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G. Srinivasan

New Delhi, June 29 The World Trade Organisation (WTO) is keen on establishing, expeditiously, agriculture and non-agricultural market access (NAMA) modalities in the next week, in the run-up to the Ministerial meeting on July 21 in Geneva.

At an informal meeting of the Trade Negotiations Committee (TNC) on Friday in Geneva, the WTO Director General, Mr Pascal Lamy, said “we are getting closer to the point when the respective Chairs will be in a position to circulate comprehensive revised modality texts.”

With developed and developing countries remaining stuck in their respective positions on both agriculture and NAMA texts, Mr Lamy said the focus was on creating convergence on agriculture and NAMA so that the Chairs could prepare texts for ministerial consideration “either with areas where full convergence has been achieved, or with straight choices for Ministers”. This meant, he said, a very intensive phase of work in these areas, which should culminate in the circulation of the revised texts soon.

The EU Trade Commissioner, Mr Peter Mendelssohn, said in Brussels recently that there remain big farm issues that would necessarily be for Ministers to solve. These include the US cap for trade-distorting farm support and the degree to which emerging economies would be granted flexibility to protect particular farm sectors (Special Products and Special Safeguard Measures).

On NAMA, where a revised text is expected soon, the EU, the US and a majority of developing countries, including India, struck a discordant note on the new NAMA text that came out mid-May. The EU has said that developing countries are receiving significant flexibilities and exclusions while the OECD countries have no such latitude. The EU also objects to whole product sectors to be carved out from tariff cuts by the competitive developing countries. Hence, the EU and other developed countries sought an anti-concentration clause, within flexibilities. India and other developing countries are opposed to this in toto.

Alongside these two contentious issues, which have dragged the negotiations on modalities for far too long since the Doha Round was launched in November 2001, substantial outcome in other areas such non-tariff barriers, services, geographical indications, rules, trade and environment and trade facilitation will also need to be in place.

Even as Mr Lamy calls for “maximum efforts from every one over the next few weeks, not just to put in the hours but to make the movement we need”, trade policy analysts say the July Ministerial is the last chance for WTO talks from floundering further. For, beyond that, the US will get busy with its elections. Hence, the urgency to sink differences and ensure that efforts to conclude the Round by the end of 2008 are translated into reality. Otherwise, as Mr Lamy has warned, “everything that has been accomplished so far in the round is at stake if we do not succeed in establishing modalities in the next very few weeks.”

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