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He told an informal meeting of the Trade Negotiations Committee, which comprises the full membership, that he would try to
capture as much of the convergence as possible in the revisions, “but
obviously issues that still remain to be resolved may be left out at
this stage.”
He promised that the changes will reflect what has emerged from members’
discussions under his chairmanship or those of agriculture negotiations
chairperson Crawford Falconer and non-agricultural market access talks
chairperson Don Stephenson. As usual, that would mean “no surprises”.
Mr Lamy said he and the negotiating-group chairs would take up the other
issues urgently during the day, using a range of types of meeting within
the “concentric circles”
structure of small and large meetings, and returning to a meeting of the
full membership.
WTO spokesperson Keith Rockwell told a press conference that some of the
meetings would be among a group of seven delegations, before the issues
are taken to a larger Green
Room) meeting of
about 30 representative delegations.
After many long days of hard work and with time running short, members’
comments in today’s informal Trade Negotiations Committee meeting showed
“a degree of intensity”, Mr Rockwell said. “I would say many of them
were of a testy nature.”
The daily informal meetings of the full membership took a break on
Sunday 27 July, but members continued their intensive discussions in
various forms.
Lamy’s report
Mr Lamy said the discussion of the previous two days had focused on
issues other than those in the package of issues he listed in
his
report on Saturday 26 July.
Therefore today’s report to the membership dealt with these other
issues.
Agriculture
Mr Lamy reported “important progress” overall. (For an explanation see
the unofficial guide to the 10 July 2008 agriculture draft, available
here)
Tropical products: broad agreement on the list of products and
convergence on how these would be treated (the accelerated and deeper
tariff cuts)
Preference erosion: broad agreement that the approach will be similar
to the one used for industrial products but with some variations, and
broad convergence on the list of products
Least-developed countries: an understanding that the text on this will
be identical to that in the non-agricultural market access text
Sensitive products for developing countries: a number of options to be
included in the revised draft so that developing countries have an
“array of alternatives” including the ability to designate sensitive
products without expanding tariff-rate quotas (developed countries would
have to expand the quotas and might not be allowed to designate a
product as sensitive unless it already has a tariff-rate quota)
The present special safeguard (SSG): developing countries currently
eligible to use this type of safeguard would be allowed to keep it for
2.5% of products (their “tariff lines”) — 5% for small and vulnerable
economies — and only for those products that are currently eligible.
(For developed countries the SSG safeguard could be phased out
completely. The SSG is not the same as the new special safeguard
mechanism — SSM — for developing countries)
In-quota tariffs: a broad understanding that those below 5% will go to
zero, the rest will have a 50% cut but will also be subject to a maximum
level, which has not yet been agreed. For developing countries further
details have been developed for special products. Some of these could
have no tariff cut. If there is a tariff quota, that means no cut on the
out-of-quota tariff. The latest understanding is that in-quota tariffs
would not be cut either. For all other special products the in-quota
rate would be cut by 15% — but by 7% for small and vulnerable economies.
No solution has been agreed on the maximum in-quota tariff for countries
that recently joined the WTO (recently-acceded members or RAMs)
• Overall trade-distorting domestic support for developing countries:
Least-developed countries and net-food importing developing countries
will not be subject to a limit on this, unless they have “Blue Box”
support, because they would not be required to “schedule” (include in
their list of commitments) the overall support. Those using the Blue Box
would have to notify the WTO.
Blue Box support per product: Net
food-importing developing countries and least developed countries would
only have limits set on Blue Box support for a product (by “scheduling”
or listing the amount among its commitments) if the support for that
product in the base period is more than 75% of the country’s overall
Blue Box support (the figure is 30% for developing countries in
general); and the actual support given would have to be no more than 25%
of actual overall Blue Box support (10% for other developing countries).
Export prohibitions and restrictions: transparency provisions will be
improved
Tariff-quota “underfill mechanism”: these are provisions dealing with
situations where quotas are consistently not filled. Some developing
countries are willing to accept the need to share information and
discuss why their quotas are not fully used but they do not want to be
obliged to change the way they allocate quotas — the wording of the
present draft could be altered to take account of this (paragraph 4 of
the draft’s Annex E)
Export subsidies and other export competition issues: all issues
except one seem settled. The remaining question is “monetization” —
selling food donations in order to raise cash for nutritional or other
purposes. Some of the wording of the text will be revised. Apart from
that, convergence has been achieved on
exporting state trading
enterprises (on eliminating their monopoly power) and on
phasing out the
quantities of exports that are subsidized (the base period for “volume
commitments” will be 2003–2005)
Mr Lamy said remaining issues where consultations continue include:
cotton; the creation of new tariff-rate quotas (which would determine
which products can be called “sensitive” since these products have to
have tariff quotas); tariff simplification (from more complex forms of
tariffs, mainly into percentages of the price). These now have to be
solved politically, Mr Lamy said.
