Reuters / By Robert Evans
GENEVA (Reuters) - World Trade Organization (WTO) countries agreed Wednesday to shape coming liberalization negotiations to try to ensure that developing countries play a larger role in the global services industry.
They also set down terms underscoring that nations taking part in the talks -- to move into a business phase in May -- could exclude any sector from their own commitments to open up to foreign competition.
The accord came at the end of a year of preliminary talks during which many countries in the 140-member WTO tabled their own ideas about how its current services pact, the GATS, could be broadened.
Shaped after several weeks of sometimes stormy discussions, the agreement was in the form of a set of "guidelines and procedures" for the talks, although no time-frame was set for any conclusion.
"This outcome is seen by everybody as opening the way for the next phase of negotiations," WTO Director of Services David Hartridge told a news briefing.
Services -- which include industries like banking, insurance, telecommunications, travel and tourism -- account for around one fifth of all world trade, but that proportion is growing fast. The sector was first brought under global trade rules in the 1986-93 round of world free trade negotiations.
BIG POWERS LOOK TO NEW ROUND
Major trading powers like the European Union and Japan have made clear they would prefer to see the services talks -- and a parallel set of negotiations on freer trade in farm produce -- wrapped into a new round.
The United States, the world's biggest market and supplier across a broad range of services, says it wants both sets of negotiations to proceed whatever the outcome of efforts to get agreement on the launch of a broader negotiating effort.
Developing countries, many of which are reluctant to get into another round while they are still digesting the effects of the last one, have insisted that the services talks must take into account their interests and those of their young service industries that could be overwhelmed by big multinationals if their markets were opened too rapidly.
The guidelines agreed Wednesday, Hartridge said, were drafted to meet these issues by allowing for "flexibility" to be given to developing countries and for "due consideration" in the talks for the needs of small and medium-sized service providers, especially those in poorer states.
A coalition of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) -- suspicious of the WTO, which they see as the motor of globalization -- is calling for a halt to the services talks, claiming that GATS opens the way for countries to be forced to open up public services -- like health, education and water supplies.
The WTO and many delegations to the body say this argument is unfounded. But diplomats said the inclusion in the guidelines of a phrase allowing participants in the talks "the right to specify sectors in which commitments will be undertaken" was drafted to drive the point home.:
