The European Union says a proposed deal to rescue global trade talks is a "step in the right direction."
Mediators at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) presented a draft last Friday (Jul. 16) for an agreement on steering the stalled Doha Development Round (DDR) negotiations towards a pact on reforming global trade.
The draft document is to serve as a framework for the final stretch of the talks, scheduled to begin in late July and to keep negotiations on track for the Dec. 31 deadline.
The draft guidelines envisage the elimination of agricultural export subsidies and big cuts in domestic farm supports and border protection. Other issues covered include industrial tariffs, services, cotton subsidies and the launch of negotiations on customs procedures.
The document will be debated in Geneva this week.
In spite of initial criticism from developing countries, the European Commission, the European Union (EU) executive, says the proposal will serve as a basis for further work.
"The paper that the WTO produced on Friday is from our point of view a basis for further work," EU trade spokeswoman Arancha Gonzalez told media representatives Monday (Jul. 19).
"We note that this text requires still a number of clarifications and a number of precisions, and this is what we are going to work on over the coming days with our WTO partners in Geneva," she added.
Gonzalez said the Commission wanted to achieve a maximum cut on tariffs on industrial goods, which represent around 90 percent of world trade, and saw the draft text as the "minimum balance" in that direction.
"The text is the minimum balance between a high level of ambition, which is what we want to achieve, and a lower level of ambition that a number of countries have already expressed," she said.
On services, Gonzalez said the Commission would like to see greater precision, including a deadline for improved offers from WTO partners.
However, she refused to say whether the Commission expected an agreement on the framework by the end of the month.
"We're not in the betting business, and therefore we cannot say what percentage chances we have of reaching this deal at the end of July," she said.
The Commission's agricultural sector also backed the plans as a positive move.
"Our feeling is that the text goes in the right direction. It is definitely a step forward, not a step back, which is not always obvious in these delicate negotiations," said EU agriculture spokesman Gregor Kreuzhuber.
"We say that we want to see the elimination of export subsidies and the elimination of trade-distorting elements of other export competition tools, and there the text has to become much clearer," he said.
Kreuzhuber said the agricultural part of the document needed to "lock in" reform of the U.S. Farm Bill which seeks to protect farmers.
The DDR was launched in the Qatar capital in 2001. The talks were scheduled to conclude this year, but are months behind schedule.
Negotiators have urged more political will in restarting the Doha trade round since the WTO meeting collapsed in Cancun last September mainly over the billions of dollars a year rich countries spend on farm subsidies.
Officials are concerned that unless a negotiating framework is agreed by the end of July, the Doha round risks being sidelined by a new structure in the enlarged European Commission and by the U.S. presidential elections in November.
If an agreement is reached by the end of July, it will be half-way to an accord on liberalising global trade in agriculture, services and industrial goods.
A final decision on the WTO document will be reached in a late July session of the organisation's General Council, which governs the multilateral trade body between ministerial conferences.Africa News:
