With impending elections, India might buckle under pressure from the farmers and civil society groups who have warned negotiators of any kind of a trade off on the controversial ‘Peace Clause’ under the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) food security agreement. Further, this will not guarantee any protection to India from getting dragged into trade disputes by developed countries.
While the WTO is ready to offer this as an interim measure, there is a catch. The catch is while developing countries can provide the WTO-prohibited subsidies to its farmers without inviting any dispute under the agriculture agreement, rich countries will have the right to drag them to the WTO Disputes Settlement Body (DSB) under the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (ASCM) thus making it null-and-void, top sources told Business Standard on condition of anonymity.
The government seems to be divided over the issue. While one set of top officials want India to agree to the offer so as to not to be seen as a spoiler of talks, yet another part of the government wants that India puts it foot down since any such trade off would mean impact the livelihood of 600 million farmers in return of making the Doha round successful.