Agence France Presse | Aug. 12, 2003
The EU, Canada and the US said Tuesday they had teamed up in crafting a proposal aimed at reviving deadlocked WTO talks on opening up markets for industrial goods' trade.
But reactions from other countries at talks at WTO headquarters earlier Tuesday were quite cool, with Pakistan and other developing countries accusing the proposal of being a step backwards, trade sources said.
With just over four weeks to go before a pivotal World Trade Organisation meeting in Mexico, the negotiations, like those in areas such as agriculture, have been stalled for months.
"This is an effort by the US, the EU and Canada to incorporate what we have been hearing from other countries in a way that gets this balance between ambitious trade liberalisation on the one hand, but sensitivity to the situations of the developing countries on the other," Deputy US Trade Representative Peter Allgeier told reporters at a telephone conference.
Although no timeframe or figures are given, the joint paper calls for "a simple, ambitious, harmonising formula" for reducing tariffs along the lines of the so-called Swiss Formula.
This is a formula which would lead to steeper cuts on high tariffs, so the paper also includes flexibilities to help developing countries cope with the resulting loss.
Mexican ambassador Eduardo Perez Motta described the formula as "aggressive" and said he hoped the EU as a co-sponsor would also follow through with ambitious proposals for agriculture.
"We think that in order to talk about ambition in industrials, you have to understand what is going to be the level of ambition in agriculture, that's very clear, especially in subsidies," he told reporters.
"If we don't see what's going to happen there, we cannot talk about ambition in non-agricultural market access," he added.
Washington and Brussels have announced they plan to present to other WTO members a joint position on probably the most controversial WTO issue, agriculture, by Wednesday at the earliest.
EU Ambassador to the WTO, Carlo Trojan told reporters it was quite normal that some countries would rather wait to see "where the road is going on agriculture" before speaking out on the other proposal.
And he insisted the proposal on industrial goods responded to the various needs of developing countries.
Non-agricultural market access "should not be merely a North-North exercise, but it should meet the increasingly important component of South-South trade as well," he added.
Sergio Marchi, Canada's ambassador to the WTO, said non-agricultural products accounted for 91 percent of the flow of trade in goods worldwide, with the US and Canada accounting for 15 percent.
"If we soft pedal NAMA (non-agricultural market access) I think you run the risk of soft pedalling the entire round" of trade negotiations, he added, stressing the need for a high level of ambition.
Members failed to keep an end-May deadline for agreeing on targets for cuts in non-agricultural tariffs amid wide divergences over how far the reductions should go.
Developed countries' high ambitions over the pace and extent of opening up markets in industrial goods are resisted by poorer WTO members for whom the tariffs are an important source of revenue.
Tariffs, or customs duties on merchandise imports, also give a price advantage to similar locally-produced goods.Agence France Presse:
