(GENEVA) - Even as the agricultural negotiations of the World Trade Organization (WTO) gather in intensity, two studies have emerged in support of the ideas that subsidies cause distorsions in world trade and that production management could solve the agricultural crisis currently seething around the world. These studies will be presented today, at Geneva, during the session on agriculture organized by the Canadian Federation of Agriculture (CFA) as part of the World Trade Organization’s Public Symposium.

“It was ten years ago that we launched into a process of creating equal opportunity in agricultural world trade, and today we are even further from our goal than we were at the outset,” stated Bob Friesen, President of the CFA. “These studies clearly prove how important it is to reduce farming subsidies and to preserve the systems that protect sensitive domestic products while seeking to improve access to the market. We must connect the ideas put forward in these studies to the reality of the WTO negotiations.”

According to Laurent Pellerin, 1st Vice-President of the CFA and President of the Union des Producteurs Agricoles, the results of these studies prove that open markets, deregulation and heavy subsidies have a negative impact on the development of world agriculture. These practices have caused the prices of farm products to fall around the world and have provoked today’s enormous crisis in farming income.

For Mr. Pellerin, this crisis stems from the fact that we totally disregarded the particular characteristics of farming when we aligned the trade rules for agricultural products with those for industrial products. “While opening markets proved beneficial for some actors, it was definitely not beneficial for the farmers and others who live off the land of this planet. If the international trade of agricultural products is to be fair for farmers, they must be enabled to collectively organize the marketing of their products, as this would correct the imbalances in the market, where the processing and distribution sectors are increasingly concentrated while the production sector is comprised of a multitude of farmers. For this reason agriculture deserves special treatment within the WTO negotiations,” states Mr. Pellerin.

-30- 

Founded in 1935 to provide Canada's farmers with a single voice in Ottawa, the Canadian Federation of Agriculture is the country's largest farmers' organization. Its members include provincial general farm organizations as well as national and inter-provincial commodity organizations from every province. Through its members, CFA represents over 200,000 Canadian farmers and farm families.