Statement of Canada – Committee on Agriculture Special Session – February 6, 2025
Thank you, Chair, for your reflection on the process today and for the hard work and patience you’ve dedicated to this role over the past years.
While things have not been easy, you have always brought energy, pragmatism and openness to the job.
You will be missed.
Thank you to the African Group and to our Cairns Group colleagues for the continued good faith engagement in our negotiating process.
Australia provided an excellent summary of where things stand in that process, so I won’t repeat that now.
Instead, with your indulgence, I’d like to spend a minute reminding this Committee of the real-world importance of the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) and the value that it and this institution has provided in promoting stable and predictable global agriculture markets.
Thirty years ago, our predecessors responded to a tumultuous period in global agriculture. Farmers around the world faced a severe crisis marked by plummeting commodity prices, soaring interest rates, and escalating debt.
The crisis was exacerbated, if not caused, by untenable trade and subsidy policies in large countries. Prior to the AoA, agriculture markets were generally characterized by high tariffs and hard quotas that fragmented markets; subsidization leading to huge surpluses in some regions; and substantial export subsidies that crowded out local production in countries that couldn’t compete in a subsidies race – a race only a select few could hope to ‘win’ and that most could not enter.
The resulting Agreement on Agriculture and subsequent Ministerial agreements have opened doors to new markets, facilitated smoother and more predictable trade flows, reduced trade-distorting support, and bolstered food security. Global agricultural exports have surged in the past 30 years, with roughly 1.5 trillion USD exported in 2022, further highlighting this Agreement’s success.
Contributions to this total have come from multiple regions and from Members at varying levels of development. While markets are far from perfect and we have much more work to do, thanks to the Agreement, trade in global agricultural commodities does not suffer from the dangers of single market dependency of the kind that exists in other economic sectors.
Agriculture trade has also been resilient to recent shocks. Analysis has shown that reductions in agricultural trade were two to three times smaller in magnitude as compared to non-agriculture trade through the Covid-19 pandemic, for instance.
While I can assure you that Canada will remain among the most reform-oriented Members of this organization, we must all engage in a process from now to MC14 that first and foremost recognizes and reinforces the value of the system and the rules that are currently in place.
We need to consolidate and respect the progress we’ve made and continue moving towards trade liberalization. We should not give in to protectionist pressures; not slide back to the lawlessness of the 70s and 80s. We have all been there and we all know what that did – this is the very reason why we have the AoA today.
In 1996, 18 months after the founding of the WTO, the then Director General, Renato Ruggiero, delivered a lecture in Ottawa entitled: “The road ahead: international trade policy in the era of the WTO”. In it, he noted that:
“Globalization will not go away. Policy-makers could not stop the process, even if they wanted to. It is not something which is optional, but a part of our normal everyday life in countless ways…. Internationally, the choice is whether this inevitable process will take place within a system based on agreed rules or simply on power. In the post-war period we have generally tried to follow the first alternative. To abandon it now would change the economic - and possibly political - history of the world in a dangerous way for all its people.”
Those words ring as true today as they did 30 years ago.
