Brussels, 03/07/2007 (Agence Europe) - UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who presented the mid-term progress report on the Millennium Development Goals in Geneva on Monday, urged WTO members to make every effort to reach an agreement on global trade liberalisation. “The world desperately needs a successful conclusion to the Doha trade negotiations”, Ban said at the opening of the UN Economic and Social Council, before going on to say: “Existing trade barriers, agricultural subsidies, and restrictive rules on intellectual property rights reinforce global inequities … and they make a mockery of our tall claims to eliminate hunger and poverty from the world”. At Mr Ban's side, WTO Director General Pascal Lamy again stressed that “what remains to be done is small compared to all the proposals already on the table” for concluding the trade round. Underlining the risk of talks being frozen for several years, Mr Lamy asserted that only small concessions were now needed for an agreement to be reached. He said the collapse of talks in Potsdam in late June between the European Union, the United States, Brazil and India on the outlines of a deal “could be fatal” for Doha if the four do not play a constructive role over the coming period. He pointed out that a compromise on farm subsidies “depends on additional concessions from the US (that are) equivalent to less than a week's worth of transatlantic trade”, whereas the Union and Japan must agree to “an additional handful of percentage reduction in their highest farm tariffs, and Brazil and India would be required to accept similar small cuts in the duties they impose on manufactured goods.
G10 speaks out. In a communiqué, the G10 agricultural importing countries (South Korea, Japan and Switzerland) stated their conviction that “the multilateral process in Geneva needs to be intensified to allow for a successful conclusion of the Doha Round” after the stalled G4 talks. They say that talks must take better account of farm products that they wish to continue protecting with higher tariffs. “All sensitivities have to be taken into account, as well as various levels of development in line with the development dimension of the DDA”, the G10 stresses, in the hope that its position will be taken into account in the next draft compromise by the chairman of the WTO agricultural talks committee, Crawford Falconer.
Mandelson and Amorim meet in Lisbon and ministerial APEC to meet in Cairns. On the sidelines of the EU-Brazil summit in Lisbon on 4 July, Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson will be meeting with Brazil's foreign minister, Celso Amorim, for the first time since Potsdam. The next day, trade ministers of the 21 countries making up the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, which accounts for over half of global trade, will meet for two days of talks in Cairns (Australia) to seek reactivation of the round of negotiations. According to the final draft declaration, they are expected to call on parties concerned (Ed: the EU, Brazil and India in particular) to show the “necessary flexibility” to complete the talks. (eh)