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As farmers struggle, US Congress moots easing of sanctions against India

The US nuclear-related sanctions against India and Pakistan appear to have adversely affected American economic interests, particularly those of farmers, setting off a powerful move in Congress to ease the mandatory curbs, ignoring at least for the time-being the Clinton administration's proliferation concerns.

According to reports, Republican Senator Richard Lugar, who is heading the anti-sanctions move, has already lined up some 33 co-sponsors for his legislation that would stop Congress from imposing sanctions on other nations.

The immediate pressure against the sanctions is from the farm lobby because of the decline in wheat prices. Pakistan last year bought about two million tonnes from the US. If the sanctions are strictly implemented, the US grain could not go to Pakistan. But, the administration had already promised support to the anti-sanctions move.

What goes in favour of the anti-sanction amendment is the backing it had received both from the farm and the industrial lobbies.

Lugar is drawing support from recent commodity market events in which grain prices, Washington winter wheat, plummet in the wake of the India-Pakistani nuclear test crisis, says the Journal of Commerce.

That has awakened fears among US farmers of a disastrous situation like the grain embargo imposed on Russia by then president Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s.

Titled the 'Sanction Policy Reform Act', Senator Lugar's legislation would establish a set of suggested guidelines for new unilateral economic sanctions, the daily adds. The legislation is, by intention, prospective only, it adds.

The bill says sanctions must allow for ''contract sanctity'', which would mean companies could not be forced to back out of deals that they have already committed -- an important point for US business interests.

The bill would force Congress to conduct a detailed cost-benefit analysis of the proposed sanctions before enacting them, including an assessment of how likely the sanctions will be to achieve stated goals and a judgment on whether the foreign policy goals outweigh the expected economic and diplomatic costs.

UNI