Brussels, 25/10/2005 (Agence Europe) - EU Member States' farm ministers discussed the progress of the agricultural chapter of WTO talks on trade liberalisation on Tuesday, in Luxembourg. France considers it has the support of 13 other Member States on a declaration that again calls on the European Commission to comply with the mandate conferred upon it by the Council. On the subject of the new offer regarding market access for farm products that the Commission plans to make in the near future to EU partners at the WTO, French Minister Dominique Bussereau told the press that the offer should be better than the previous one. He also asserted that technical meetings taking place that same day showed that the Commission's earlier offer went too far.
After the concerns expressed by Member States, Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel said she would continue to keep to her mandate and that agriculture would not be reformed again after the results of the Doha round. She spoke of the “strong pressure” exerted by EU partners at the WTO on access to the farm market and pointed out that she would see, with Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson, “how far one can go” in this field of trade negotiations in order to make a new offer to partners. The Council president-in-office, Margaret Beckett, was keen to demonstrate that the EU adopts a very united stance. She felt the Council had wanted a positive response during the ministerial meeting in Hong Kong in December and that it was necessary to win on every front. On the subject of the declaration presented by France, Ms Beckett said: “There is no text”.
At the same moment, in a letter addressed on Tuesday to the other members of the Commission, Mr Mandelson and Ms Fischer Boel write that, if, during the week, there appears to be a large minority of Member States that want to block a new EU agricultural offer in Geneva, then they will have no other choice but to reconsider it, with all the negative implications that this would entail for the ministerial WTO conference in Hong Kong. Negotiators for the EU explain that the WTO director general, Pascal Lamy, has warned that, unless sufficient progress is made by the end of the week in negotiations on the farm chapter, there will be no more time before the meeting in Hong Kong to accomplish the work that remains to be done on industrial goods and services, and they would therefore be compelled to decide whether the meeting should still be held. On Wednesday and Thursday in Geneva, the EU partners at the WTO all said that the prospect of progress by the Hong Kong meeting depends on the EU's ability to submit new proposals on access to the agricultural market, before any other move, the two Commissioners pointed out. Only such a new offer would incite EU partners at the WTO to foresee the opening up of their markets to European exports of industrial goods and services, Mr Mandelson and Ms Fischer Boel continued, who called on their colleagues saying: “We must therefore decide this week whether we submit a new proposal and, if such is the case, what the parameters of such a proposal would be”. “The alternative to this would be to set off a crisis in the talks and this would most certainly result in cancellation of the Hong Kong meeting, with the EU held responsible for it”, they concluded.