In 2022, India appealed against a decision by the WTO’s trade dispute settlement panel. The decision said that the country’s domestic support measures for sugar and sugarcane are inconsistent with global trade norms. India filed an appeal with the WTO’s Appellate Body.
New Delhi: A group of WTO member countries, including Brazil, Canada and the European Union, has urged India to notify sugar subsidies on time. A World Trade Organization (WTO) official gave this information. The issue came up for discussion during the WTO Agriculture Committee meeting in Geneva on May 23-24. These countries are also major sugar exporters like India and they allege that India’s support measures distort the global sugar trade.
The Geneva-based official said Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, Paraguay, New Zealand, the European Union and Guatemala have urged India to notify subsidies on time. India said the central government and state governments neither paid sugarcane to farmers nor purchased sugarcane from them. All purchases were made by private sugar mills. Therefore, this information was not included in the notification of domestic support.
This discussion is important because in 2022 India appealed against a decision of the WTO’s trade dispute settlement panel. The decision said that the country’s domestic support measures for sugar and sugarcane are inconsistent with global trade norms. India filed an appeal in the WTO’s Appellate Body, which is the final authority on such trade disputes.
Brazil, Australia and Guatemala had filed cases against India over these support measures.
Following this, India, while appealing, has said that the decision of the WTO dispute panel has made certain “erroneous” conclusions about domestic schemes supporting sugarcane producers and exports and the findings of the panel are “completely unacceptable” to it.
The US and Australia have also submitted a joint counter-notification on India’s sugar subsidies. According to their study, over the four-year period from 2018-19 to 2021-22, India has provided market price support on sugarcane in excess of the limit prescribed in the agriculture agreement (10 per cent of the total value of sugarcane production) by a margin of 92-101 per cent. They claimed that India had failed to report any of these subsidies in its previous notifications since 1995, the official said.
