Archive - 2005 - Article

Paper submitted by Argentina, Brazil and India during the current NAMA negotiations.

The Bush administration's stance on immigration, already the cause of a political split with some Republicans in Congress, is beginning to erode lawmakers' support for such presidential policy priorities as trade deals and extending the Patriot Act.

Negotiations on NAMA (non agricultiral market access) are taking place this week in the WTO. On Monday (4 July), a group of Caribbean countries proposed a new tariff-reduction formula which they said is aimed at taking into account development concerns.(M. Khor)

Brazil's intervention on July 1st 2005.

Some major developed and developing countries have been giving significantly different assessments of the state of the services negotiations during the Special Session of the Council for Trade in Services held at the World Trade Organisation on 27 June to 1 July.

The Chairperson of the WTO's agriculture negotiations, the former New ZealandAmbassador, Tim Groser, has issued a status report on his assessment of key issues to be addressed in the agriculture negotiations by 31 July 2005, which is apparently the date by which the General Council session to discuss 'first approximations' has to conclude. (M. Khor)

Attempts are being made to prepare

the EU has recently tabled a non-paper on benchmarking in GATS. The response from 'Brazil' is NOT a formal Brazilian response but is apparently a view shared by many other delegations.

An assessment of the current agriculture negotiations by Tim Groser

This is an update of Edward Sussex's paper on Local and Regional Reaction to GATS and Similar Trade Rules.