India, on Wednesday, stoutly defended its position on why developing countries must have special flexibilities to designate certain farm products as special products as well as the mechanism for thwarting unforeseen rise in farm exports at a special meeting of Doha trade negotiations.

India’s chief trade negotiator Rahul Khullar explained to the Doha negotiating committee on agriculture that developing countries like India need the flexibilities to safeguard the interests of their millions of farmers.
In the face of a determined campaign by some farm exporting countries to weaken the flexibilities for special products and special safeguard mechanism, India said farmers in developing countries need instruments that can be put to use to ensure livelihood and food security concerns.

On Wednesday, India walked out of a recently constituted Group of Eight countries protesting about about lack of proper representation in the group to accommodate all the developing country concerns. The G8 was was set up by the United States to clarify and share positions on all central issues in the Doha agriculture negotiations. The Group includes the United States, the European Union, Brazil, India, Australia, Japan, Canada and Argentina.

Key issues
Following India’s protest, the group is further enlarged to include South Africa, Jamaica, China, and Indonesia. Though India raised its concern at the time of setting up of  G-8 last month to discuss all difficult issues in the market access, domestic support and export competition pillars, the industrialised countries glossed over India’s concerns, trade diplomats said. “There is no crisis of legitimacy in the G-8,” a trade envoy of an industrialised country told WTD, arguing that it is an informal group to “clarify” and “share” views on all the key issues in the Doha agriculture package.

“The group is not going to present any technical opinion to the Chair as alleged in some quarters,” the trade envoy said, preferring anonymity.

Over last seven days, the G-8 members held intense negotiations in the US, Japanese, Canadian, and Australian missions to see how far they can converge on thresholds in the tiered formula, treatment of sensitive products and expansion of tariff rate quotas, special products and special safeguard flexibility for developing countries.
Besides, the group also notched some progress in the arena of export competition, especially export credits, but made little headway in the trade-distorting domestic support pillar, sources added.

So far, the G-8 is not able have an in-depth discussion  on the issue of base period to be used for farm subsidy reduction commitments or the overall trade-distorting, said a G-8 diplomat from South America, arguing that it is time that the group intensifies work on all the issues in the domestic support pillar.