GENEVA, May 1: Dr Supachai Panitchpakdi has called on the governments of all member states of the World Trade Organization to ensure a breakthrough in the Hong Kong ministerial meeting to save the current round of trade talks and for the promotion of multilateralism in commerce and trade. “We need to have a breakthrough,” said the WTO director general. He made these remarks while speaking at a workshop on ‘media and multilateral trading systems’ attended by 20 journalists from as many countries. It was sponsored jointly by the WTO and Friedrich Ebert Stifung, a German foundation.

Mr Panitchpakdi warned that if substantial progress is not made on July declaration in the mini-ministerial and period preceding the Hong Kong meeting the trade round can actually collapse. “We must not repeat the Cancun experience where we had too ambitious an agenda with too many issues. As a result consensus was not achieved and negotiations ended in a deadlock,” he said.

After Cancun there was some realization among members but the progress on different issues of agenda has rather been slow. It certainly is far less than what it would take for the round to succeed. “Generalizations are not enough, we need to have some dates and definite timeframes of implementation,” Dr Panitchpakdi stressed. Negotiations on all five issues on the agenda for the upcoming Hong Kong meeting (market accession, services, subsidies, rules and development dimension) are still in progress. However, nothing concrete has transpired so far. Specifics that the WTO director general mentioned where progress is imperatives include: concrete definitions of amber, blue and green boxes, in the category of agricultural subsidies, incremental offers in services, rules and finally concretization of development dimension.

He acknowledged that members are comparatively more accommodating than before but so far he feels that the progress in negotiations on five issues that constitute the single undertaking has not been balanced.

Of all five issues, he said, he is most concerned about the development dimension. “We still are a bit stuck on the issue and that will have bearing on the outcome of trade talks,” he said. The development dimension actually is a cross-cutting issue that touches on all points on the agenda of the trade talks.