India is facing strong pressure to open up its markets to cheese and other dairy produce from Europe, even though the New Delhi government has expressed fears about how small farmers could be forced into deeper poverty as a result.Because its dairy sector employs 90 million people, India has advocated that milk and cheese be excluded from the scope of the free trade agreement under negotiation with the European Union. EU officials nonetheless stepped up their efforts to have India's agricultural markets liberalised during the latest round of talks, which took place in the last week of April. A Brussels source said that moves to open up all agricultural sectors are under discussion. "It has not yet been decided which products will be liberalised and India's sensitivities will certainly be taken into account as negotiations progress," the source told IPS. Anti-poverty activists complain, however, that the EU has displayed scant concern for the plight of India's rural poor until now. While India's dairy sector is of critical importance in providing work and income to farmers, particularly those who do not own land, Europe's cheese- makers have been adamant that protections offered to India's poor should be dismantled. In 2007 -- the year that talks aimed at reaching an EU-India free trade agreement were launched -- the European Dairy Association contended that the taxes levied by the Delhi authorities on imported food were "unrealistically high." But critics of the EU's trade strategies argue that scrapping such tariffs would leave India's farmers unable to withstand competition from European imports. Often those imports have been highly subsidised and can be sold at lower prices than domestically produced food.
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=51292
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment