Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest • Volume 9 • Number 39 • 16th November 2005

Goods Council: Members Repeat Past Discussions On Textiles

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At a 10 November meeting of the WTO Council for Trade in Goods (CTG), Turkey with support from Jordan and Tunisia reiterated its earlier demands for the creation of a work programme on textiles. As during the CTG’s previous meeting in July (see BRIDGES Weekly, 20 July 2005), Pakistan, India, Indonesia and China expressed opposition to the idea, though they appeared to be somewhat more flexible about keeping the textiles item on its agenda.

Turkey cited a recent report from the International Textiles and Clothing Bureau (ITCB) to argue that the declining market share of some developing countries since the phaseout of trade quotas was a problem in global textile trade that the WTO should deal with. China countered that the same report indicated that Turkey’s textiles exports had grown since the beginning of 2005. Members agreed to continue holding informal consultations on the issue and discuss it at the CTG’s next meeting on 15 March 2006.

In related news, on 14 November a coalition of textile and clothing groups from 11 countries asked their governments to lobby at the Hong Kong Ministerial Conference for textiles trade to be put in a "special textile sectoral" (STS) negotiating scheme separate from the rest of the non-agricultural market access (NAMA) negotiations (see BRIDGES Weekly, 9 November 2005). Contrary to the expedited sectoral liberalisation initiatives provided for in the 2004 July Package, the groups seek to limit rather than speed up the extent of trade liberalisation in the sector.

Sources suggest that there have been some informal discussions on the issue in WTO hallways. Though some delegations said that they need to take a look at how textiles should be dealt with in NAMA negotiations, others expressed skepticism about how a sectoral carve-out for textiles could work.

The textile groups’ letter is available at http://www.ncto.org/newsroom/pr200537.asp.

ICTSD reporting.