TRADE: Asian Governments Want Clear WTO Agenda

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Sep 28 2001 (IPS) - The agenda for this year’s World Trade Organisation (WTO) ministerial meeting has become a contentious issue, with many Asian governments insisting on it being more open to their concerns instead of being shaped to satisfy the developed world.

Equal stress has been placed on the agenda’s language, with most of the region’s developing countries favouring a “precise” text with goals clearly stated, than the broad, “ambiguous” language used in the agenda for the Nov. 1999 meeting in Seattle.

The draft agenda for the WTO’s fourth ministerial meeting, to be held Nov. 9-13 in Doha, Qatar, is expected to be circulated to member- countries next month.

These fundamental concerns cannot be ignored, said V.S. Seshadri, joint secretary of India’s commerce department, during discussions here this week with counterparts from 33 Asian and Pacific Ocean countries.

Other ranking trade officials from Malaysia, Indonesia and Pakistan backed such line of thinking, thus revealing a common policy position emerging from among Asian nations ahead of the meeting.

Developing countries need to shape the agenda in order to benefit from the international trading system governed under the WTO’s trading rules, added Jose Antonio Buencamino, assistant secretary of the Philippines’ Department of Trade and Industry.

What they seek range from a removal of prevailing imbalances in trade agreements that adversely affect developing countries to full implementation of the trade rules agreed during the Uruguay round of trade talks.

Currently, the U.S. and the European Union get away with their protectionist agricultural policies, including subsidies to farmers, which go against the grain of the WTO. Developing countries, on the other hand, are expected to conform to WTO rules, meaning no state protection for the agriculture sector.

During the discussions, which were part of week-long activities on the WTO organised by the U.N.’s Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), trade officials also made a case against a new round of trade talks at the Doha gathering, a move favoured by Washington and the EU.

Instead, they prefer a re-negotiation of the Uruguay Round of trade talks, which framed the multilateral trading rules of the WTO. “Implementation should be dealt with before the WTO launches a new trade round. The agenda must be clear on this before the ministerial conference,” stressed Subah Bose, a Malaysian trade official.

The WTO, however, questions such a rationale. “It is impossible to re-negotiate the Uruguay Round. It will lead to an unraveling of the whole process, for you cannot re-negotiate parts of it,” said Paul- Henri Ravier, the WTO’s deputy director-general, during an interview with IPS.

“Governments were aware of the trade rules when they signed the agreement. They were aware of what they were getting into. They cannot go back on this,” he added.

He expects a new round of trade talks to be a central feature during the Doha ministerial meeting. “It will be on the agenda, which will be clear,” he said. “Implementation of the Uruguay Round will be taken up too.”

And the WTO has already got the backing of regional giant China, whose entry into the WTO was approved this month. Beijing’s trade officials were unequivocal about their country’s stance during this week’s discussions, with their spokesman saying, “We support the launching of a new round at the Doha meeting.”

Criticisms, however, have been levelled against the WTO’s stance. “The developing countries should decide on the new round and the new issues based on their assessment of the gain and loss,” stated a briefing paper released by the non-governmental Third World Network (TWN), a Malaysian- based group with affiliates across the developing world.

According to the paper, developing countries are justified in feeling let down by the Uruguay Round, which held out promises that they would benefit from agriculture and textiles, since these two sectors were to be opened to their products.

“However they both remain closed six years after the Round ended,” it revealed. “In agriculture, tariffs of many agriculture items of interest to developing countries are prohibitively high (some are over 200 and over 300 percent).”

It noted that domestic subsidies in the developed countries have “risen from 275 billion dollars to 326 billion dollars instead of declining as expected.”

And in textiles, “only very few items which the developing countries export have been taken off the quota list, even though more than half the implementation has passed.”

The developed countries, the TWN argued, have fallen short of their commitments to liberalise trade, yet “they still proclaim that it is unquestionably beneficial for developing countries to liberalise their imports and investments as fast as possible”.

Oxfam, a leading international development agency, shares some of these criticisms. In a background paper made available at the ESCAP discussions, it declared that the developed countries and their powerful multinational companies have made substantial gains through the international trading system to the detriment of the developing countries.

“Trade liberalisation has been an unequal bargain, with the greatest gains from WTO agreements accruing to industrial countries,” noted the paper, ‘Harnessing Trade for Development’. “The costs of Northern protectionism for developing countries are huge, amounting to a loss of 700 billion dollars in annual export earning, or 12 percent of their combined GDP.”

For Anwarul Hoda, an academic from the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, these “asymmetries in international trade” can be dealt within the framework of a new round at Doha. “The inventory of demands put forward by countries like India could be taken up during the round, than what India is insisting, that it be dealt with before Doha.”

He admitted, though, that developed countries could not ignore this rising tide of concerns, particularly the clamour for implementation issues. “The Developed countries should take a political decision to consider the implementation issue before Doha.”