Inside US Trade | November 7, 2003
Stuart Harbinson announced Nov. 6 that he would resign as chairman of the World Trade Organization agriculture negotiations once a successor is chosen. He will continue serving as chief of staff for the office of Director-General Supachai Panitchpakdi, a Geneva source said.
Harbinson had come under some criticism when it was announced he would serve as Supachai's chief of staff even while he chaired the committee charged with the WTO's most politically sensitive negotiations. One Geneva source speculated that one possible reason for his decision to resign could be his dual roles, which Supachai had acknowledged could be difficult to balance.
When Harbinson was appointed chief of staff in Sept. 2002, Supachai said that he could "for the time being" coexist with his current role of being the chairman of the WTO agriculture committee. But, "Stuart himself would have quite some hard time in allocating his time for the Secretariat and the work for the Committee," Supachai said at the time (Inside U.S. Trade, Sept. 6, 2002, p. 6).
Harbinson said in practice it had been possible to combine chairing the agriculture group with his other duties. But now that the WTO was entering a new phase in those talks following the failure of the Cancun ministerial, he said, "I think a new chairperson may be better able to bring the fresh perspective, which we now need."
Harbinson will stay on as agriculture chair until a successor is selected. It is not clear when this process will begin, as Supachai suspended all negotiating groups working on the Doha round in late September. General Council Chairman Carlos Perez del Castillo is expected to engage in consultations with members on how to address the status of the negotiating groups and whether to appoint new chairs. But one delegation source said it is unclear when this process will begin given the fact that Castillo is now involved in an effort to get WTO members to agree at a Dec. 15 meeting on frameworks for moving forward with the negotiations that stalled in Cancun.
Harbinson, once the permanent representative of Hong Kong, China to the WTO, was chosen by in February 2002 to chair the Committee on Agriculture in Special Session. He authored a modalities proposal released early this year that came under criticism from almost all WTO members.Inside US Trade:
