French President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Thursday he will propose his G20 partners launch an international agriculture organisation to co-ordinate and anticipate world production.

France has made the regulation of commodities markets, mainly agricultural, one of the priorities of his presidency of the Group of 20 leading economies.

“Maybe it could be useful to have an international agriculture organisation that would take stock of output forecasts,” Sarkozy told a roundtable of farmers after visiting a cattle farm in central France.

“It is not useful that from South America to Europe, from Europe to the United States, from the United States to Asia, from Asia to Russia, we all plant the same things at the same time, which means we keep on going from oversupply periods that knock prices to under-production periods that excite speculation,” he said.

He referred to the surge in world grain prices that followed Russia's decision to set a unilateral ban on grain exports after a severe drought ravaged its crops.

“No international organisation was able to precisely assess world stocks and this lack of transparency has led to speculation, panicking, which meant that all at once prices have exploded,” he said.

Sarkozy did not refer to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome which, among other tasks, collects and publishes data from its members states about grain crops and stocks.

The body released its latest Food Outlook last week, pointing to a rise in wheat plantings for next year in response to higher grain prices.

French Agriculture Minister Bruno Le Maire is due to meet his G20 counterparts in the first half of next year to work on the French proposals on commodities markets regulation.

Sarkozy repeated he was in favour of the so-called European “community preference” and that he would make sure that products that do not respect the same environmental and health standards do not enter the European Union, citing meat from New Zealand and Argentina.

BusinessReport