Bali, 02/12/2013 (Agence Europe) - In order to avoid a resounding defeat for the multilateral system, the 159 member countries must conclude a partial agreement to relaunch a Doha Round which is on life support.
Political will and flexibility. This is what the director general of the WTO, Roberto Azevedo, expects of all the trade ministers meeting between 3 and 6 December on the Hindu island paradise in the Indonesian archipelago, in order to conclude a partial agreement on the negotiations on the Doha Round, at the ninth ministerial conference of the multilateral organisation. If we fail, “we would fail for no justifiable reason. Nothing that is on the table requires any member to go beyond what is doable. One may not get all that he seeks, but no unmanageable contribution is required from anyone”, the Brazilian said on 26 November, after three months of preparatory work which have led to significant progress, although no draft mini-agreement has been concluded.
The core point of this partial agreement, which will be added to by a working programme to be decided upon from 2014, is an agreement on trade facilitation, based on a simplification of customs procedures to facilitate commercial flows. The developing member countries have linked an agreement on issues of special and differentiated treatment for the developing countries and the needs of the least developed countries (LDC) and a number of agricultural elements to this agreement: public storage for food security purposes, export competition and the management of tariff quotas.
Last week, Azevedo said that the persistent differences of opinion were not due to any North-South disagreement, but were “specific and localised” and surmountable. However, shortly before curtain-up on Monday 2 December, coordination meetings of the emerging countries of the G20, led by Brazil, and the developing countries of the G33, led by India and Indonesia, showed that the old North-South divide, between rich countries which subsidise their agriculture and the developing world which suffers from this, is still very much a reality.
In Bali, discussions are expected to stumble once again on agriculture. Although an agreement on trade facilitation and an agreement on a development package - both dossiers on which technical negotiations have made progress and the political negotiations are causing few problems - is close at hand, an agreement on the agricultural chapter is again threatening the WTO, which is playing for its own survival on Bali.
First of all, the proposal of the G33 countries for special treatment to allow them to build up stores of products required to meet any food crisis without being threatened with being brought before the WTO by the other third countries is still a problem. The United States have proposed a compromise based on a peace clause limited to 4 years, to provide enough time to find a sustainable solution ahead of the next ministerial conference. This is an interim solution which the G33 would just about accept, particularly as its members have stated that they are “deeply disappointed” by the failure of the rich countries to observe the deadline of 2013 to end export subsidies, as the Indonesian Trade Minister, Gita Wirjawan, intimated on Monday. The G33 will also have to learn to live with the misgivings of one of its members, Pakistan.
Lastly, the two agricultural proposals of the countries of the G20, one on export competition, the other on the management of tariff quotas, require a tricky political consensus. On the second, the G20 wants to resolve the problem of unnecessary charges set in place by importing countries to prevent exporting countries from taking full advantage of the tariff quota. On the first and more controversial issue, the G20 wants a binding political declaration on the partial application of the agreement concluded in Hong Kong in 2005 on eliminating all forms of export subsidies (European export credits, American food aid and Canadian commercial state enterprises). On Monday, the Brazilian minister, Luiz Alberto Figuereido, pointed out on behalf of the G20 that “distortions caused by a high level of protection in agriculture, including subsidies, continue to undermine the long-term development prospects of many developing countries, including LDCs”. (EH/transl.fl)