HONG KONG, Dec 17: The Chairman of the Hong Kong ministerial conference John C. Tsang on Saturday issued a revised draft text declaration in an attempt to conclude the ongoing ministerial conference with some degree of consensus among the members.
The revised draft containing 57 paragraphs, on key areas of agriculture, non-agricultural market access (NAMA), services, cotton, trade related investment promotion (TRIP) rules, environment, least developed countries (LDCs), aid for trade and integrated framework, was put forward as a basis for consultation in “consultative committee groups”, (formerly known as green room).
Negotiators and analysts said the proposed draft has been issued to test the understanding skills of the negotiators of the least developing and some developing countries. The outcome, as mandated by DDA in terms of its clarity of the direction and destination, has yet to be integrated into the text, which was also unlikely to be developed in the final closing text.
There is still no consensus on key contentious issues in the revised draft and this version also contains lot of bracketed text, (bracket in draft text reflects lack of consensus among members), especially on implementation period and level of cuts, without which other developments have become out to be meaningless.
According to the revised text on agriculture there are micro developments beyond what was present in the final pre-Hong Kong draft text. For instance, the ‘working hypothesis’ on three bands for classifying trade-distorting domestic subsidies in developed countries for the purposes of reduction has been replaced by text specifying that “there will be three bands,” with similar language for structuring tariffs into four bands for making tariff cuts.
On export subsidies, the members agreed to develop detailed modalities on parallel elimination of all export subsidies and to discipline all export measures. However, consensus could not be achieved between the US stance, (eliminating them by 2010), and the EU stance, (5 years from commencement of implementation, possibly by 2013 due to their domestic commitments).
An important movement in the latest text is the recognition of the fact that Special Products (SP) and Special Safeguard Mechanism (SSM) shall be an integral part of the modalities and the outcome of negotiations in agriculture.
