THE WTO REGIME AND THE INDIAN ECONOMY 25 been done by Northern TNCs seeking to profit from the much lower wages in Third World countries; these too face tariff and non-trade barriers. The Agreement on Agriculture mentions food security as a non-trade concern at the behest of the developing countries and most magnanimously 'permits' stock holding activities for food security reasons. But the conditions attached have serious implications: countries are 'allowed' to make public stockholding of foodgrains provided " the difference between acquisition price and external reference price (i.e the ruling international price) is accounted for in the Aggregate Measure of Support " where the AMS is subject to reduction commitments. Now while this did not matter for years where the domestic procurement price in India was below world price, but now that the world grain price has fallen in the course of the last two years, and is below the current per tonne production cost in India , the pressure to give up procurement at a fair price to our farmers is bound to mount. Indeed with the current reduction of import duty to a flat across the board 35% in the 2000 budget, Indian farmers are already subject to unfair competition, since the world grain price itself is not related to production cost abroad but is the result of massive subsidy used for capturing markets. A paper titled "GATT Intellectual Property Code" presented to the Licensing Executive Society USA/Canada Annual Meeting in October 1989, by James R Enyart,. Director, International Affairs, Monsanto Agricultural Company, describes the successful efforts of the Company along with like interest groups in pushing the IPR provisions they wanted: "A country cannot exclude drugs, chemicals, biotechnology and the like from patentability ; a reasonable term must be provided with 20 years from filing suggested. Compulsory licenses are to be tightly limited." The paper is interesting for its fulminations against developing countries, which are accused of seeking "magic ways to shortcut the development process", and against the UN system "where high flown rhetoric and crackpot ideas are taken seriously" even by many developed country academics who "took this New World Economic Order stuff seriously". "Export Oriented Agriculture and Food Security in Developing Countries and in India" EPW Special No. August 1996 also reprinted in my book The Long Transition: Essays on Political Economy (1999) Utsa Patnaik The Likely Impact of Economic Liberalisation and Structural Adjustment on Food Security in India (Workshop organised by ILO and National Commission for Women , New Delhi January 1993) See the 1998-99 Economic Survey. By mid-1999 it was clear that the 1998-99 foodgrain output had again reached its earlier peak at 203 m.t, so the 1999-2000 Economic Survey released in February 2000, has suddenly added an annual increment of 22 million persons quite arbitrarily, to obtain the 1998 population figure, and then has reverted to adding 16 million to that to obtain the 1999 provisional population, which remains at only 986 million owing to the earlier window-dressing, whereas we have been informed with great fanfare that India's population had crossed the one billion mark by October 1999! According to independent demographers, there is no reason to believe that the annual population growth rate is less than 1.9 to 2 percent. By the time authentic estimates of the nineties population growth from the 2001 Census are available, people will have forgotten the doctored figures of the Economic Survey.