Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest • Volume 9 • Number 13 • 20th April 2005

WTO In Brief

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‘PATCHWORK’ EXPECTED FOR JULY ‘APPROXIMATIONS,’ SENIOR OFFICIALS SAY

Senior trade officials from 31 influential WTO Member countries have begun to converge in their views on feasible progress in the ongoing trade talks, according to Canadian WTO Ambassador Don Stephenson, who hosted the 18-19 April meeting in Geneva. Trade news sources report that Stephenson said the end-July ‘first approximations’ of a potential deal to be adopted at the WTO’s December Ministerial Conference in Hong Kong would likely contain some detailed language on agriculture and non-agricultural market access (NAMA), with fewer specific provisions on services, rules and trade facilitation.

At the meeting — organised to prepare for a 4 May ‘mini-ministerial’ gathering in Paris — participants discussed negotiating areas including agricultural trade liberalisation, in particular the controversial issue of converting specific tariffs and other tariffs not based on the value of the imported good into ‘ad valorem equivalents’ (AVEs). However, a compromise on tariff conversion fell through soon afterwards during negotiations in the special session of the Committee on Agriculture (see related story, this issue). Stephenson said that participants had talked about recent proposals that had been made in the NAMA talks, as well as ways to move the services negotiations forward.

Countries attending the meeting included Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Benin, Brazil, Chile, China, Egypt, the EU, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Japan, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, Pakistan, Rwanda, South Africa, South Korea, Switzerland, the US, and Zambia.

"Canadian Official Cites Convergence Points In Meeting of Senior Trade Officials at WTO," WTO REPORTER, 20 April 2005; " Canada Sets Out Agenda for Senior Officials Meeting Ahead of Paris WTO Mini-Ministerial," WTO REPORTER, 15 April 2005; "’Misunderstanding’ on AV Tariff Equivalents Threatens WTO Ag Deal; Exporters Blame EU," WTO REPORTER, 20 April 2005.