G-20 Agriculture Ministers Step Back from Launching ICT Platform
Date：06-12-2016 Source：Bridges
Differences among the G-20 major advanced and emerging economies have prompted the group to step back from launching a new platform on information and communications technology (ICT) in farming.
Draft documents seen by Bridges had indicated that agriculture ministers would set up the new initiative at their meeting in Xi’an, China, last Friday. (See Bridges Weekly, 2 June 2016)
While the final communiqué issued after the meeting highlights the role of new technologies, it now says that ministers invite various agencies to make proposals to the G-20 agriculture deputies ahead of the next meeting. The agencies referred to included the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
An earlier draft of the text had said that ministers would “decide to launch an Agricultural ICT Exchange and Cooperation Platform (Annex) based on assessment by FAO, IFPRI, and OECD on existing global agricultural ICT applications and platforms.”
“There was a lot of opposition from Russia,” explained one source, who told Bridges that it was unclear to them why Moscow objected to the initiative.
Sources told Bridges that G-20 agriculture ministers were due to meet early next year under the German presidency, in the margins of an annual agricultural ministerial convened by Berlin each January. This year, for the first time, the G-20 has agreed that agriculture ministers should meet regularly.
The international agencies would have to make their proposals during this year’s Chinese presidency due to the unusually short duration of the talks on agriculture in 2017, sources told Bridges.
Language on anti-microbial resistance was also softened, reportedly at the insistence of meat-exporting countries such as Brazil. Anti-microbial resistance is resistance of a microorganism to an anti-microbial drug that was originally effective for treatment of infections caused by it. Growing resistance is making it harder for governments to ensure that diseases such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria are treated effectively.
While G-20 ministers expressed their support for the implementation of the World Health Organization’s global action plan in this area, language committing countries to “phase out the use of medically important antibiotics for growth promotion in animals” was dropped from the final draft of the communiqué.
The section of the declaration on trade, reaffirming the outcomes of the WTO's tenth ministerial conference last year in Nairobi, was virtually unchanged from earlier drafts. Similarly, ministers did not alter a clause supporting the "vital role of the multilateral trading system in global food security.”
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