RI to defend agriculture tariff policy at WTO

RI to defend agriculture tariff policy at WTO

A'an Suryana, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The government would defend its current import tariff policy on
agriculture products at the upcoming World Trade Organization
(WTO) meeting in Geneva, Indonesian Ambassador for WTO Gusmardi
Bustami said.

He told The Jakarta Post on Thursday that the tariff barrier
was crucial for Indonesia as a developing nation in which a large
part of the population earned their living from cultivating food
crops.

"With limited government resources, tariffs are our only means
of support to our farmers," Gusmardi said.

He added that the above position was not against the world's
drive for trade liberalization because the current average import
tariff of 8.4 percent was already considered too low.

The WTO talks on liberalization of the agriculture sector will
be held from March 24 to March 31. It will be the final round,
meaning that any outcomes will be binding for member countries of
WTO.

The final round is a follow-up of the milestone agricultural
WTO meeting in Doha, Qatar, called the "Doha Round" in November
2001.

Meanwhile, a senior official at the ministry of agriculture
said in a trade liberalization seminar on Thursday that
developing countries like Indonesia must be excluded from the
liberalization drive.

The ministry's negotiator at WTO P. Natigor Siagian said a
full liberalization of the country's agriculture sector would
cause huge losses to the domestic farming sector.

"The government will fight in order to ensure that Indonesia
can be excluded from trade liberalization," he said.

Another government official at the ministry, who was also
present at the seminar, added that the Indonesian demands will be
focused on several "strategic" agriculture products like rice,
sugar, and soybeans.

A non-governmental organization (NGO) called the Institute for
the Global Justice supported the government's position.

The NGO executive director Bonnie Setiawan said that opening
up the agriculture sector would cause the domestic market to
become flooded with low priced imported agriculture products,
thus hurting the owners of agribusiness corporations as well as
most of the farm laborers that work the land.

He said that while Indonesia was previously one of the world's
rice exporters, the country has now already become one of the
biggest rice importers in the world, purchasing around 10 percent
of the rice being traded in the international market last year.

However, an association representing agribusiness has said
that to keep their prices higher than the imported agriculture
products, the government must further raise the existing import
tariff rate so all the produce will be more expensive allowing
them to maintain their current income.