Mathabo Le Roux
25 July 2008
Johannesburg — WORLD Trade Organisation (WTO) boss Pascal Lamy has extended trade talks in Geneva with agreement on key issues still out of reach after four days.
In a bid to give fresh impetus to talks, Lamy on Wednesday narrowed negotiations to include trade ministers of the seven key WTO members - the European Union (EU), US, Brazil, China, India, Australia and Japan - where discussions focused on six key issues in the agricultural talks and three issues in industrial talks.
The agricultural issues are: overall trade-distorting domestic support for developed countries; cotton; top-tier tariff cuts for developed countries; sensitive and special products, which will be shielded from full tariff cuts; and temporary increases in developing-country tariffs to deal with import surges or price slumps, which is called the special safeguard mechanism.
On industrial access, the focus was on the formula and flexibility of industrial tariff cuts; the controversial anticoncentration clause, which would prevent an entire sector from being shielded from cuts; and "sectorals" -- a clause that increases the tariff reduction burden on countries that do not opt for sectoral tariff elimination, which is the removal of tariffs on certain identified sectors.
Despite meeting into the early hours yesterday, and some progress, Lamy said yesterday positions were still too far apart.
SA's chief negotiator, Xavier Carim, said it was too early to give any definite statement on where the talks were heading.
"Things should be clearer (today)," he said, but critical issues still needed to be resolved . "We have said there is an imbalance in the two negotiating texts. The anticoncentration clause, added to the Nama (nonagriculture market access) text in May, would put different countries in different positions. But from SA's point of view, its inclusion would be very onerous," he said.
"It will certainly undermine the flexibilities very seriously in a number of sensitive sectors for us. The problem is the late inclusion of the clause. In SA we have been consulting with business and labour for two years on the basis of the flexibilities we understood to be available. There was never any consideration of this kind of exclusion."
Services discussions, scheduled for yesterday, were also postponed to tomorrow to allow for more time to thrash out issues in agriculture and industrial market access. The concluding session for the meeting was pushed back indefinitely.
EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson, writing in his web blog yesterday, said the 12 hours of talks were some of the "most difficult and confrontational" in his time as trade commissioner. However, members were "potentially closer than we have ever been to a deal, but the final steps are the hardest and still look formidable".
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