TOKYO, Feb 14: The head of the World Trade Organization issued an urgent plea on Friday to ministers attending a “mini-ministerial” meeting here to show leadership to prevent the imminent gridlock of the multilateral trade negotiation process.
“We are facing imminent gridlock. Only tightly-focussed political energy can avoid it,” WTO director general Supachai Panitchpakdi told ministers representing 22 WTO member countries and regions at a working dinner at the opening of the three-day meeting.
In a hard-hitting speech, a copy of which was obtained by AFP, Supachai spelled out the key deadlines facing trade negotiators as they try to overcome differences between developed countries and poor nations, especially over agricultural trade and access to cheap drugs for poor countries.
“Failure to make real progress on them has deepened suspicions among developing countries that the ‘development’ part of the Doha Development Agenda may be little more than a slogan,” Supachai said.
Unless these issues are resolved, support for the Doha round by leaders of developing nations will become increasingly hard to maintain, he warned.
At talks in the Qatari capital Doha in November 2001, negotiators were instructed to complete the trade round by the end of 2004, but they have have already suffered numerous setbacks through disagreements and missed deadlines.
The next looming deadline is for WTO members to agree the framework for negotiating rules on farm trade by March 31, 2003 ahead of a full meeting of 145 WTO members in the Mexican resort of Cancun in September.
“We must meet the March 31 deadline or risk a serious blow to the momentum and the credibility of the negotiating agenda overall,” Supachai said.
The WTO issued its draft framework for reforming agricultural trade to negotiators on Wednesday, which has so far been greeted with criticism on all sides.
Drawn up by the chairman of the WTO’s agriculture negotiations, Hong Kong WTO ambassador Stuart Harbinson, it calls for both export subsidies and import tariffs to be slashed, according to trade sources and a summary issued by the Japanese farm ministry.
Japan on Thursday rejected the proposed tariff cuts which threaten its uncompetitive rice farmers as biased in favour of exporting countries. The US described the plan for developed countries to slash export subsidies as “problematic”.
The European Union blasted the draft proposal as unbalanced in its approach to subsidies and claimed it failed to take into account non-trade concerns. Australia’s Trade Minister Mark Vaile said the proposals “disappointingly fall short of achieving a genuine outcome”.
Representatives of 13 agricultural organizations from nine countries in Asia, Europe and North America also condemned the draft at a press conference, claiming it would result in the disappearance of “hundreds of thousands of farms.”
The Tokyo meeting will also seek to make headway on a another high-profile sticking point: the WTO members’ failure in December to reach a deal to permit poor countries to sidestep patents, allowing them to import cheap generic drugs to fight disease.
The US is concerned any deal agreed by the WTO should not cover non-infectious diseases, such as obesity or asthma, which prompted it to reject a draft text and block consensus at the end of last year.
Both the EU and Japan have presented proposals to break the deadlock.
Other topics on the agenda include trade in non-agricultural goods and services, investment rules, transparency in government procurement, and granting special treatment to developing countries to help them take a more active role in the WTO negotiations.
No formal communique is due to be issued at the end of the meeting.—AFP