US May Agree to Defer New WTO Round - Cairns Group


By Gustavo Capdevila

DOHA, Nov 9 (IPS) - The United States wants the Fourth Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which opened Friday in the Qatar capital, to accelerate talks on agriculture so that the next meeting of trade ministers, in 2003, can launch the much-touted new round of multilateral negotiations .

The US intentions as far as global trade talks were outlined Friday for the Cairns Group, which is made up of 18 countries that favour broad liberalisation for international farm trade.

For more than a year, the industrialised countries - the United States and the European Union in particular - have been laying the groundwork to launch a new round of trade negotiations at the current WTO ministerial conference in Doha, which runs through Tuesday, Nov 13.

But their objective has clashed with the staunch opposition of developing countries, which demand that the industrialised nations comply with the commitments made during the Uruguay Round of negotiations (1986-1994) before beginning new trade talks.

The US strategy reportedly consists of a two-stage plan. The first phase would be accelerated negotiations on agriculture, to be wrapped up by mid-year 2003 so that the trade ministers could sanction the resulting farm accord at their next biennial conference.

Then, at that ministerial conference, the officials would lay out a plan for negotiating the ''new issues'' for launching a new round of global trade liberalising talks. The US trade officials who met with the Cairns Group mentioned that the new agenda would include ''investment, the environment and other matters.''

The Cairns Group and the United States held meetings at various diplomatic levels to assess the agricultural debate leading up to the conference now under way.

At an early session in the series, US diplomats outlined their strategy for seeking a speedy agreement on farm trade in order to immediately convene a new round of negotiations on the issues that are of greatest interest to the industrialised countries.

A subsequent meeting, which involved US Secretary of Agriculture Anne Veneman and ministers from the Cairns countries, reaffirmed the alliance that the two parties had established in Punta del Este, Uruguay, in September for dealing with farm trade negotiations.

At the WTO conference in Doha, the two parties will attempt to give some teeth to the agriculture-related paragraphs in the draft of the final declaration that was drawn up for the signature of the more than 140 ministers representing the trade organisation's member states.

John Fahey, Australia's minister of agriculture and spokesman for the Cairns Group, told a press conference Friday that ''the time has come to end discrimination against agriculture.''

The Cairns Group demands substantial reductions and ultimately the elimination of the financial supports that most industrialised countries provide for their farming sectors, charging that they distort the global agricultural markets.

The other two main Cairns demands, said Fahey, are a significant improvement in agricultural countries' access to international markets and the elimination of all forms of export subsidies.

In that respect, the draft declaration being debated by the ministers would commit the WTO member countries to achieving ''reductions of, with a view to phasing out, all forms of export subsidies.''

But the Cairns Group, and now the United States, want the words ''phasing out'' to be replaced with ''full elimination'' of subsidies. US officials said government supports should be eliminated ''as soon as possible,'' reported a Cairns negotiator who requested anonymity.

Such stances tend toward the dismantling of the farm protectionist systems erected by industrialised countries - the EU, Japan, South Korea, Switzerland and Norway, but also by the United States - and which reflect a total outlay of 350 billion dollars annually.

Fahey announced the Cairns Group's support for a new round of talks, buoyed by the United States commitment to work in favour of quickly liberalising agricultural trade.

The Cairns Group members are Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Fiji, Guatemala, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Paraguay, Philippines, South Africa, Thailand and Uruguay. (END)