[LINK] "Kerala Angered Over FTA With ASEAN"

[rfmcdonald]

Inter Press Service's Ranjit Devraj reports on how public and official opinion in the Indian state of Kerala is turning strongly against India's recent free trade agreement with ASEAN, the Southeast Asian trade and diplomatic alliance. These Keralan groups fear that Southeast Asian competition in agriculture and fisheries will overshadow whatever gains that India might make in exports to Southeast Asia.

With the Indo-ASEAN Free Trade Agreement (FTA) now slated to become operative in Jan. 2010, agricultural experts, fishermen’s representatives, trade union leaders and Kerala’s Marxist Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan have been at pains to convince the pro-reform central government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that the deal should be postponed or scuttled.

India is a dialogue partner at ASEAN - which comprises Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. ASEAN already has FTAs with three other dialogue partners - China, Japan and South Korea.

"The centre has bypassed its constitutional duty to take Kerala and other states into confidence before deciding to go ahead with this deal," Achuthanandan told IPS soon after a meeting with Singh in the national capital this week to discuss the issue. "We are yet to see a copy of the proposed pact which, if signed, will undoubtedly affect the fisheries and plantation sectors."

It does not help that Kerala - a state of 32 million people, with high human development indices - is ruled by the Communist Party of India - Marxist (CPI-M), which is bitterly opposed to the pro-liberalisation polices of Singh’s Congress party-led government.

[. . .]

Also with multilateral trade agreements under the World Trade Organisation (WTO) having hit an impasse there is a new emphasis on bilateral and regional trade agreements. As for competition there is a need to improve productivity and quality as India gradually integrates into the global market.

"Such arguments are all very well but the ground realities are very different," says Thomas Verghese, a distinguished agricultural scientist and chairman of the Kerala State Prices Board. "There are huge differences in productivity, labour costs and inputs in the participating countries which cannot be easily bridged."

Speaking with IPS over telephone from Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala’s capital, Verghese said while the productivity of pepper is 380 kilograms per hectare in India it is 1,000 kilograms per hectare in Vietnam and 3,000 kilograms per hectare in Indonesia. "If this FTA goes through, pepper may cease to be produced in Kerala, the land where it originated."