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Economic Co-operation Organisation members can face WTO challenges unitedly: Pakistan
ISLAMABAD (August 11 2002) : Pakistan's senior government official on Saturday said ECO nations could successfully face the WTO challenges if they joined energies together to protect their interests.
President Musharraf's advisor on agriculture, Muhammad Shafi Niaz, told IRNA here that ECO member nations should boost their per acre agriculture yield so that their cost of production would come down thereby enabling them to compete in the world market.
"Apart from boosting production by adopting better techniques and know-how, the Economic Co-operation Organisation (ECO) should prevail on rich nations to slash the amount of subsidies they give to their agriculture," he noted.
He pointed out that presently developed countries as a whole give one billion dollars in subsidy daily to their agriculture sector that gives them an edge in the world market.
"What the ECO nations could do is to seek cuts in subsidies pumped in by the rich nations as they are not in a position to give that much subsidies to their agriculture sector."
CRITICISM: Shafi Niaz argued that rich countries are facing persistent criticism from within governmental circles as well as from the public about the WTO programme.
WTO meetings, held anywhere in the world, have faced rowdy agitation on roads, be these in Washington or in Rio de Janeiro, he said. However, the advisor was vehemently of the opinion that donor agencies, like the IMF or World Bank, were affecting developing nations more than the anticipated danger from the WTO regime.
To a question about the success of ECO efforts in boosting co-operation in agriculture, he said that "if European nations could join hands to their mutual benefit, why not the countries of the region?"
MUTUAL TRADE: For instance, he said that Pakistan produces surplus wheat, rice and sugar. All the three items Iran imports. These areas can be a base for boosting trade ties between the two nations.
The similar formula can be extended to promoting mutual trade in the agriculture sector among ECO nations, he maintained. "Furthermore, what is needed is formulation of strategies after careful deliberations and analysis, and then their implementation in letter and in spirit," he maintained.
Shafi Niaz was the Food and Agriculture Organisation's (FAO) representative to Iran from 1972 to 1979. The advisor was of the view that the governments in countries of the ECO region should not undertake any measure that could be counter-productive.
"The ECO member countries will have to carefully review policies as the cost of production of agriculture items is continuously going up, squeezing the farmers' financial position," he said.
UNWISE POLICIES: In the direction of unwise policies, he mentioned the imposition of the general sales tax (GST) on fertilisers in Pakistan, saying the tax imposition had led to a plunge in fertiliser consumption and, as a result, production had also come down.
"The decrease in production clearly indicated that the tax had not benefited the government; instead, the measure had caused more losses than revenue gains," he contended.
The first meeting of ECO member countries' agriculture ministers was held in Islamabad last month. Iran, Pakistan and Turkey formed the ECO in 1985 as the founding members. In the early 1990s seven other states joined the platform.
Shafi Niaz was of the view that the FAO could play a significant part in improving the performance of ECO member states in agriculture by co-ordinating and helping the organisation obtain financing from donor agencies.
Business Recorder
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Pakissan.com;
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