Jakarta, April 19 (ANTARA) - Asian farmers` associations grouped in the Asian Farmers Group for Cooperation (AFGC) at their second meeting here will ask the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to let Asian countries continue to protect their agricultural products. "The meeting will discuss basic principles which Asian farmers will fought for," AFGC President Sutrisno Iwantono, who is also chairman of the Indonesian Board of Cooperatives (Dekopin), said here on Tuesday after opening the two-day meeting. The meeting would also aim at harmonizing their perceptions, namely that Asian farmers are facing common problems which they should address jointly in the face of pressures by the WTO, he said. He said the WTO which was tending to be more representative of the developed countries` aspirations than of any others`, wanted to create a free trading system by abolishing import duties in its member countries, particularly in developing nations. "We don`t want this situation. We, who are also exporters of tropical agricultural products, will ask the WTO to give priority to efforts to make the developed countries open their markets first," he said. The agricultural sector, he added, is an important thing to all nations, particularly to nations with large populations.
If the sector was liberalized, many farmers in those nations would move into the industrial sector, he added. "This an experience many countries have undergone. If they no longer want to be farmers, we would be threatened in the matter of food security," he said. "And if this happened, it means the country is on the brink of ruin. We can not let our stomachs depend on food produced by other countries," he added. Iwantono said certain agricultural commodities, such as rice, should not be included in the list of fast-track trade liberalization because doing so would eventually make the country concerned dependent on other countries. Japan which is now a developed country and a country which has the highest production cost for rice, is still protecting its farmers by instituting high import duties, on rice, he said. The production cost of one kg of rice in Japan was at least 500 yen or Rp35,000, he said. The policy was forcing Japan to import rice from the international market despite its surplus, he said. An opening in the international market, he added, would enable the agricultural products of developed countries to enter the developing countries. The rice problem, as well as those others involving agricultural commodities, could not be seen from the economic side but also from the political value, he said. For Indonesia, he added, WTO was actually still providing facilities to developing countries like Indonesia with the purpose of ensuring food security.
Iwantono, however, expressed surprise that Indonesia had so far not benefited facilities as stipulated in the Letter on Intent (LoI) with the IMF. The international lending agency wanted the Indonesian government to scrap all duties on imported agricultural products. "We sometimes behave or think more liberally than even the real liberals merely because we are being pressured by the IMF. Is it because we do not understand, or we (are) being cheated or the IMF is too smart. We need to do some introspection," he said.:
