TRADE: WTO Gears Up for New Talks in 2002

By Gustavo Capdevila Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Jan 2 2002 (IPS) - Three years of arduous work lie ahead for the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which must immediately begin a new round of trade-liberalising talks while also maintaining a difficult internal political balance.

The fourth ministerial conference, held last November in Doha, capital of Qatar, gave the WTO the mandate to negotiate accords for deepening trade liberalisation and for issues involving the environment, industrial tariffs and the implementation of pending agreements.

The upcoming round of talks, in the framework of intellectual property rights related to trade, will include establishing “a multilateral system of notification and registration of geographical indications for wines and spirits” (Champagne, for example), as the European countries have been demanding.

The question of geographical designators is also being debated by the agriculture committee of the WTO because the Europeans intend to extend such protections to other farm products – to cheese in particular -, a move opposed by the United States and the Cairns Group.

The Cairns Group, a bloc of agricultural exporting nations that oppose subsidies and non-tariff trade barriers to their products, includes Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Fiji, Guatemala, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Paraguay, Philippines, South Africa, Thailand and Uruguay.

The mandate to embark on a new round of global trade talks also covers subsidies and related compensatory measures, with the clarification that they must take into account the needs of the developing and least developed countries.

That chapter of WTO standards encompasses a new variable with its call to negotiate formulas that would clarify and improve multilateral trade with respect to the fishing industry.

The reference to fishing subsidies arises from a long-standing complaint from the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF, also known as World Wildlife Fund), which won its inclusion in the draft resolution presented at the failed WTO ministerial conference in 1999, held in the U.S. city of Seattle.

The negotiating package for the next three years covers issues related to regional accords, an understanding on dispute settlement procedures within the WTO, and the continuation of negotiations on the agriculture and service sectors that were begun in January 2000.

In the chapter on farm trade, what stands out is the commitment the ministers made at the Qatar conference to reduce all forms of export subsidies, with sights on phasing out all such state aid.

The European Union, which spends a great deal on farm export subsidies, was able to amend the text so that it states that the commitments were made “without prejudging the outcome of the negotiations.”

But the nations whose economies are largely based on farming and which do not subsidise production or export of agricultural goods played down the importance of such wording and assert that the text favours their negotiating position.

As far as industrial tariffs, which the WTO refers to as market access for non-agricultural products, the ministerial conference in Doha decided to convene immediate talks in spite of pressure from developing countries, which fear a new process of “deindustrialisation”.

Study of the most contentious matters, such as investment and competition, will begin this month, but formal negotiations will not get under way until after the fifth ministerial conference, slated to take place in Mexico in 2003.