Bridges Trade BioRes • Volume 7 • Number 1 • 19th January 2007

Environment Negotiations Low on Priority List of WTO Members

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Doha Round environment Chair Ambassador Toufiq Ali (Bangladesh) expressed concern about the slow progress of the talks at a 19 December informal meeting, after Members used the first gathering of the negotiating group since the July suspension largely to restate their positions.

With regard to the Doha mandate to expedite trade liberalisation for ‘environmental goods and services’, some countries such as India, Egypt, Thailand, Brazil and Chile proposed that Members should work on a compromise between two main approaches proposed for doing so. The so-called ‘list’ approach would identify specific goods and earmark them for liberalisation; the ‘project’ approach would temporarily liberalise trade in environmental goods and services used in approved environmental projects. These countries, which favour the latter approach, added that they would elaborate on how to operationalise it within the WTO system (see Bridges Trade BioRes, 14 July 2006, http://www.ictsd.org/biores/06-07-14/story1.htm).

On the other side, countries, such as Canada, Korea and Japan, which favour the ‘list’ approach, proposed to shorten the potential environmental goods lists put forward by nine Members (and compiled into an informal document by the WTO Secretariat in November 2005, TN/TE/W/63), which they suggested could enable negotiators to reach agreement.

To help move the negotiations forward, the chair suggested holding informal consultations to discuss technical issues related to environmental goods, such as special & differential treatment and non-tariff barriers. He also proposed informal talks on other aspects of the trade and environment mandate, including information exchange between the WTO and secretariats of multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) and criteria for observer status.

In a related development, EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson on 18 December called for eliminating tariffs on climate-change related goods such as renewable energy technology, saying that this would help combat global warming and encourage investment in further innovation (see related story, this issue).

ICTSD reporting.