As the World Trade Organization (WTO) holds talks this week in Geneva, a senior United Nations official has urged an end to cotton subsidies that distort the global market at the expense of producers in poor countries.
Writing in The International Herald Tribune, Under-Secretary-General Anwarul K. Chowdhury points out that cotton is one of the worlds most heavily subsidized crops. In the United States, cotton exported at 37 cents a pound in 2002 cost agricultural firms 86 cents to produce, with the difference made up by US taxpayers. The superpowers subsidies for cotton amounted to 1,7 billion (milliarder) dollar in 2002.
– These subsidies, placed on cotton by Europe as well as by the US, form a barrier to a number of poor countries trying to work, and trade, their way out of abysmal poverty, says Mr. Chowdhury, the UN High Representative for the Least Developed Countries (LDCs), Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States.
He explains that cotton is a key export for at least 20 LDCs, where generally the population lives on one dollar a day or less.
– Not only are they competing at home and in the world market with the advanced technology of agro-business in the North, they have to contend with subsidized exports that, from the US in 2002, were being sold at an average of 61 per cent below the cost of production, Mr. Chowdhury points out.
Mr. Chowdhury also notes that Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad and Mali, which rely heavily on cotton production, are among its lowest-cost producers in the world.
Those four countries last year proposed that the European Union and US should embark on a three-year phase-out of cotton subsidies, and set up a transitional mechanism to offset the losses incurred in the meantime.
– Since the breakdown of trade talks in Cancun last September, there has been some attention but too little action directed toward the problems of cotton growers from poor countries, the High Representative says, calling for the WTO to revisit the proposal.
– As WTO Director-General Supachai Panitchpakdi said at the time it was made, these countries are not asking for preferences, but for a correction of trade distortions, he recalls.
The phase-out of cotton subsidies, he argues, would not only open up economic opportunity in some of the worlds poorest countries, but could also jump start progress in other areas of agricultural trade disputes.
– If that happens, the whole world would benefit, Mr. Chowdhury concludes.
Kilde: FNs Nyhedstjeneste.
