EU Calls for 'Services' Ministerial
31 May, 2006
Todd Tucker, Research Director, Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch
The move is intended to press the EU message that revisions in its offers on agricultural market access must be reciprocated in services - 'on a good faith basis.' Brussels wants to focus the ministerial discussion on the triangular linkage between market access in agriculture and nonagricultural market access and services.
The meeting will take place around June 26 - just three days before the scheduled meeting of trade ministers to finalize negotiating modalities on agriculture and industrials - and will include ministers from Brazil, Argentina and some Southeast Asian countries, including Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines. All have been reluctant to move ahead on ambitious results in the services talks until there is a better signal out of the agriculture negotiations. European officials also hope the ministerial will provide an opportunity for all key developing countries to evaluate results in agriculture and NAMA to date.
The 2005 Hong Kong ministerial declaration calls for revised offers on services to be tabled by July 31.
As a result of the proposed ministerial, the Doha services cluster of negotiations will be reduced to one week beginning June 19 instead of two weeks as earlier planned, negotiators said. During this month's cluster only issues pertaining to an emergency safeguard mechanism, domestic regulation and subsidies will be discussed, WTD was told.
Services negotiations Chair Fernando De Mateo today will discuss the schedule change with trade envoys.
July Cluster
The July cluster of services meetings will concentrate on market access in an effort to help members prepare their final revised offers. Meetings relating to plurilaterals will, consequently, be put off until September.
The EU-sponsored ministerial is expected to bring up some ticklish issues - such as audiovisual and maritime services along with advances in 'Mode 4' relating to short-term services providers, negotiators said.
In the latest round of plurilateral meetings, the EU and Canada sought a priori exclusion of any commitments in audiovisual services while the United States said it cannot provide further market access either in 'Mode 4' or maritime services.
In an effort to lower the hurdles on 'Mode 4' discussions, World Trade Organization Director General Pascal Lamy is expected to press members on simplifying domestic qualification requirements and other barriers to cross-border service providers, negotiators added.
Export Taxes and NAMA
Geneva - Key industrialized countries led by the European Union yesterday insisted that nontariff barriers - such as export taxes and export restrictions - ought to be part of the Doha Development Agenda nonagricultural market access negotiations, trade diplomats told WTD (WTD, 5/31/06).
But the move came under stiff criticism from Argentina, Brazil and Indonesia.
During an open-ended meeting on nontariff barriers, Brussels offered a detailed text on how to eliminate export taxes which, it says, provide unfair advantages to domestic industries at the cost of foreign exporters. The EU insisted it is not targeting all export taxes and is making a distinction between trade-distorting taxes and 'legitimate' export taxes like those for 'balance of payments requirements' or the environment.
Argentina - joined by Malaysia, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Cuba, India and Venezuela - said export taxes are not part of the NAMA mandate. It pointed out that the NAMA-11 developing-country coalition has tabled a paper as to why export taxes should fall outside of those discussions. But the United States, Canada and South Korea defended the EU proposal, saying there is no legal basis for the imposition of export taxes by developing countries simply to increase revenue or stabilize prices. Canada said export taxes disrupt otherwise unfettered trade and are not legitimate instruments of trade.
Not NTBs
India said export taxes are tariffs and should not be clubbed with nontariff barriers.
Although NAMA chair Don Stephenson suggested that while export taxes are not explicitly part of the Doha mandate, implicit in the mandate is the need to deal with all trade-distorting practices. He acknowledged there is no consensus - 'and that's where this issue sits.'
Also during the meeting, Japan presented a revised offer on export restrictions which stresses the need for a World Trade Organization agreement on export restrictions along the lines of the import licensing agreement. It called for new procedural rules for countries that want to put in place export restrictions.
The EU also sought at yesterday's meeting creation of some sort of problem-solving mechanism - similar to the WTO Dispute Settlement Understanding - to deal with nontariff barriers.
NAMA negotiators will meet again on Friday to review simulations prepared by the WTO secretariat.