IPS | September 4, 2001 | By Gustavo Capdevila
GENEVA - With just two months left before the Fourth Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), indecision continues to plague efforts to launch a new round of multilateral talks for deepening the processes towards global free trade.
The chairman of the WTO General Council, Stuart Harbison, announced Tuesday that he would take responsibility for drawing up the ministerial declaration for the conference, now that all of the deadlines for doing so have passed without producing a final text.
Harbison is to distribute his draft of the document in late September to allow governments time to evaluate it before their delegations head to Qatar for the Nov 9-13 meet, announced Keith Rockwell, WTO spokesman.
But prior to Doha, there will likely be an unofficial ministerial gathering, probably in Singapore, to debate Harbison's draft of the Qatar declaration, say trade-negotiating sources.
That meeting, tentatively set for mid-October, would depend on deliberations taking place around that time in China among ministers from the member countries of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC).
This new meeting will be different, it will be political, establishing a different kind of environment, commented Rockwell.
During Tuesday's press conference in Geneva, the WTO spokesman refused to compare the current setbacks in the run-up to Doha and the difficulties that led to the resounding failure of the third ministerial conference in late 1999 in the US city of Seattle.
With sights on the Fourth Ministerial Conference, the WTO had planned to reach an accord by the end of July that would favour the launching of a new round of international talks, but the differences in opinion of its 142 member countries made consensus impossible.
That panorama has not changed after a month of vacation for the WTO offices and the active discussions involving several blocs of countries.
Last week, a preparatory meeting for the Doha conference was held in the Mexican capital that involved top trade officials from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Egypt, Hong Kong, India, Jamaica, Japan, Singapore, South Africa, Switzerland, Tanzania, United States and Uruguay, as well as representatives from the European Union (EU).
Most of the comments heard following the informal conference in Mexico indicated cautious optimism, though one of the participants, Swiss Economy minister Pascal Couchepin, offered a negative forecast for the possibility of a new round of global trade talks.
Couchepin said that the two days of talks in Mexico did not produce "the sensation of having achieved the dynamic that would ensure success" at the ministerial conference in Doha.
Switzerland supports the position championed by the United States and the EU that calls on the Fourth Ministerial Conference to approve a new round of multilateral talks towards expanding progress on trade liberalisation.
But developing countries, the majority of membership in the WTO, which makes its decisions by consensus, have so far been reluctant to give the green light for a new round if the organisation's pending problems are not resolved beforehand.
The world's poor nations are demanding the implementation of all provisions stipulated in the previous agreements, reached during the Uruguay Round (1986-1994), including those involving the most contentious sectors for these developing economies, such as textiles and agriculture.
Rockwell, in reference to the draft declaration the ministers will receive in Doha, stressed the importance of the regional and international consultations to occur in the coming weeks, including the APEC meeting.
For instance, he said, the Cairns Group, made up 18 agricultural exporting countries, is studying proposals for a joint trade strategy at a meeting this week in the Uruguayan resort city of Punta del Este.
Also, the members of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) will be holding a conference of ministers at the end of this month in Abuja, Nigeria, while the EU General Affairs Council is slated to meet the first week of October.
All of these negotiations bode well for avoiding a repeat of "the 1999 scenario of having no draft text agreed to" before heading to the ministerial conference in Qatar, said Rockwell.IPS:
