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Indonesian NGOs Want Agriculture Off the Table at WTO Meeting
Dian Ariffahmi | November 24, 2009

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Indonesia should lobby to have the agricultural sector excluded from the Doha Development Round negotiations at the next World Trade Organization meeting, local non-governmental organizations insisted during a discussion on Tuesday.

The Doha Development Round, the current round of WTO-sponsored trade negotiations, commenced in 2001. It includes negotiations on liberalizing trade in agriculture products. The talks will be held on Nov. 30 to Dec. 2 in Geneva, Switzerland.

Many developing countries fear that pulling down barriers to agricultural trade could lead to domestic farmers being forced out of business by imports from the efficient farms of the developed world.

“We have to escape from the agriculture commitment before the developed countries exploit us even more than they are doing now,” Bonnie Setiawan, a senior researcher from the Institute for Global Justice, said during the discussion.

He said the Doha Round needed to focus on development issues rather than “sacrificing the interests of developing countries.”

“The trade talks will only benefit multinational firms and the developed countries,” he said.

Bonnie added that he wanted to see the Indonesian government put the nation’s interests first, and not allow the Special Products and Special Safeguard Mechanisms to be sacrificed.

The SP-SSM allows WTO member countries to impose import duties on certain types of farm imports deemed damaging to their agricultural sectors.

Erpan Faryadi, the secretary general of the NGO Alliance on Agrarian Reform Movement (AGRA), said failure to insist on retaining the SP-SSM would threaten the livelihoods of 21 million farming families in Indonesia.

However, Trade Minister Mari Elka Pangestu said it would be difficult to exclude agriculture from the negotiations.

“We cannot pull out of one set of negotiations, as that would mean changing the entire agenda of the overall negotiations,” Mari told the Jakarta Globe on Tuesday.