December 2005
The amber box contains aid to be avoided and reduced. All domestic support measures "considered to distort production and trade" fall into this box. These could take the form of "support for market prices" via the setting of a minimum "intervention" price, or of subsidies tied to production levels or prices for the current year. For example, when the European Union buys up cereals and dairy products at guaranteed prices, it is amber-box aid. Likewise its rebates on interest rates in the farming sector.
The blue box contains tolerated aid. It includes subsidies that are linked to one product, but that do not increase according to production levels. This includes aid that is linked to production limitation programmes and calculated according to fixed production data from an earlier period. For example, the blue box contains aid to livestock or land not linked to prices but to fixed figures for surface and yield.
The green box contains fully authorised aid. It takes in subsidies that do not distort trade, or only minimally. Research and training services provided to farmers by the state are one example of such aid. Aid designed to help protect the environment or to resist natural disasters is another. Most of all for the EU, the green box contains aid that has been transferred from the blue box through "decoupling", in the form of the single payment per farm, but does not really meet the criteria to be classed as green-box aid.
The country groupings
Three groupings of developing countries came together for the WTO's Cancún ministerial conference in 2003 to campaign exclusively on agriculture. They have since taken up positions concerning other sectors.
The G20 has only 19 members. Nine are net exporters of farm produce; 10 are also members of the G33. The grouping is led by Brazil backed up by China, India and South Africa. It sees itself as leader of the developing world as a whole, but is often contested by the G33 and the G90. This G20 is not to be confused with the other G20 created in 1999 by the G7 industrialised countries to bring together international financial institutions.
The G33 has 42 members, of which 10 are also in the G20 and 28 in the G90. Its priority is to defend developing countries' right to maintain high tariff barriers on imports.
The G90 is made up of 79 countries from the African, Caribbean and Pacific group of states, linked to the EU by the Cotonou convention. It includes the world's 49 least developed countries - most of them ACP members - and the African Union nations. It shares the G33's objective of maintaining high tariff barriers for its own members, and also fears that if developed countries drop their tariffs - as the G20 wants them to do - then it will lose the tariff preferences from which it benefits greatly, and not just for bananas and sugar.
The G4 brings together the US, the EU, Brazil (representing the G20) and India (representing the G33). It is tending to supersede the G5 (which has more weight in Australia) in the preliminary definition of the progress to be made at talks, before discussions with larger groups (10-12 members) or even "mini-ministerials" of 25-30 members take place.
More Information on the World Trade Organization
More Information on the WTO's Sixth Ministerial Conference
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