Buenos Aires, Argentina – The World Trade Organization (WTO) Secretariat gave the commitment that it would review the Philippine proposal to provide more safeguards to sensitive commodities which are highly vulnerable to import surges and price declines, including pork and corn.
WTO Director-General Roberto Azevedo gave the assurance during a meeting with the Philippine delegation headed by Trade and Industry Secretary Ramon Lopez and the Agriculture Secretary.
Azevedo said that the Philippine proposal seeking a review of the “trigger price” for sensitive commodities like pork and corn will be tackled by the WTO Secretariat when it gets back to Geneva at the end of the 11th Ministerial Conference here.
Nothing substantial was agreed upon during the week-long tense negotiations with at least two big countries invoking their veto powers to block any agreements on Public Stock Holdings and Domestic Support.
The Philippines had earlier voiced its intent to exercise its veto powers if its advocacies on the Special Safeguard Mechanism (SSM) or an improved Special Safeguard Provisions (SSG) were not given due course during the Conference.
The Philippine Statement issued on Dec. 12 said:
“The Philippines reiterates that it could not join any consensus for adopting any draft substantive decision in the absence of a solution on SSM or an improved SSG. There is simply no sufficient political basis for us to do so.
“What are we asking for? A special dispensation on the subsisting SSG (a) to have access to a different calculation of trigger prices based on the last 3-year average price (instead of basing it on 1986-1990 prices); and (b) to apply compensatory duty equal to 90% of the price gap between the trigger price and the import price.
“To give context to our concern, the current SSG trigger price for corn is 5 cents/kg while the import pricer the last three years averaged 31 cents. For pork, it is US$ 36 cents/kg compared to US$ 1.65 or almost five times higher than the SSG trigger price. This means that unless the price of imported corn is lower than 5 cents/kg and pork at 36 cents/kg, our government cannot impose additional tariff to protect our farmers. These numbers are ridiculous because the buying price of local corn is at 30 cents/kg and pork is roughly US$4.50.
“The Philippines, therefore, is in dire need of this special dispensation to be able to cushion the impacts import surges and price declines especially for our very vulnerable sensitive products that are constantly bombarded by exports of highly subsidized products.”
In the absence of any substantive agreements on major issues, the 11th WTO Ministerial Conference ended with the major exporting countries not getting anything and the developing countries keeping the safeguards that they are using now against highly subsidized imports.
(Photos taken by WTO Mission Charges d’Affaires Arnel Marcos Sanchez.)
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