Call to educate farmers about WTO implications

Speakers at a seminar emphasised the need for enhancing the agriculture stakeholders' capacity before the World Trade Organisation (WTO) regime sets in.
The capacity-building seminar on agriculture sector was organised by the Action Aid Pakistan in collaboration with the Green Rural Development Organisation at a local hotel here on Monday
Roshan Malik from Action Aid Pakistan said that farmers in the country lack the capacity to understand the impact of the WTO regime and its agreements related to agriculture.
Outlining details of the WTO working and its impact on our agriculture sector, he called upon newsmen to play the role of a catalyst between farming communities and policy-makers.
Dividing developed and developing countries into North and South, respectively, he said that the North is highly subsidising its agriculture sector while our allowable subsidies are equal to nil.
It clearly indicates that the government is not attaching due attention and priority to the agriculture sector nor it had taken any step to prepare the local farming community for meeting the upcoming competition from the developed markets.
He said there is a need to debate the issue of WTO from grass root level to the forum of parliament and involving research institutes into the policy issues.
He said if awareness of the issue created amongst the farmers, they would be in a better position to meet challenges of the WTO regime where the only criteria would be price and quality.
Sohail Khan, a research scholar, discussing issues of agreement on agriculture and trade related aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), said that we should increase the domestic support for farmers.
He said that the PBR act, in most cases, favouring the breeders while ignoring interests and rights of the small farmers. He said that farmers should be protected against the IPRs regime.
He also emphasised the need for introducing the seasonal tariff system at the time of arrival of the crop to help farmers to get fair price of his product.
Mehnaz Ajmal from Action Aid Pakistan, while talking about the sanitary and phyto-sanitary (SPS) measures of WTO, said that the standards in the WTO on agriculture are very high.
She said that Pakistan is lacking in complying with the SPS standards and it is a great challenge for us to meet the standards to market our products in the international market.
She said that laboratories should be established in the country to check standards of our produce.