September 12, 2003	Friday	Rajab 14, 1424

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ISLAMABAD, Sept 11: Pakistan has urged the World Trade Organization to remove barriers from the international trading system to make it equally beneficial for both the developed and developing countries.

Participating in the plenary session of the 5th WTO conference at Cancun, Mexico, Commerce Minister Humayun Akhtar said: “Let us adopt a bold approach which will genuinely realize what is now called the Doha Development Agenda. This can be a first and historic step towards introducing equity in the international trading system.”

Pakistan also welcomed Nepal and Cambodia’s formal entry into the fold of WTO regime.

The minister said that due to bottlenecks in the multilateral trading system, bilateral and regional trading arrangements (RTAs) were proliferating. As a result, a large number of countries, particularly low-income developing countries, were being left out and were getting marginalized.

“We have to get the multilateral trading system working to ensure that the trading system works for all. If we want to achieve the millennium development goals, we have to translate rhetoric into reality and recommit ourselves towards a development agenda we agreed at Doha,” he said.

At this half-way mark on way to completion of the Doha Agenda, this conference would serve a good purpose if we were able to critically examine whether our work so far was on target and, if not, how to bring it back on track.

During the interim period, he said the only notable achievement relates to TRIPS and Public Health. Apart from this, the results so far did not seem to be very promising either in terms of ambition or development goals, he said.

“We have missed all the deadlines and there seems to be a deadlock in several areas of developmental value to the developing countries. No modalities of negotiations have been agreed in market access areas such as agriculture or industrial goods,” he said.

The minister said: “We only have draft frameworks, which gave no idea as to what could eventually be achieved.”

Regarding agriculture, he said an agreement on timetable and agenda for setting up of modalities for negotiations was to be arrived at by the end of March 2003. Six months after the deadline what we have was a disputed framework agreement, which was quite low on ambition.

There were hardly any significant commitments on reduction of trade distorting domestic support, elimination of export subsidies or any meaningful market access, he said. This impasse was having serious repercussions on all other areas of our negotiations, he said.

For industrial goods, the minister said the problem was less complicated. Developed countries have low tariffs except on goods of export interest to low-income developing countries like the textile sector.

It was expected that they would be able to agree on modalities, which reduce their tariffs on such products while allowing some protective tariffs to developing countries for their emerging industries. In addition, it was essential to address the issues of tariff peaks and escalations.

Unfortunately, he said major players could not agree to it as they were not willing to agree on any differential treatment for developing countries.

“We are making rather slow progress in negotiations for liberalization of services.

We should be mindful of the fact that potential gains from successful liberalization of trade in services are huge, far more than those from comparable liberalization of goods. If we believe in development and creation of opportunities for more people to work, we should be more liberal in allowing movement of natural persons,” the minister said.

Real market access will remain the engine for development.

He said: “We should also not forget the pronounced emphasis in the Doha Declaration on implementation issues, special and differential treatment for developing countries and building of capacities to supply.

“Other issues of interest to developing countries such as trade, debt, and finance and the transfer of technology are also important and need more focused attention.

“There was a serious need to address the non-tariff barriers and to ensure that trade remedy laws were not used for protection purposes.

“We need to be creative and flexible. The question of expanding the WTO to include new areas under its rubric needs to be approached in a careful and calibrated manner while taking into account the sensitivities and reservations of the developing countries,” he said.

“This is the only way that we can add $400 to $500 billion to global income and boost the income of developing countries by $150 billion a year in an otherwise gloomy economic environment,” he added.

According to a World Bank Report, “this translates into lifting 144 million people out of poverty. If we fail, all responsibility for this loss will rest on us for keeping millions of people poor for many years to come. Let us not fail,” the minister exhorted the member countries.