Brussels/Geneva 5/07/2001 (Agence Europe) - Key progress was achieved on Wednesday after a week of intense talks in Geneva on China's membership of the World Trade Organisation. "All the key problems have been settled, according to the main negotiators from the EU, China and the US, citing farming, services and patent protection, at the end of a close-door session held on the sidelines of the relevant working group meeting. The set of texts to which the 141 hope to give the « green light » next autumn in Doha still feature a « few brackets », however, which is a sign of the continuing, mainly transatlantic, row over insurance.
Closing the 16th session, the working group agreed to meet on 16 July to spend five days fine-tuning its draft report and accession protocol, then in mid-September for a review, possibly the final one, before the ministerial-level conference in Qatar. For certain sectors, the talks are over and in particular: commercial rights, services (the bulk), farming (apart from a reservation about limiting subsidies to 8.5% of the value of production), intellectual property rights, antidumping and countervailing measures, industrial policy (including subsidies) tariff quotas, health and plant health measures, technical obstacles to trade, specific safeguards for textiles, quantitative import restrictions (bans and quotas as well). The question of deploying foreign insurance companies in China continues to divide the Europeans and Americans. The latter stresses that firms already operating there (such as the American Insurance group) should be entitled to open new branches across the country without having to seek further permission from the government. Another potential problem is focused on the concern being expressed by India, Malaysia, and South Korea about the US concession that allows China to raise the farm subsidy ceiling to 8.5% of the value of its production.