GENEVA, May 26: The World Trade Organisation on Saturday proposed sharply lowering tariffs on some agricultural products from poorer countries in exchange for them reducing trade protection measures.

The WTO’s chief agriculture negotiator, Crawford Falconer, said the new proposal could allow for progress in the stalled Doha round of negotiations aimed at reducing barriers to global commerce.

Falconer said developed countries should reduce tariffs for tropical products to zero for tariffs currently situated at less than 25 per cent, while those above that threshold should drop by 85 per cent.

He also proposed limiting special safeguard mechanisms used by poorer countries that allow them to increase tariffs to protect their economies against abrupt influxes of imports.

“If this is a mechanism which would, when applied, be capable of being triggered literally hundreds of times in any given year, how is this to be reconciled with something that is ‘special’?” Falconer said.

He proposed making “this instrument workable and responsive to genuine need.”

That position goes against that of the G33, a group of 46 developing countries with large rural populations, including Indonesia, India, China and Kenya. The group has demanded that the safeguard mechanism be applied to all import products.

Falconer’s proposal, however, is in keeping with the position of the so-called Cairns group of agricultural export countries, including Australia, Canada and Brazil.

Focus on the Global South, a nongovernmental group, said the proposal showed “ignorance or gross insensitivity towards the crisis caused by import surges experienced by a vast number of developing countries.”

The organisation cited Cameroon as an example, saying poultry imports into the African country increased nearly 300 per cent between 1999 and 2004, resulting in the loss of 110,000 rural jobs annually between 1994 and 2003.

The new proposal complements another one distributed to WTO members by Falconer a month ago recommending a decrease is US agriculture subsidies to below $19 billion per year. It also proposed 50 per cent decreases in agriculture tariffs and cuts of between 65 and 80 per cent for the highest tariffs.

WTO negotiations aimed at reducing barriers to global commerce have gone nowhere for the past six years. Differences, notably on trade in agricultural products, have blocked progress in the Doha Development Round, launched with great fanfare in the Qatari capital in 2001.—AFP