Indonesia told to quit from Cairns Group

A'an Suryana, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Indonesia must quit from the Cairns Group of agricultural exporting nations, a local non-governmental organization (NGO) said on Thursday.

The NGO, called the Institute for Global Justice, argued that Indonesia had no longer been considered an agricultural exporting nation since 1990, meaning that membership of the lobby group would offer no benefit to the country.

It added that the move would ensure Indonesia was free to determine the course of its agriculture policies.

"Indonesia has always been under pressure from dominant members of the group (Cairns Group), like Australia and New Zealand," said Nur Hidayat, an activist at the NGO, at Thursday's media conference.

He pointed out that Indonesia had often been forced by Australia and New Zealand to follow the agricultural policies of the two latter countries, although the policies were often harmful to local farmers.

One example of the policy campaigned for by Australia is the complete elimination of subsidies for farmers and agriculture products.

The institute strongly criticized an earlier proposal made by the Cairns Group to the World Trade Organization (WTO) to cut import tariffs on agriculture products to no more than 25 percent.

But Hidayat said that the government had resisted the demand, as local agricultural producers were not yet fully prepared to compete with overseas producers, and that farmers had also still to be given subsidies to survive.

He said that the liberalization drive would only cause serious damage to the country's agriculture sector.

In order to free itself from diplomatic pressure by key members at the Cairns Group, Indonesia had no other way than to quit from the lobby group, Hidayat said.

The Cairns Group, a coalition of agricultural exporting nations, was established in 1986. The coalition, which is chaired by Australia, covers one-third of the world's total volume of agricultural exports.

It has become an influential lobby group in the WTO, in which its policies are influential in determining the WTO's policy course.