It was reported that the ministerial conference on the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade (GATT) of the WTO in Davos, Switzerland failed again to ratify the agreement which had been the subject of intense debate during the seven ministerial conferences held in the past five years.

WTO President Pascal Lamy decided to discontinue the negotiations last Tuesday when negotiators virtually failed to reach an agreement on trade terms that led to the collapse of WTO talks.

European Union (EU) representatives blamed the collapse of the WTO talks on the refusal of the United States to reduce its subsidy to its agricultural sector, noting that its subsidy per one cow is even higher than the per capita of most African countries.

Provincial Board Member John Kim, chairman of Benguet board’s committee on agriculture, said that five years of negotiation had put poor countries, like the Philippines, in suspense.

For the past several years, the local vegetable industry suffered losses from the legal importation and smuggling of cheap vegetables.

Prices of vegetable from Benguet, Mountain Province, and Ifugao plunged to as low as R1 per kilo because lowland buyers preferred to buy the cheap Chinese vegetables which flooded the local markets.

Kim urged that the agricultural sector to continue to be vigilant and to oppose government’s plans such as entering into bilateral or tri-lateral agreements such as the one being spoused by Trade and Industry Secretary Peter Favila.

Meanwhile, the Benguet Farmers Federation (BFF ) welcomed the development in the WTO talks, saying that this could lead to the normalization of vegetable trading in the country in the next few years.

But like Kim, BFF aired its opposition to the forging of bilateral agreements the government plans to enter into to replace the controversial GATT.

BFF said that government must focus its attention on efforts to help farmers maximize production and improve on their living standards.

Kim said that the forging of bilateral agreements is even more dangerous because there is no third party to which the Philippines can complain when these accords are violated.

With the kind of negotiators the country and the status of the Philippines as a third-world economy, Kim said, "we will always be at the mercy of big countries and developed economies."

He said that the US, Japan, and China will always dictate the terms of any agreement into which the Philippines will enter.

GATT-WTO’s objective is to liberalize the entry of goods to a country though the gradual reduction of import tariff and duties.

Developing, poor countries whose agricultural sector has not been developed demanded the immediate removal of subsidies by big, rich countries to their farmers to level the playing field. Poorcountry farmers cannot compete with their counterparts in rich countries because without government subsidy, the production costs of their goods are much higher than those of their counterparts who are enjoying subsidies.

In the ministerial conferences held in Duha, Cancun, Seattle, Hong Kong and Davos, the subsidy issue was at the center of negotiations and debates. The refusal of the US to cut subsidies to its agricultural sector led to the collapse of the WTO talks last Tuesday.

The WTO website stated the US representative to WTO flew to Brazil to try to save the WTO, but critics doubted the success of the last-ditch rescue effort.