TRADE: Agriculture Bogs Down Negotiations for Singapore

By Gustavo Capdevila Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Nov 27 1996 (IPS) - Argentina’s proposal for a special clause on agriculture issued Wednesday will block the drawing up of a final declaration for the Singapore ministerial conference of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

The Argentine initiative was immediately supported by Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, its three partners in the Southern Cone Common Market (Mercosur), and Australia, said Argentina’s ambassador, Juan Carlos Sanchez Arnau.

With the step taken by the Buenos Aires representative, negotiations for the Singapore declaration run the risk of getting bogged down barely ten days before the ministerial conference is due to open.

The foreign trade ministers of the 125 WTO member countries will meet from Dec. 9 to 13 in Singapore to carry out the first revision of the organisation’s record so far in its two-year career.

Up until this Wednesday, the WTO director-general, the Italian Renato Ruggiero, had managed to limit differences between delegates to just a handful of controversial issues.

The trade officials predominantly believe the disagreements on the main principles will last until Singapore and that the ministers will have to negotiate agreement.

The most disputed issue is the proposal from some industrialised Northern countries to include a paragraph linking multilateral trade relations with the basic labour regulations in the declaration.

But this “social clause,” has not fared well in the run up in Geneva, and the Developing Southern nations have objected to its inclusion, claiming it threatens the advantage they have for their low labour costs.

Consensus was not reached on the final paragraph of the draft declaration either, a section which proposes investment and trade agreements and mentions WTO-related competition policies and transparency and guarantees for public contracts.

Meanwhile, trade officials said the delegations could still reach an agreement on the issue of textiles, where the mainly Southern producers are at loggerheads with the main buyers: the United States, the European Union, Canada and Switzerland.

The practically uninterrupted negotiations since Tuesday in the WTO headquarters have allowed agreement to be reached on trade and environment, and the delegations generally agreed on the paragraphs of political content in the draft declaration.

They especially insisted there should be rapid consensus on the commitments WTO members will make to the less developed nations.

The declaration proposes a plan of action with measures which aim to improve the general capacity of the Southern nations to respond to the opportunities offered in the trade system.

However, the agricultural issue brought up by Argentina is barely mentioned in the orgiginal draft declaration.

Commitments made in the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the predecesor of the current WTO, mean the agricultural issue will have to be raised again in 1999.

However, the agricultural exporters in the Cairns Group have been campaigning over the last few years for these negotiations to be brought forward.

The Cairns Group includes Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Chile, Fiji, Hungary, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand and Uruguay.

But the net importers, like Japan and South Korea, are planning to oppose the Argentine proposal which asks ministers to declare whether they have seen the agricultural sections of the Uruguay Round begin to be applied.

The amendment adds that the Agriculture Committee agreed to start research and information exchange in 1997 to allow the WTO members to better understand the questions involved and to identify their interests before negotiations start.

Before the Argentine initiative was known, the French minister of foreign trade, Yves Galland, had already reconfirmed his nation’s opposition to the early reconsideration of the agricultural issue.