Risky appetite
February 8, 2012
Officials from the European Union and the Indian government are in the advanced stages of negotiations for a new a free trade agreement. The deal, which is expected to be signed this month, will remove almost all regulations governing trade between the two large economies.
The plan requires India, for example, to lift protective tariffs levied on a wide variety of food imports. That's rung alarm bells at a number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in both India and Europe.
Experts from the New Delhi office of the Third World Network, the German Catholic development group MISEREOR and the Heinrich Böll Foundation fear that opening India's domestic dairy and poultry sectors to foreign competition could have a disastrous impact on the nation's poor.
Cheap imports from Europe?
In a joint study of the proposed free trade agreement between the EU and India, the three NGOs argue that similar deals between the EU and other countries have had a major impact on local food production.
"If India lifts its protective tariffs on milk powder and poultry meats, the nation's small-scale farmers will be swamped by a wave of cheap imports from the EU," said Christine Chemnitz, a trade expert at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, which promotes environmentally responsible politics.
Chemnitz added that the German government's support for the deal was "irresponsible" because India's dairy and poultry sectors generated "significant income for the nation's most vulnerable people, such as small-scale farmers and people without land."
Vulnerable farmers
India's dairy sector supports an estimated 90 million people, while poultry production accounts for the livelihoods of another 3.5 million.
"Chronic malnutrition affects 225 million people in India today - that's about a quarter of the population," said MISEREOR Director General Josef Sayer.
He warned that the proposed trade deal with the EU risked denying even more people of their "basic human right to food."
NGOs fear the free trade agreement could also harm India's retail sector, which employs 37 million people, by removing obstacles to foreign chains such as French supermarket giant Carrefour or Germany's Metro Group.
Street vendors lack representation
"If supermarket chains expand as fast as Carrefour predicts over the next five years, our calculations show more than a million jobs will disappear," said MISEREOR trade expert Armin Paasch.
Street vendors are likely to be the worst affected, Paasch said, because they tend to be poor and lack other means of generating income.
In December, several million retailers took to the streets of India's major cities to protest against plans to open the sector to foreign competition. But like the small-scale farmers, they have struggled to get lawmakers to take their concerns seriously, according to Ranja Sengupta from the Third World Network.
"Negotiations between India and the EU have only taken place behind closed doors, without input from civil society," Sengupta told Deutsche Welle.
The European Commission and the Indian government have "acted systematically to keep official documents about the negotiations secret," she added. "That has to change."
Human rights before trade
In their report about the proposed trade agreement, the three NGO called on negotiators from Brussels and New Delhi to conduct a "detailed analysis of the deal's impact on Indians' right to food and other human rights."
They also urged officials to exempt particularly sensitive industries from the agreement and involve local social groups in the negotiation process, as required by the United Nations' guiding principles on business and human rights, which were approved in the summer of 2011.
"Signing anything before all points have been addressed would be irresponsible," said Barbara Unmüssig, the head of the Heinrich Böll Foundation.
Author: Andreas Zumach / sje
Editor: Holly Fox