(Siglo XXI – Guatemala’s Newspaper)
Paris Bound?-The Central American sugar industry is strongly behind efforts to integrate the Central American countries into the Cairns Group, which is fighting within the WTO framework to eliminate agricultural subsidies. Currently the European market is closed to Central American sugar by a preferences scheme similar to their WTO-condemned banana regimen.
Governments around the world pay their farmers hundreds of billions of dollars in agricultural subsidies and "incentives." The "Uruguay Round" of the General Accord on Trade and Tariffs, was a 50-years-long global trade negotiation process that ended in the 1995 establishment of the World Trade Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. The last segment of GATT negotiations, the Uruguay Round, forced and/or encouraged significant changes in much of the way that the world's countries do business with one another, especially in all manner of services.
Many agricultural exporting countries, however, felt left out of the party, as "Uruguay" did little to dismantle the framework of agricultural subsides that so distorts global trade in agricultural products. The larger, industrialized countries refused, and continue to refuse to restructure or eliminate subsidies, incentives, and quotas that restrict or close their markets to many foreign-source products. The Cairns Group, an ad hoc body of 15 nations, has joined forces within the framework of the WTO to try to force change in the upcoming "Millennium Round", which is due to start by the end of 1999.
The Cairns Group states that "Subsidies on exports destabilize markets, drive down international prices and close doors to exports from efficient providers which do not subsidize production or sales, including developing nations which to a large extent depend on agriculture as a source of foreign exchange." At the last WTO ministerial conference, Uruguayan Minister of Foreign Relations Didier Opertti pointed out that the industrialized nations of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) subsidized agriculture to the tune of 280 billion dollars a year. Of this, the member-nations of the European Union are responsible for 85 percent of the total, and the US for two percent.
Taking the cue, the Guatemalan government has requested integration into the Cairns Group, and is encouraging its regional neighbor s to join the campaign. According to the Sugar Growers' Association of the Central American Isthmus (AICA), agricultural products represent the majority of all of the Central American countries' exports. AICA figures show El Salvador lowest at 53.3 percent, and Honduras at the high end with 90.2 percent; Guatemala's exports are 65.5 percent agriculture. Both Guatemala and Costa Rican plan to attend the September 1999 Cairns summit.
"The Cairns Group is the best vehicle to promote change in world markets that would open the door for Central America's highly competitive agricultural products," commented AICA's Guatemalan executive director José Orive.
|
