As India aims to double exports from agricultural sector by the year 2022, Commerce Secretary Rita Teaotia has said that her ministry is working on an institutional mechanism for addressing market access barriers and to deal with sanitary and phyto sanitary issues, which certainly are the biggest barriers in global food trade. Besides, she said that they are trying to focus on high value products, the value added agricultural products, focusing on some perishable commodities that need to be stored and transported properly. She added that they are also looking at the indigenous, ethnic and some non-ethnic categories.
The Secretary further said that there is a need to look at the issue of disproportionate large subsidies to agriculture by developed countries and the product-specific concentration of subsidies that the measures of support permit under the WTO agreement on agriculture. She noted that under the global trade norms, a WTO member country's food subsidy bill should not breach the limit of 10 percent of the value of production based on the reference price of 1986-88. She said 'when we looked at the prices, the prices that are obtained by Indian consumers whether less or high, this also factors in the effect on global prices of distortionary policies of other countries, so global prices are a function of that as well.'
According to Teaotia, recent times have witnessed very perverse efforts to target minimal support extended to poorest farmers in developing countries and to make efforts to undermine the core principles of special and differential treatment for such countries, which is at the heart of multilateralism. She pointed out that these short-sighted efforts would further aggravate the kind of imbalances they have already seen in the agreement on agriculture and also undercut one of the key objectives of WTO which is to improve living standards of populations around the world.