Washington, Sept 16: Terming the failure of the WTO Ministerial Conference at Cancun as a "disaster", executive vice-president Peter Woicke has said the agricultural subsidies in rich countries were doing the developing nations great harm.
Speaking after releasing IFC's annual report here yesterday, Woicke said "I think we will struggle for quite a while with this issue of subsidies for agriculture as well as for manufacturing, for steel (about which the US is complaining) and other items."
The five-day WTO Ministerial Conference collapsed on Sunday with India and other developing countries opposing the attempt of rich nations to take up the contentious issues of trade and investment ignoring their concerns on agriculture.
Woicke said the failure showed that even rich countries have "a problem now (with free trade)" and were struggling with globalisation.

"It is not NGOs any more that are complaining against globalisation. While developing countries have made some serious progress towards globalisation, the rich countries complain about losing manufacturing jobs.



"When developing countries produce more efficiently, there seems to be a problem for the rich countries today. I think one should also recognise that wealthy countries have a problem now (with free trade)," Woicke said.


Bureau Report