Agence France Presse | GENEVA, Developing countries voiced dissatisfaction on Wednesday and warned that the WTO could be heading for a repeat performance of the Seattle failure, as delegates met to formally send a draft agenda for a new trade round to next week's Doha talks.
With nine days to go before ministers of the World Trade Organisation open talks in the Gulf state of Qatar that aim to launch a new series of trade liberalisation negotiations, an official from a developing country warned "the situation is critical".
"I think we are heading for a new Seattle," the official said referring to the WTO's ministerial gathering in the US west coast city in December 1999 which failed amid deep divisions to agree on a round. The draft texts are the second versions to be drawn up by the WTO's ruling general council chairman, Hong Kong Ambassador Stuart Harbinson and were released at the weekend.
Trade sources said the revised drafts had already narrowed some differences among the WTO's 142 members but that about six difficult issues still remained to be settled by ministers at the November 9-13 meeting.
Ambassador Federico Alberto Cuello, of the Dominican Republic, stressed to reporters that the texts did not "command consensus" as he headed into the meeting of the general council at WTO headquarters here.
He said that despite attempts by the chairman to find a middle ground "still there is a lot of grumbling from all delegations".
"The climate is really not that much different from the climate before Seattle," he commented.
Canadian Ambassador Sergio Marchi acknowledged that no one was completely satisfied with the texts but said he believed they did form "a very credible basis for ministers to discuss and work on further".
"I don't think anybody is fully happy, I think everybody will have issues, but secondly everybody will also have to stand back and look at it from a systemic WTO perspective," he told reporters.
"And when you do it that way that's why I think it is a very good basis for further discussion and to bridge the differences on some issues that still exist," he added.
Nigeria commented in a written statement that the revised text was "unsatisfactory because it is one-sided", accusing it of accommodating "in total" the interests of developed countries while disregarding concerns of developing and least developed countries.
"Time changes everything and the distance between Seattle and Doha appears long. But the problems remain the same," Nigeria said in the statement.
Developing countries demands include dealing with the implementation of past trade accords, which they say have not produced the benefits promised to them from greater access to developed countries' markets.
But the subject emerging as likely to be one of the most controversial at Doha, concerns the flexibility of the WTO's accord on trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPS) relating to access to medicines.
Developing countries demand that nothing in the 1994 TRIPS accord should prevent members from taking measures to protect public health.
Some countries, notably the United States and Switzerland, want a more restrictive statement on the issue, saying that nothing must add to or diminish the rights and obligations of the TRIPS agreement.
"There I think is the major division and probably the deal-breaker is going to be that one," Ambassador Cuello told reporters.Agence France Presse:
