Mexico, Paraguay and Venezuela).
