India is powerful to resist WTO - Trade Facilitation - Pak Newspaper
THE Pakistani Newspaper ‘The News International' editorially commented yesterday;
"The US is displeased with India for blocking an initiative at the World Trade Organisation to streamline customs procedures. India has said it will only agree to the measure if it is accompanied by a parallel agreement allowing it to stockpile and subsidise grains. The move is something of a U-turn by the neo-liberal Modi, who had criticised the Congress government for implementing a similar food security law, and he has obviously angered the Americans. That India is powerful enough to resist such efforts should be welcomed."
The newspaper mentioned some other US-India issues and commented, "Modi struck another important blow against the US by criticising the surveillance regime the superpower maintains around the world…. None of these issues, however, mean that the burgeoning alliance between the US and India has met anything other than a temporary speed bump. Modi will likely meet President Obama at the UN soon and the two countries are so intertwined on matters of trade that any problem will remain a minor impediment."
The newspaper earlier reported a US State Department official as saying, "Failure to sign the Trade Facilitation Agreement sent a confusing signal and undermined the very image Prime Minister Modi is trying to send about India."
But India received unexpected support from a UN agency. International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD) President Kanayo Nwanze said, "Creating jobs for some other country, while people are still hungry, doesn't make sense... If I was in the position of feeding my own family or creating jobs for someone else, what would I do? What would you do? …. The bottomline is that every government has the responsibility to ensure that it can feed its own people…" IFAD is an agency of the United Nations, established as an international financial institution to finance agricultural development projects for food production in the developing countries.
Yesterday Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said that he was not against the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement, but was only against the limit of 10 percent for food subsidy, which is not possible in India as the Indian farmers had to be given a support price. He said that agriculture was heavily subsidised even in US and Europe.