He added that he hopes to report progress on cotton soon. Members are
strongly committed to what they
agreed in the 2005 Hong Kong
Ministerial Conference
and not to leave this until the last minute, he said.
Non-agricultural market access
(For an explanation “the July 2008 NAMA modalities text made simple”)
-
Duty-free quota-free market access for least-developed countries:
revised wording will ensure meaningful market access (among the 97% of
products that countries will make duty-free and quota-free)
-
Non-reciprocal preferences: more products added to the US and EU lists
of products to be given preferences
-
Various countries’ specific concerns: Bolivia will not be required to
notify the Goods Council periodically under its special treatment;
Mongolia will be treated as a low-income economy in transition; the
concern of South Africa and its Southern African Customs Union (SACU)
partners is recognized but no agreement yet on exactly how much
flexibility South Africa should be given; no convergence but continuing
consultations on Venezuela’s call to be treated as a small and
vulnerable economy, and those of Oman and the Gulf Cooperation Council.
-
Sectoral liberalization: members agree that this will be voluntary and
are working on new wording
-
Small and vulnerable economies: progress has been made and convergence
is close. The remaining political question is the target average tariff
level in the top two bands
-
Product coverage: “there appears to be growing convergence to remove
the brackets in the footnote” — that would allow countries some small
variation in which products they consider to be “non-agricultural”
-
Recent new members: opinions differ on whether the recently-acceded
members (RAMs) should have three or four years longer than others to
implement the agreement
Mr Lamy also described the
services signalling conference
on Saturday 26 July as an important step towards getting a sense of what
this part of the final Doha Round agreement might look like.
Intellectual property
As before, Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre
reported on his
consultations. He said members still have a
considerable way to go to find agreement and encapsulate it in a text.
He said he had continued to explore possible ways forward, taking into
account members’ differences on questions such as whether negotiations
on these subjects would be part of the Doha Round “single undertaking”
and the legal form of the outcome. Mr Støre said he would call a meeting
among the delegations he has consulted, in the afternoon.
His consultations are on three intellectual property issues: the
multilateral register for wines’ and spirits’ geographical indications
(GIs), extending higher level geographical indications protection beyond
wines and spirits (“GI extension”), and proposals to require patent
applicants to disclose the origin of genetic material and traditional
knowledge (“disclosure”) — formally the relationship between the WTO
Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement
and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). (See explanations
here.)
Discussion
Members expressed their opinions on issues that concerned them, such as
various aspects of the agriculture and non-agriculture texts — including
differing views on preferences (a range of issues in agriculture and
non-agricultural market access centring on who receives preferences, for
which products and the effect of general tariff reductions) and bananas
(where a compromise is being negotiated between exporters having
preferences, those without preferences and major importers such as the
EU), and whether allowing developing countries additional flexibility to
protect (through special products and the special safeguard mechanism)
is necessary for development because of the vulnerability of poor
farmers, or whether it would hold up development by hampering poor
farmers’ ability to produce for export.
Some had comments on the negotiating process, including whether the
compromise on some key points worked out over the past few days should
be renegotiated or whether doing that would harm chances of reaching
agreement.
Speakers
Today’s speakers in the informal Trade Negotiations Committee were:
Guyana, Norway, India, the US, China, Switzerland, Cameroon, Argentina,
Lesotho, Indonesia, Paraguay, Chinese Taipei, Turkey, El Salvador,
Bolivia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Venezuela, Uganda, Ecuador, Senegal, Hong
Kong China, Tanzania, Cuba, Bangladesh, Nepal, Zambia, Rwanda, Angola,
Uruguay, Viet Nam, Haiti, Guinea, Madagascar, Burundi.
Texts of some of the statements — those supplied by delegations for
publication on the website — can be found
here.
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 Audio:
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remarks by Chair and report by Jonas Gahr Støre
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Press Conference: Mr. Keith Rockwell, WTO Spokesman
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