ISLAMABAD, Oct 15: Commerce Minister Humayun Akhtar Khan on Saturday attributed the failure of two WTO ministerial conferences to high aspiration of the member countries to achieve results on a very ambitious scale.
“We have to learn from our past mistakes that resulted in failure of the two out of three ministerial conferences — Cancun and Seattle. Both times we tried to achieve results on a very ambitious scale, and failed to focus on the core issues of market access,” he said.
Speaking at the Evian 10 plenary meeting in Hague, the minister said: “We have very little time to choose the correct route. Today it is October 14 and by December 14, 2005 or in two months time, we would know which route we have opted for.”
Mr Khan said everyone had an opinion on why Cancun failed. “I was in the Green Room on the fateful day when the conference was declared a failure and I noted with regret that we had not even touched any of the market access issues,” he added.
“Instead, what we started discussing was how many Singapore issues should be part of the Doha Development Agenda. Obviously, dealing with politically sensitive issues than market access or international trade was never going to be easy and we paid the price,” the minister added.
Mr Khan pointed out that for making Hong Kong conference successful the focus should be on the core issues of market access and enabling rules to maintain free flow of goods.
“We all know that distortions are in agricultural trade and cutting high tariffs can make maximum gains and tariff peaks both on agricultural as well as non-agricultural goods,” he said.
The minister said: “We have learnt from experience that cutting tariffs did not necessarily provide market access. We also have to deal with non-tariff barriers by formulating clear rules on anti-dumping and regional trading arrangements.”
Mr Khan said services sector was another area where “our careful approach of opening up on the basis of a voluntary positive list has so far given us dividends”. “Development would be taken care of if we are able to remove trade barriers and provide additional market access,” he added.
The commerce minister proposed that other issues, such as environment, intellectual property, labour standards, etc., should either be left for later or for other international organizations better suited for dealing with those issues.
He said that what the EU was proposing was to shelter behind sensitive products. Similarly, the US is not indicating what it is contributing for cutting its trade-distorting domestic support.
Experience of the last 10 years has shown that developing countries have been unilaterally liberalizing and they will continue to do so even without any outside pressure, he adds.
The minister said a multilateral free trade approach must be adopted by all. “If not, there will be a further rush towards bilateral arrangements. Spaghetti bowl of FTAs will make trading rather difficult. Bigger powers will be dictating their terms of how and on what terms, they want to trade. The carefully negotiated WTO rules will become meaningless,” Mr Khan added.