Africa: 'Cotton Four' preparing new proposal on domestic support

The four African countries that originally proposed the Cotton Initiative will produce a proposal on cutting domestic support in the “coming days”, Benin told the Cotton Sub-Committee on 31 January 2006 in its first meeting since the 13-18 December 2005 Hong Kong Ministerial Conference. The Cotton Four (Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad and Mali), sub-committee chairperson Crawford Falconer, and some other countries said work on domestic support will be urgently needed if members are to meet the 30 April deadline for “modalities” that was agreed in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong Ministerial Declaration says cuts in trade-distorting domestic support on cotton will be deeper and quicker than those agreed for agriculture as a whole, but does not spell out how much deeper or faster, according to the Millenium Development Goals Campaign.