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SEN.
Edgardo Angara called on the United Nations to consider
the elimination of export subsidies and reduction of
domestic subsidies of rich countries, as he blamed the
prevailing trade imbalance for the looming global food
crisis.
Speaking
before delegates at the 16th Session of the UN
Commission on Sustainable Development on the theme
“International Agricultural Trade and Access to
Markets,” Angara asserted that substantial protectionism
in rich countries has been traced as the root cause of
skewed trade in agriculture.
“We have
blamed the global food crisis on a confluence of
factors: climate change, increased demand for food,
rapid increase in the price of oil and mandates for
biofuel production. But looking deeper, this crisis is
the culmination of long-standing imbalances between rich
and poor countries in international agricultural trade,”
Angara said.
He
bemoaned that developed countries forced countries like
the Philippines, “to open our markets to their
industrial goods, while they kept their markets closed
to our agricultural products with various mechanisms
such as nontariff barriers.”
Contrary
to the principles of the World Trade Organization (WTO),
Angara noted that rich countries “give their farmers huge
subsidies, which developing countries cannot afford,
thus creating an unfair playing field,” said
Angara.
According to the senator, huge domestic support and
export subsidies provided by developed countries to
their farmers render developing countries’ farm products
uncompetitive.
In 2005
he reported that the total subsidy to agriculture in
OECD countries amounted to $385 billion, more than
double the Philippines’ gross national product (GNP)
last year, and over $1 billion a day.
“Developing countries like the Philippines cannot afford
to provide its farmers the same subsidies that developed
countries grant them. As a result of this unfair trade
regime, developing countries are inherent losers. Since
its launch, the World Trade Organization turned many
countries from net exporters to net importers,” he
lamented.
Angara
recalled that the Philippines, now one of the most
vulnerable countries to the global rice crisis, used to
be a net exporter of agricultural products pre-WTO
membership, enjoying a trade surplus averaging at $157
million a year from 1985 to 1994.
But upon
accession to the WTO in 1995, the country registered its
first trade deficit in agriculture in a decade, and has
never gotten over that slump ever since.
He noted
that its export earnings grew 0.18 percent a year on
average, while imports ballooned by 8.01 percent a year,
with the trade deficit reaching $1.53 billion by 2006.
At the
same time, the senator pointed out that developed
countries’ subsidies to their farmers have had a very
serious impact on poor farmers in the Asia-Pacific
Region.
Rice
subsidies in the
US,
for instance, have affected rice farmers in
Thailand,
Vietnam and India, he said.
Corn
subsidies have also driven prices down, affecting
farmers in the Philippines and China. Soy subsidies have
undermined the livelihoods of 2.5 million Indonesian
farmers.
In the
same UN forum, Angara pressed for fair trade for the
developing world’s poor farmers, arguing that current
iniquitous practices have driven them to subsistence
living and rendered many developing countries food
insecure.
“In the
early 1960s, we, developing countries, had an overall
annual agricultural trade surplus of almost $7 billion…
[but] since the beginning of the 1990s, we have become
net importers of food and have incurred deficits. In
Asia’s developing countries, agricultural imports
started exceeding exports by an average of 4 percent
since 1994,” Angara reported. |
