Consumers call shots

International trade - specifically in agricultural goods - has shifted emphasis from protecting producers to protecting consumers, said former World Trade Organisation president Pascal Lamy yesterday.

Lamy was speaking at the Forum for Agriculture in Brussels, Belgium, a gathering of industry insiders and policymakers.

The shadow of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which includes agricultural haggling between the US and EU, hung over yesterday's forum.

The US and EU are now in their fourth round of wrangling over this deal, which is aimed at, among other things, opening large markets to farmers on both sides of the Atlantic.

"Tariffs and subsidies were of major importance from the 1960s to 1990s," said Lamy, who tried in vain to get a multilateral trade deal signed while he headed the WTO.

Producers used to be on the side of regulators, helping to erect trade barriers such as à50-billion subsidies, which protected, among other things, EU cows.

This not only forced consumers in developed countries to fork out more for milk, meat, grains and vegetables, it also hurt developing countries, which could produce these commodities for much less - they lost out on lucrative export markets.

But these days, it is the consumers who throw a spanner in the works by setting the bar very high when it comes to food safety. And trade authorities pounce on these to make it more difficult for foreign products.

Lamy referred to a phenomenon that had seen consumers prevent some products from entering the domestic market in the name of consumer protection.

He also said it was an "old view" that, in order to produce, you needed to be protected from foreign competition.

Not so, said Robert Sichinga Zambia's minister of commerce (formerly of agriculture).

"How can you tell us we are not allowed to subsidise?" he said later in a breakaway session.

To claw back from a maize shortage a decade ago, Sichinga told delegates, Zambia had to subsidise fertilisers and equipment.

By 2011, it had a surplus after its farmers gained traction.

Now his country wants to push even further to install the technology to do on-farm processing and not simply consume or export the commodity.