Reuters | November 15, 2001 | by Robert Evans
DOHA - Ministers from the 142 countries of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) agreed yesterday to launch a "broad and balanced" set of free trade negotiations to start by January 31 next year and end by January 1 2005.
A declaration approved at the end of a six-day conference in Qatar and promptly dubbed "the Doha Round" by Qatari officials, provides for immediate talks in seven specific areas to be supervised by a special Trade Negotiating Committee (TNC).
Additionally, a 10-page document opens the way to eventual negotiations, either within the new round or a later one, in four more areas, and to preliminary talks in two more.
The programme it sets out, which European Union Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy and Japanese trade minister Takeo Hiranuma hailed as "the Doha Development Agenda", also provides for a review of the current WTO accord on intellectual property, knows as TRIPS.
The following are the topics that would be included from the start:
1) IMPLEMENTATION - or a gamut of problems that developing countries have with agreements reached in the last negotiations, the 1986-93 Uruguay Round, ranging from access to Western textile markets to ending government investment programmes in their national industries.
2) AGRICULTURE - negotiations that began last year at the WTO's headquarters in Geneva to follow up and expand the accord on farm trade reached in the Uruguay Round will be wrapped into the new talks.
This includes working towards a reduction of farm export subsidies with a view to eventually phasing them out, and to aiming to agree on "substantial reductions" in trade-distorting domestic farm support.
3) SERVICES - as in agriculture, negotiations started in 2000 on expanding an earlier accord which covers areas like banking, insurance, telecommunications and tourism will become part of the Doha Round programme.
4) INDUSTRIAL TARIFFS - a major objective for rich powers, these will aim at further lowering customs duties or eliminating them entirely on any product WTO countries wish to throw into the pot. They will be especially aimed at reducing or abolishing especially high tariffs that rich countries impose on semi-finished goods from poorer states.
5) WTO RULES - a term covering the explosive issue of anti-dumping measures, normally special tariffs, allowed under the Uruguay Round Subsidies Agreement and of which the United States has been the most prolific user, in particular to protect its troubled steel industry against cheaper foreign products. Japan and major emerging economies like Brazil had pressed hard for talks on tightening rules on when such measures could be applied.
But the negotiations would also aim to "improve" WTO rules on subsidies to fishing industries. Developing countries, and the United States and Australia - as well as a vociferous environmental lobby led by the Swiss-based World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) - want the European Union and Japan to end subsidies to the industry which they say lead to overfishing and the destruction of stocks in addition to distorting world market prices for marine produce.
6) DISPUTE SETTLEMENT - improving the current WTO arrangements and procedures for settling trade rows between members. The WTO's current dispute settlement system was set up at the end of the Uruguay Round and provides for approval for sanctions to be imposed on countries judged by independent panels to be breaking WTO fair-trading rules. Since 1995, over 250 disputes have been brought to it, but some of these cases have highlighted shortcomings in the framing of the system.
7) ENVIRONMENT - on an issue which developing countries had long refused to consider, there will be negotiations on the relationship between WTO rules and specific trade obligations included in international environmental agreements like the Convention on Bio-Diversity and the CITES convention on protecting endangered species.
Four so-called new issues that were first brought up at the WTO's Singapore ministerial meeting in 1996 will be studied in existing WTO bodies with a view to the possible launch of full-scale negotiations after the WTO's next ministerial meeting in two years' time.
8) GOVERNMENT PROCUREMENT - talks in an existing WTO working group aimed at shaping rules that would commit member governments to be open about the way they choose firms to undertake state-financed projects. But the eventual negotiations will not commit participants to open up their procurement market to foreign companies.
9) TRADE FACILITATION - work over the next two years will be aimed at clarifying and improving current WTO rules affecting customs procedures and documentation. In two years' time, the next ministerial meeting will decide whether there will be negotiations on specific new rules in these areas.
10) INVESTMENT - The EU and Japan wanted full talks in a new round on setting rules that would protect foreign investors in WTO member countries, but this was strongly resisted by poorer states. The declaration provides for studies on the issue in an existing WTO committee, and a decision in two years on whether to launch full negotiations.
11) COMPETITION - The EU was the main champion of negotiations to frame rules on national competition policies - aimed at curtailing the power of local cartels who carve up markets for both goods and services. This was also resisted by developing countries and will be treated in exactly the same way as investment.
14) TRIPS - The WTO's Committee on Trade-Related Intellectual Property issues will be instructed to look specifically into the question of protecting biodiversity and traditional knowledge in discussions in updating the current TRIPS agreement. This would go some way to meeting demands from, in particular, farmers in India who say seeds they have developed are effectively stolen by big multinationals who take out patents on them - a problem highlighted in Doha by campaigners from India who said thousands of farmers there had committed suicide after being deprived of their livelihood.
15) TRADE, DEBT AND FINANCE and TRADE AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER - at the request of developing countries, and particularly the poorest known as LDCs, separate working groups on both will be set up in the WTO. Both groups would report to the next ministerial conference.Reuters:
