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TRADE-EU: A Summer of Discontent Begins
By Stefania Bianchi
BRUSSELS, Jul 22, 2004 (IPS) - European Union trade officials are set to face a scorching
summer as they aim to resolve faltering multilateral trade negotiations.
While high level trade representatives and European Union (EU) commissioners may have
been hoping to escape to their home countries for summer repose, they are instead
faced with the sticky challenge of resolving two sets of trade talks.
Negotiations under the Doha Development Round (DDR) and with South America's
Mercosur bloc have floundered over the past week and show little sign of picking up
before the summer is out.
Both sets of talks were further hit Wednesday (Jul. 21) as discussions between the EU
and Mercosur, made up of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay broke down amid
divisions over market access, and France further jeopardised the chance of getting the
DDR talks back on track.
Mercosur talks were scheduled to finish at the end of the week, but have now been
rescheduled for the second week of August in Brasilia and then later again in Brussels in
September, a month ahead of an end October deadline set by both sides.
"Meanwhile, there should be contact between ministers," EU trade commissioner Pascal
Lamy's spokeswoman Arancha Gonzalez said Wednesday.
The EU had been pressing for greater access to telecommunication and maritime
shipping industries while Mercosur wants more access to agriculture markets..
Brazil said Mercosur could not accept EU proposals to phase in quotas for its goods
such as beef, chicken and ethanol over a 10-year period.
Brazil's international negotiations director Regis Arslanian, who is Mercosur's chief
negotiator at the talks, described the EU proposals as totally inadequate. "Two months
from the deadline (in October), the talks ought to be going forwards, not backwards,
which is the case with the EU proposal," he told the Associated Press news agency.
The European Commission agreed that market access was the main stumbling block.
"The two sides were not able to make progress on the market access parts," Gonzalez
said. "We were expecting to make more progress this week but that was not possible,"
she added.
Lamy said last month that the EU had made concessions on sensitive issues such as
agriculture, and now it expected Mercosur to make similar efforts. Lamy also stressed at
the time that the target of concluding the talks by October was not an "official deadline."
Although most of the EU's 25 member states back Lamy's strategy on the talks, France,
the biggest EU farming nation, opposes his proposals. France is also not keen on the
idea of signing an EU-Mercosur agreement before the end of the Doha negotiations.
France also made waves over the Doha talks. French President Jacques Chirac has
attacked a proposal aimed at restarting stalled global trade talks under the DDR as
"unacceptable".
A document presented by trade mediators at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) last
Friday (Jul. 16) attempts to kickstart the stalled Doha round of trade talks.
The draft guidelines envisage the elimination of agricultural export subsidies and big
cuts in domestic farm supports and border protection. Other issues covered include
industrial tariffs, services, cotton subsidies and the launch of negotiations on customs
procedures.
The document is being debated in Geneva this week.
Chirac said Wednesday the proposal was "profoundly unbalanced to the detriment of the
interests of the European Union." Chirac said that although France wants the Doha
round to be completed, "it would not be able to give its backing to negotiations worked
out on such a basis."
He called on the European Commission, which had cautiously welcomed the proposal
earlier this week, to "do everything to substantially re-balance this text, which is
unacceptable in its current form."
The EU executive had said Tuesday (Jul. 20) that the text was a "step in the right
direction."
Officials had hoped that a negotiating framework could be agreed by the end of July
before the Doha round risks being sidelined by a new structure in the enlarged
European Commission and by the U.S. presidential elections in November.
While this may still be possible many delegates already predict that the content of the
draft document will be watered down.
"It won't be easy, but something will emerge in the end," one delegate from a Caribbean
nation told IPS earlier this week, adding that the discrepancies seen in the past few days
would "inevitably lead to a 'lite' text."
The debate over the text will continue until Friday (Jul. 23), after which a four-day
general council session will begin on Tuesday (Jul. 27) with the aim of producing a
framework for the talks.
In light of such recent setbacks, EU trade officials are likely to spend the next couple of
months trying to find ways to repair the rifts that have built up over the past couple of
months.
(END)
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