Andrew Mitchell: vested interests must not prevail

By Alex Singleton | 24 October 2005

Andrew Mitchell MP, Britain's Shadow Secretary of State for International Development, today spoke of the importance of success at the Doha round of trade negotiations:

We must not let French vested interests jeopardise the entire Doha round of trade liberalisation, which could generate hundreds of billions of pounds for the world economy and help lift poor nations out of extreme poverty.

We all know what needs to be done - the EU must set a rigorous timetable for eliminating, not just reducing, tariffs and trade-distorting agricultural subsidies.

Alan Beattie and Raphael Minder, writing in the Financial Times, explain the wranglings over the CAP:

The European Union's refusal to meet its trading partners' demands to cut farm tariffs has threatened to cause the collapse of the Doha round of trade talks.

The EU consistently argues that such demands take no account of the reforms it has already made to its Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), agreed in 2003. But what has emerged from the trade talks is that some member states, particularly France, regard ensuring continued production through high tariffs on imports as part of that reform.

The Doha negotiating mandate for Peter Mandelson, trade commissioner, and Mariann Fischer Boel, agriculture commissioner, is contained in a series of conclusions from the meetings of various European ministers. Though it is imprecise on tariffs, France and others cite a section mentioning "the need to protect the reforms of the CAP"...

Making progress in Doha ahead of December's ministerial meeting in Hong Kong will either mean taking a risk that the tariff cuts will have less effect than the French predict, or accepting that production will have to fall. "Mandelson and Fischer Boel have sometimes adopted French rhetoric about the importance of the CAP reform in 2003," says Annachiara Torciano, at the political consultancy GPlus in Brussels. "But Hong Kong clearly cannot succeed without going beyond it."