August 27, 2001 | ISSN 1533-1350 | By Harbaksh Singh Nanda
NEW DELHI--South Asian countries Aug. 23 joined hands and said the implementation issues of the Uruguay Round agreements must be settled before any new topics are added to the agenda for November's World Trade Organization ministerial meeting in Doha, Qatar, where members will try to launch a new round of multilateral trade negotiations. At the meeting of the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC) nations, trade ministers resolved that any move to add further issues to the agenda of the talks could risk overloading the agenda and making it unsustainable.
A joint statement issued after the meeting held in the Indian capital New Delhi said, "Implementation issues being a fallout of the Uruguay Round agreements must be meaningfully resolved upfront without any extraneous linkages." India does not want resolution of implementation concerns linked to any new round of negotiations.
The meeting also opposed linking of trade with social or other nontrade issues like labor and environmental standards.
The statement said, "The SAARC considers that the mandated negotiations [in agriculture and services], the mandated reviews, the ongoing work program in the various working groups, the accession of over 30 countries, taken together with the work program for the resolution of the implementation issues themselves, provided a sufficiently broad agenda for now."
The meeting was attended by Abdul Razak Dawood, Pakistan's minister for commerce, industry, production; Batty Weerakoon, Sri Lanka's minister for justice; Mahesh Acharya, Nepal's minister for agriculture & cooperation; Digvijay Singh, India's junior commerce & industry minister; Nihal Rodrigo, SAARC secretary-general; Prabir Sengupta, Indian commerce secretary; Karma Dorjee, Bhutan commerce secretary; Bhanu Prasad Acharya, Nepal's secretary of commerce, industries & supplies; Mirza Qamar Beg, Pakistani commerce secretary; and S.C. Mannapperuma, Sri Lanka's commerce secretary.
The meeting, hosted by India, was held under the leadership of India's federal Commerce and Industry Minister Murasoli Maran. He said that any further delay in the resolution of the implementation issues of the developing countries was likely to send a wrong signal.
Developing countries led by Egypt, India, Malaysia, and Pakistan, have insisted that the difficulties they face in implementing and complying with existing WTO agreements must be addressed before they can agree to new negotiations that go beyond the mandated talks on agriculture and services already under way. As part of the exercise, these countries have called for a review of agreements clinched during the Uruguay Round of negotiations concerning the protection of intellectual property (TRIPs), trade-related investment measures (TRIMs), agriculture, services, textiles/clothing, customs valuation, rules of origin, technical barriers to trade, sanitary/phytosanitary measures, and safeguards.
The European Union and Japan, in particular, have called for a comprehensive round of negotiations. Proposed agenda items for the round include trade defense measures (antidumping, subsidies, and countervailing measures), investment, competition, the environment, and social development issues (including labor).
Maran said that it would be prudent to confine the WTO agenda in Doha to already mandated negotiations and reviews and not take on any new issues unless there was convergence of views in the entire membership of the WTO.
"We cannot afford another Seattle [WTO ministerial] and as such, no contentious issues or issues on which there has been no consensus, should be pushed into the WTO agenda as it may risk a failure which may not augur well for WTO," Maran said.
The Seattle WTO ministerial meeting, held in late 1999, ended in failure when member countries could not agree on a agenda for the next round of trade negotiations.
On July 25, the WTO General Council chair said in a progress report on the preparations for Doha, that there was an "enhanced sense of engagement and willingness on the part of key Members" to address demands of developing countries for more flexible terms and increased assistance in complying with existing WTO agreements, but "there appears little significant movement as yet towards convergence in some major areas".
"We cannot afford to allow any new issues which are going to harm our national interests onto the WTO agenda," Maran said.
Maran called for flexibility in the provisions of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) to enable countries to address their public health concerns, particularly ensuring affordable access to medicines in the developing countries.
"We are concerned that while wines and spirits can get a higher level of geographical indication protection, other products of interest to developing and least developed countries are not given a similar level of geographical indication protection," Maran said.
The meeting resolved that there should be a further extension of the moratorium on the applicability of violation complaints to TRIPs. "There is a need to prevent piracy of traditional knowledge built around bio-diversity and there should be a harmonization of the TRIPs Agreement with the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity so as to ensure appropriate returns to traditional communities," the members said.
Agriculture Tariffs
A statement issued by the Indian government said that SAARC ministers decided that urgent focus is needed on specific issues of particular interest to them, such as greater market access for exports of developing and least developed countries, by addressing issues of tariff peaks and tariff escalations. Maran said, "Developed countries must substantially reduce tariff peaks and tariff escalations and reduce domestic subsidies so as to provide meaningful market access, while sufficient flexibilities should be available to the developing countries to take care of their food security, livelihood, rural development, and employment concerns."
SAARC ministers also called for substantial reductions in domestic support and elimination of all forms of export subsidies given by developed countries in order to facilitate greater market access for agricultural products of the developing countries.
Services
In the services sector, the ministers called for market access from the developed countries especially in free movement of professionals. The meeting resolved that there is an immediate need for a more meaningful integration of the textile and clothing sector, in view of very limited liberalization of trade, affecting items under specific quota restraints.
The trade ministers called for accelerated removal of quota restrictions whereby an additional 50 percent of imports of products from the four product groups are integrated at the beginning third stage of integration by Jan. 1, 2002.
Under the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing, the European Union, the United States, and other developed WTO members agreed in 1994 to phase out quotas on textile and apparel exports in four stages over 10 years--covering 16 percent of the total volume of imports in 1990 by Jan. 1, 1995; another 17 percent by Jan. 1, 1998; another 18 percent by Jan. 1, 2002; and the remaining 49 percent by Jan. 1, 2005.
The SAARC members also resolved that least developed countries' applications for WTO membership should be allowed to accede on a fast track on the basis of clear guidelines. The conditions for accession must not be more restrictive than those applied to other LDCs during the change of their membership from GATT to WTO.
Maran said that a rule-based multilateral trading system had been unable to make any worthwhile increase in developing countries' share in international trade, while, at the same time, the world's 200 richest people had more than doubled their net worth in four years in 1998 to more than $1 trillion.
Indian Commerce Secretary Prabir Sengupta said that "there is considerable imbalance in the agreements, which needs to be corrected if all countries were to benefit from trade liberalization."
Maran said that the joint position taken by South Asian nations at Doha meeting will decide the future of SAARC's 1.4 billion people.
Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee Aug. 20 said that while India is prepared to discuss all issues relating to global trade with an open mind, it is insistent that unmet obligations of the past should be fulfilled first. Vajpayee had also stressed that labor and environment issues be kept off the WTO agenda as these could lead to further nontariff barriers.
Copyright c 2001 by The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc., Washington D.C.37130:
