They said India provides market price support for rice and wheat in excess of what it has reported to the global trade body. India’s market price support for rice appears to have been over 87% of value of production for 2021-22 and 2022-23 while the support for wheat appears to have ranged between 67-75% of the production value over the two years, according to the submission.
Claiming that India appears to be providing “significant” market price support (MPS) for rice and wheat, both in terms of absolute value and as a percentage of the value of production, the five countries said, “India’s notifications for the years at issue appear to dramatically under-report the value of India’s MPS for rice and wheat.”
They claimed that India’s notification for marketing year 2022-23 showed ₹47,614.5 crore worth of support for rice and ₹64 crore for wheat as against their own estimate of ₹3,72,846.5 crore for rice and ₹1,78,959.5 crore for wheat.
“The cosponsors said that they look forward to future discussion of the significance of India’s support for rice and wheat for both its domestic market and world markets,” said an official, who did not wish to be identified.
In May, the US, EU, UK and Australia, along with four others, raised concerns over India’s input subsidies for power, irrigation and fertilisers reaching $48 billion in 2022-2023.
The input subsidies, covered in Article 6.2 of the Agreement on Agriculture of the WTO, allow developing countries additional flexibility in providing domestic support. They are not subjected to caps as other farm subsidies, such as price and income support, included in aggregate measurement of support (AMS) which is fixed at 5% of agriculture production for developed countries and 10% for the developing ones. The AMS are called de minimis entitlements.