By: Natsumi Mizumoto | Japan Economic Newswire
Ministers from 142 members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) will meet in Doha, Qatar, next Friday in an effort to wrap up months of discussion and launch a new round of multilateral trade negotiations.
Despite widely varying opinions over thorny issues that led to the collapse of the previous ministerial meeting in Seattle in late 1999, the consensus among members is that the Doha meeting should be brought to a successful conclusion so that the world trading system, already affected by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States, will not be undermined further.
Another failure would completely erode confidence in the WTO and the world trade system, Japanese trade officials say. 'Everyone is now on the ring where a failure is impermissible,' one official said. Given that the world economy has taken a murkier path following the terror attacks, the WTO wants the launch of the new trade round to serve as a leverage for global growth.
Development is an important topic at the WTO's fourth ministerial meeting, given the fact developing countries account for more than 80% of the WTO's membership.
But wide-ranging differences between rich and poor nations, along with disputes among industrial countries, have threatened to topple the Doha meeting and still need to be resolved.
Such differences will likely lead negotiations for a deal to last until the eleventh hour of the five-day ministerial meeting starting next Friday, trade analysts say.
Gaps exist over whether to include in the new negotiating agenda such topics as investment, competition and environment issues, as well as the proposed review of existing antidumping rules and scrapping of farm export subsidies.
Relations over trade and environmental protection have divided the European Union and developing countries.
The EU is pushing for the WTO to launch talks to restrict trade from the viewpoint of protecting the environment while developing countries, backed by the U.S., say the EU's proposal is tantamount to disguised protectionism, an argument expected to make it difficult to include the issue in the agenda.
The antidumping issue is essentially a confrontation between the U.S. and Japan under the context of steel trade. Tokyo is confident the issue will be set as a negotiation topic for the new round, claiming it has won substantial support from other WTO members in its cause to prevent the abuse of the mechanism.
But how the discussion will unfold is uncertain with U.S. delegates likely to resist any proposal for changing the current antidumping rules.
Creating WTO rules on investment and competition policy has been called for jointly by Japan and the EU, but developing countries are reluctant to adopt rules that would narrow their development policy options. Some hard-liners are opposed to putting them on the agenda.
Japan and the EU are passive about agricultural trade liberalization as sought by developing countries, the Australia-led Cairns Group of 18 major farm exporters and the United States. Such negotiations have already begun as they are a part of the mandatory built-in agenda under the Uruguay Round accord.
Meanwhile, the ministerial meeting, the WTO's highest decision-making session, will likely agree without much difficulty to begin negotiations on further reductions in tariffs for nonagricultural trade.
It may also decide not to call the new series of talks a 'round' and instead declare the start of a broad 'work program' that encompasses also non-negotiating topics like e-commerce and various subjects related to developing and least-developed countries.
The move appeared apparently in deference to developing countries which have expressed anger at the old term's association with the imposing approach taken by industrial countries in the previous 1986-1994 Uruguay Round.
Accords are also expected over trade facilitation, transparency in government procurement and improvement of dispute-settlement procedure, as well as continued talks on the services trade.
Ministers may agree to conclude the negotiations in about three years in a so-called 'single-undertaking' format that is meant to ensure they reach a consensus on the basis of the balance of the overall outcome.
Whether the time frame will be achieved is uncertain, however, since the parties had failed to wrap up the previous round in the targeted four years due in part to the difficulty of striking a consensus on diverging views among as many as 125 members.
Aside from the pledge to launch the new round, the WTO ministers plan to adopt a separate declaration to address the issue of infectious diseases such as AIDS.
That declaration will likely spell out ways to ensure the supply of drugs for infectious diseases to developing countries at reasonable costs, as patent protection under the WTO's intellectual property rights rules has been accused of boosting the drugs' prices.
A separate document will be also issued to help developing countries implement extensive trade obligations and rules set under the previous round, which created the Geneva-based WTO.
The Doha meeting is also expected to give a final go-ahead to WTO membership for China and Taiwan, on Saturday and Sunday, respectively, paving the way for their accession after ratification by the end of this year.By: Natsumi Mizumoto:
