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US slams EU's policy on agriculure

The US, Canada and Australia accused the EU on Wednesday of blocking progress in talks on opening up global markets for farm produce by trying to avoid reform.

Senior negotiators for the three powers made the charge at a news conference at the start of a session of WTO talks on lowering tariffs on agricultural goods and cutting subsidies to farmers.

They also accused Brussels of throwing a spanner into the works at the talks -- a vital part of the three-year Doha Round of overall free trade negotiations -- by seeking to cut their access to its grain markets.

"We need equitable results from these talks," said chief US agriculture negotiator Allen Johnson, asserting that the EU did not want to look at existing distortions in world farm trade that also anger poor countries.

As aides distributed a chart showing the 15-nation EU as by far the world's biggest provider of export subsidies and of domestic support that helps its farmers sell goods cheaply on foreign markets, Johnson said the problem must be tackled.

"The United States is on the side of those who want to address these imbalances," he declared. Its own proposals, filed at the WTO in early August, would slash by half its own domestic support that helped farmers export at low prices.

"But we don't see a lot of specifics coming from the other side," Johnson declared. "We don't see any numbers from them."

The talks, which face a key deadline next March, have been under the spotlight at the United Nations Earth Summit in Johannesburg where poor countries have complained bitterly over EU and U.S. barriers to their farm goods.

By March, the 144 WTO member countries are due to approve a schedule setting out specific targets for liberalising farm trade to be finally negotiated before the Doha Round is completed by January 1, 2005.

Johnson, backed by Canadian negotiator Suzanne Vinet and Australia's envoy to the WTO David Spencer, said a request from the EU to renegotiate current terms for the import of wheat, durum and barley was "a very bad signal."

Brussels committed itself to current grain import conditions for major Western trading partners -- based on tariffs only -- in the 1986-93 Uruguay Round, but wants to introduce quotas because of a flood of wheat from Russia and Ukraine.

This action, Canada's Vinet told the news conference, "is very unfortunate." She said her country would do all it could to maintain its current level of access to the EU market.

Spencer said the EU move was "a very poor message at a time when we should be talking about opening up, not closing down."

And in the WTO talks, the Australian envoy declared, Japan and South Korea as well as the EU "have steadfastly refused to be drawn on what they would do on tariffs and domestic support" to reach an overall agreement.
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