African cotton producers on Thursday kept up pressure for swingeing subsidy cuts as part of a global trade deal and said a date should be set for their total elimination.
The Africans - Chad, Benin, Mali and Burkina Faso - gave details of their call, initially made last month, for cotton subsidies to be cut three times as deeply as the formula to be applied across agriculture in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations. They also want the subsidy cuts to apply three times as fast, with agreement on a date for ending them altogether to be reached before the conclusion of the WTO's Doha round. By the end of April, the deadline set by the WTO for a draft agricultural deal, countries must take the political decision that all cotton subsidies had eventually to go, they said.
The plan aimed at "putting into practice" what was agreed by trade ministers last December in Hong Kong, the four states said in presenting it to the WTO's cotton negotiating committee.
In Hong Kong, ministers said cotton should be dealt with "more ambitiously" than other crops and "over a shorter period of time", but they did not get into figures. In late February, the Africans put forward their "three times" formula, but without spelling out how it would work.
The African plan gave a formula for cotton subsidy cuts that would ensure that whatever was agreed for all crops, those for cotton would fall further.
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