France will not permit the Doha round of world trade talks to undermine its agricultural sector, Prime Minister Francois Fillon said on Tuesday. Talks between the United States, the European Union, India and Brazil on a deal on the Doha round of trade talks collapsed last month over a dispute about trade-distorting farm policies.
"The government will not allow WTO (World Trade Organisation) talks to be used against our agriculture," Fillon said in his inaugural speech to the lower house of parliament. "For our industrial firms and services we will demand reciprocity. For access to public markets, we will ask the European Union to negotiate an exemption for our SMEs (small- and medium-sized enterprises), following the example of the United States, Japan and Canada."
He said the European Union needed to adopt "a less naive trade policy". Brazil and India say the United States and Europe are demanding too high a price for cutting their farm subsidies. France, whose farmers are dwindling in numbers but are still a powerful political lobby, is traditionally the staunchest defender of farming interests in the EU and has long opposed making further concessions in agriculture in the round.
At a meeting of EU trade diplomats last Friday, France called for a complete rethink of the bloc's trade policy, given the precarious state of the World Trade Organisation's (WTO) Doha round of global free trade talks, trade diplomats said. But European Commission officials said at the meeting in Brussels that the WTO round remained their priority.
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