WTO: Bleak Future for Agriculture

DAWN, Pakistan's most widely circulated English language newspaper
March 22, 2002

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DAWN, Pakistan's most widely circulated English language newspaper | March 22, 2002 | by Nadeem Saeed

According to official statistics, 93 per cent of the farmers in the country own small land holdings below the subsistence level of 12.5 acres. They find it difficult to make ends meet owing to the high cost of production. But, somehow, they have relieved the government of the responsibility of food security since what they are earning from agriculture is grain for their domestic consumption.

According to an Asian Development Bank report of 1998, as many as 33 per cent of the country's population is living below the poverty line. The report reveals that poverty in Pakistan is growing year after year and, therefore, the food insecurity as well.

The scenario becomes more bleak in the wake of enforcement of agreements under the World Trade Organization regime. It will be implemented from Jan 1, 2005, as part of the globalization agenda. The treaties which are worrying agriculturists are the Agreement on Agriculture and Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights.

An anti-globalization activist based in Islamabad, Roshan Malik, was in town the other day. Being an agriculturist from Multan, he had a fair knowledge of the implications of treaties like AoA and TRIPs for Pakistan's agriculture.

Talking to Dawn, he said soon international trade laws would dictate terms to least-developed countries, instead of domestic policies, and this would be a very difficult situation for countries like Pakistan due to lack of awareness about what is to be done after 2004.

He said market access under AoA would give multinational corporations a competitive edge over domestic producers in developing and least-developed countries. Similarly, export subsidies would be cut gradually for export competition under AoA. While the developed countries like the US and the EU had been cleverly exempted from reduction in domestic support under AoA, the developing countries would be bound to reduce domestic support to their agriculture sector under the ceiling tariff.

Mr Roshan said under TRIPs, farmers would have to pay royalty to the patentee if they resolved the patent seed. If the farmers violated these contracts, they might be sued by the MNCs. The MNCs had patented several in- demand agricultural produce after the so-called micro-biological changes in their plants. To name of few, basmati rice, neem (margosa), haldi (turmeric), sarson (rapessed) and anar (pomegranate).

He said the convention on bio-diversity allowed farmers to reproduce and re-sow the seeds but TRIPs threatened them of legal action in case of violation of patent laws. He said globalization was likely to introduce corporate farming in developing countries like Pakistan which would ultimately knock the local farmers out of competition and they would have no choice except to sell their small landholdings to giant corporations and leave villages for employment in the cities.

"What the people are not realizing is a total socio-economic change looming in the wake of WTO, AoA and TRIPs treaties," he asserted.

He said need of the hour was capacity building of the people to make them ready to face the world after 2004 as the LDCs were least likely to get the WTO treaties changed in their favour, though they had tried to establish a like-minded group during the meeting of WTO in Doha, Qatar.

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