Mark Peart: Anderton's schmoozing of Europeans misplaced

I couldn't quite credit it. There he was, Jim Anderton, our new Minister of Agriculture, in England, schmoozing with British farmers and waxing lyrical about how progressive (no pun intended) the Europeans are when it comes to agricultural policy reform.

Certainly, British Prime Minister Tony Blair has been a vocal champion of late of the need to kickstart the limply meandering World Trade Organisation talks on agriculture.

The same couldn't be said of the wider European community, of which Britain is a member.

The WTO ministerial conference in Hong Kong in December was for the most part farcical because of the EU's stubborn and persistent refusal to bring a proposal to meaningfully cut domestic farm subsidies.

The word meaningful is important, because what the Europeans consider meaningful and the remainder of the WTO membership (including New Zealand) consider meaningful are two diametrically distinct concepts.

Europe says it won't budge until countries like Brazil and India cave in on non-agricultural market access (or industrial products).

The countries in the vanguard of the push for more liberalised agricultural trade include the United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

In a speech just before Hong Kong late last year, Prime Minister Helen Clark noted that both the Apec and Commonwealth leaders' summits issued strong statements on the need to break the impasse on agriculture - and that the focus was firmly on the EU position.

Subsequent events at Hong Kong and since haven't altered that.

As Helen Clark put it, Apec and Commonwealth leaders, representing a sizeable proportion of the world's economy and a cross section of developed and developing economies, believe the EU has to improve its offer on agricultural market access to unlock the Doha round.

The EU signed up at Hong Kong to the elimination of export subsidies by 2013, but moved not one muscle on the market access issue.

EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson resents the pivotal role New Zealand and others play in the WTO in the pursuit of a successful and unfettered Doha round, which thanks to Mandelson and his cohorts has been wounded, but not mortally.

He made that plain at Hong Kong by insisting that dairy giant Fonterra is a state-subsidised single-desk seller, even though there are laws on the statute books clipping its monopolistic wings.

So here is our Jim, on British soil, praising the "substantial commitment" the EU has made towards the elimination of export subsidies and the reform of its Common Agriculture Policy.

Huh?

"New Zealand is working with the EU to ensure that the other major subsidiser - the US - also undertakes the meaningful reforms that are necessary to free up international markets," Anderton said.

Jim and I must be on different planets.

Surely, if one accurately digests the utterances made by trade ministers Jim Sutton and Phil Goff, and a plethora of trade experts, it's the other way round.

The overwhelming consensus is that it's the EU, which will determine whether substantive numbers can be dropped into the framework that's supposed to be concluded by the end of next month to pave the way for subsidy and tariff elimination.

Anderton says the EU is "well on the way" to less trade distorting support for farming and is "well placed" to contribute to an ambitious outcome in the negotiations. The jet lag must have really scrambled his brain.

I'm perturbed now that I opined in this space late last year that Anderton was a shrewd choice for the agriculture portfolio.

Sucking up to the arch-protectionist Europeans in a negotiation potentially worth billions to New Zealand farmers, when those same Europeans have the potential to deny them that windfall, isn't my idea of shrewd.

So excuse me while I scrape the egg off my face, gag on my humble pie, and console myself that at least Helen Clark didn't make Anderton the Minister of Trade.

* Mark Peart is a Dunedin-based freelance writer.