WORLD TRADE TALKS: The two men at the heart of the EU negotiating team, Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy and Agricultural Commissioner Franz Fischler, were on the point of physical exhaustion late Saturday night by the time the Minister for Agriculture, Mr Walsh, took the floor to deliver his verdict on the framework agreement which will pave the way for the eventual conclusion of the Doha Round of trade talk, writes Denis McClean.
At the insistence of the Irish, French and Hungarian delegations, Mr Lamy was obliged to present the framework to a formal meeting of the EU heads of delegation attending the World Trade Organization talks in Geneva rather than assuming he had the mandate to go ahead and accept the deal on his own.
Mr Walsh made it clear that even for countries with significant dependence on agricultural exports, the framework agreement was something they could live with though it clearly calls for a timetable on the elimination of export subsidies, stricter rules on state aid for rural development and market access for developing countries.
The Minister had been alarmed at earlier versions of the text but congratulated the two commissioners on the outcome of the latest negotiations which continued almost non-stop for 48-hours in a nail-biting finale to a crowded schedule of meetings which stretched back over the previous two weeks. The 147 members of the General Council of the WTO finally signed off on the agreement in the early hours of yesterday morning.
Afterwards, Mr Walsh said the agreement "copperfastens the benefits to Irish farmers of the recently negotiated reform of CAP" and that it also protected "the essential interests of Irish agriculture in the EU domestic market".
Successes scored by the Irish team at the negotiations were listed by the Minister as the protection of direct payments to Irish farmers valued at €1.7 billion, which are no longer linked to production. Ireland will also be able to register beef and dairy products as "sensitive products which will then be subject to special treatment in so far as tariff protection is concerned," Mr Walsh said.
All forms of export assistance such as export credits, guarantees, insurance schemes and the operations of state trading enterprises will be subject to rules. Food aid will have to be genuine and not merely surplus disposal. Mr Walsh said he was happy that the playing field for export competition had been levelled in this way.