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The ICAO Statement on the WTO Agricultural Negotiations
1. We, the ICAO member agricultural cooperatives, as a self-reliant group of 400 million farmers relying on agriculture for our livelihoods, embodying the ICA principles and accounting for over 50 percent of agricultural production and marketing in the world, act as advocates of member farmers' rights and interests.
2. We would like to underline, on the occasion of the forthcoming WTO Ministerial Conference, that the WTO agricultural negotiations should be fully based upon Article 20 of the UR Agreement on Agriculture. In pursuing the mandate of the negotiations as stipulated in Article 20, agricultural reforms should be gradual and flexible, taking duly into account the reform process is on-going.
3. Unlike other primary industries, agricultural production is carried out by a larger number of individual farmers under a considerable variety of climatic and other natural conditions. Therefore, the WTO members should embrace the special characteristics of the world agriculture and endeavor to ensure that further progressive action in all relevant areas of the WTO negotiations should be fair and balanced in order for possible economic gains from the reforms to be equitably distributed among farmers all around the world.
4. As stressed at the 1998 World Farmers' Congress, agricultural trade itself is an important factor in food security, but alone, is not sufficient to ensure it. Likewise, further liberalization of agricultural trade cannot be a panacea to ensure food security at the national and global levels. Therefore, the additional agricultural reform process should pay due attention to the primary responsibility of national governments to attain enduring food security through the sustainable use of their own agricultural recourses, the importance of which was emphasized at the 1996 World Food Summit Rome Declaration on World Food Security.
5. Since farmers have taken the leading role to keep and promote agricultural systems, it is important that farmers' cooperative organizations be fully involved and consulted, not only on specific issues but also on overall focus and direction of the agricultural negotiations. In light of the experiences regarding the limited consultative process and external transparency of the WTO, however, ICAO urges a wider opening of the WTO, in particular, to representative farmers' organizations.
6. For farmers, policy reforms means changing policies to ensure that they are better adopted to the needs of agricultural community in a global economy, and able to assure an adequate standard of living for farmers worldwide. This is not the same as the agenda of many governments, which see farm policy as dismantling previous farm programs and making savings in their budgets. In so doing, they leave the destiny of their agriculture to the vagaries of imperfect global market.
7. In order to ensure predictability in the farm policy environment, it is vital for farmers' organizations to be involved in developing a new policy framework that is stable and organized.
8. We declare that we will actively participate in relevant international meetings in close collaboration and cooperation with other organizations in order to reflect the view of ICAO member farmers in the WTO agricultural negotiations.
International Co-operative Agricultural Organisation (ICAO)
Seoul, Republic of Korea
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