Developing countries call for scrapping of farm subsidies

Developing countries at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg on Tuesday pressed for a commitment from the world's richest nations to scrap billions of dollars in farm subsidies, which they say undermine their market access. With close to 13 million people in Southern Africa facing severe food shortages, delegates attending the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) criticised what they called trade-distorting subsidies applied in Europe and North America. "Rich countries gave about US $57 billion in development aid in 2001 but paid more than US $350 billion to their own farmers. Such subsidies help keep out third world produce," a Togolese delegate, Mensah Todzro, told IRIN. World Bank figures suggest that giving developing countries more access to rich markets could earn them about $150 billion a year. "We sit here talking about sustainable agriculture, and families are dying," said Lesotho Environment Minister Lebohang Ntsinya. "We appeal to you to put your policies right." The United States came under fire for a new Farm Bill that boosted subsidies to domestic farmers. The development agency Oxfam pointed out that US wheat, rice and cotton farmers would thereby increase their earnings by up to 50 percent, enabling them to further undercut produce from poor countries. Measuring subsidies as a percentage of farmers' total income, EU subsidies topped the chart at 35 percent, while the United States climbed to 21 percent from a low of 14 percent in the mid-1990s, Oxfam said. "We're subsidising farmers in the north to the tune of US $1 billion a day to preserve the quality of life of those in the north, whereas there is only negligible support for poor farmers in Africa and the rest of the developing world. The already strong in this case, are only getting stronger," an environmental professor from the University of California, Pedro Sanchez, told IRIN. "If we could just take a week of the US $1 billion a day that American farmers are getting and distribute to farmers in the developed world, we would see the end of hunger in sight," he said. South African Trade and Industry Minister Alec Erwin also slammed the US Farm Bill as a step "backwards", while developing countries also saw a new EU agriculture plan as "falling short". Erwin told a press briefing that South Africa was pushing for a reaffirmation of a timetable, agreed at the World Trade Organisation talks in Doha, Qatar, last year. That commitment was for rich nations to increase market access for farm products from the poorest countries by 2004. But the opposition of the United States to such targets was "obviously problematic", he said. Both the United States and members of the EU delegations at WSSD reiterated their commitment to helping agriculture in the developing world, but refused to comment on the issue of farm subsidies. "We're entering an economic slowdown and it's always harder at such times for countries to open their markets," one EU delegate told the conference.