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Indonesia to Propose for Special Treatment of Agricultural Products

Posted on: Saturday, 3 December 2005, 09:00 CST

Indonesia to propose for special treatment of agricultural products

JAKARTA, Dec. 2 (Xinhua) -- Indonesia will pursue its proposal in the upcoming World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting that agricultural products be given special treatment, Trade Minister Mari E. Pangestu said here on Friday.

"We will give priority to our national interest. At the Hong Kong meeting, we will continue to ask that special treatment be given to agricultural products," the minister said following a hearing with the House Commission VI.

Agricultural products are closely related to food security, poverty eradication and rural development, Antara news agency quoted Pangestu, who will attend a ministerial level WTO meeting in Hong Kong in mid-December 2005, as saying.

Therefore, Indonesia will pursue its demand that those products be given special treatment and must not be bound to the commitment of global trade liberalization.

She admitted that certain parties were pessimistic about the Hong Kong meeting given the fact that a number of advanced countries such as the United States and European Union countries had resisted any efforts to relax the protection of their agricultural products.

However, she was still hopeful that the upcoming WTO meeting would not fail again, like the organization's previous ministerial meetings in Seattle (1999) and Cancun (2003).

Having a population of around 220 million people, Indonesia is an agricultural country where almost 70 percent of its population work in the agricultural sector.

Source: Xinhua News Agency - CEIS

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