Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest • Volume 6 • Number 1 • 16th January 2002

Countries Struggle Over How To Negotiate WTO Doha Mandate

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WTO Members have been meeting frequently over the past week in informal bilateral and plurilateral sessions in an attempt to find common ground on how trade negotiations launched in Doha, Qatar in November 2001 should be structured. The specifics of how negotiating sessions will take place are to be addressed formally on 28 January at the first meeting of the Trade Negotiations Committee (TNC), which was set up in the Doha Ministerial Declaration to "establish appropriate negotiating mechanisms as required and supervise the progress of the negotiations. However, countries remain far from decided over the modalities of how negotiations will progress, in which subsidiary bodies, or even who should chair the TNC itself.

Developing countries forward TNC considerations

Developing country and least-developed country (LDC) Members have already submitted statements outlining their priorities for how the TNC should operate ahead of the meeting. According to trade sources, they are concerned that developed country Members — mainly the ‘Quad’ group of Canada, the EU, the US and Japan — will attempt to push their own preferences on procedure in order to gain an upper hand on negotiating substance as outlined in the Doha Ministerial Declaration (see BRIDGES Weekly, 15 November 2001). As a result, these developing countries and LDCs favour the General Council as a decision-making forum since it operates according to previously agreed-upon procedures, including consensus.

In a statement made to the General Council in December on behalf of the WTO’s LDC Members, Ambassador Ali Mchumo of Tanzania said that all final decisions should be made by the General Council, rather than by the TNC. "All negotiating decisions should be made in the General Council which will provide the final negotiating text on the basis of Members’ consensus," Mchumo said. This stance is also reflected in a 21 December submission (WT/GC/58, available at http://docsonline.wto.org/) by a group of developing countries informally called the Like-Minded Group (LMG), though India and Malaysia, two traditionally strong supporters of the LMG perspective, did not sign onto the submission. The LMG propose that the TNC should work in accordance with direct instructions from the General Council, and that it should report to the General Council at least once every three months.

Both the LMG and Mchumo’s statements also insist that no ‘green rooms’, or informal, closed-door negotiating sessions, should take place, and that all informal consultations and negotiating decisions should be undertaken in open-ended sessions.

One representative from a Quad country conjectured that the positions forwarded by the LMG — Pakistan in particular — were an attempt to stall the negotiating process.

Chairs up in the air

Selection of Chairs for the TNC and its negotiating, or working, groups is an area that threatens to mire WTO Members as they jockey to have their preferred representatives chair various groups. Inter alia, the LMG urges that Chairs should be selected from the membership within the General Council and that the distribution of Chairs and Vice-Chairs between developed and developing countries should proportionately reflect the current composition of the WTO. They also say that Chairs should be appointed for periods of one year, with the possibility of re- election if decided by consensus.

The LDCs also believe that Chair of the TNC should be a Geneva-based Ambassador, for reasons of continuity and in order that countries have easy access to him/her and vice versa. In addition, they argue for terms of one year to allow for rotation among regions. They are not in favour of the WTO Director-General or the Secretariat being involved in negotiations.

Under the pre-1995 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) system, the TNC was chaired by the presiding Director-General, and negotiating group Chairs were permanent: in the last (Uruguay) round Chairs presided through 8 years of negotiations. Chairs were drawn from the capitals or Geneva-based missions of the members of the GATT’s Contracting Parties, and acted under their own under personal capacity. However, there is no binding precedent that these procedures need to be taken up by the WTO.

Geneva-based diplomats indicate that whatever happens, the Chair selection process is likely to be linked with the annual selection process of Chairs for all other official WTO bodies. Most observers speculate that it is unlikely that Members will decide on this issue by the time of the first TNC.

Five negotiating groups likely

According to trade sources, five working groups are expected to be set up: Agriculture, Services, Environment, Rules, and Industrial Tariffs. For the most part, these reflect the range of issue-areas that have been mandated. However, there is little agreement yet on where outstanding implementation issues that do not fall into these categories will be negotiated. It is also unclear at this stage where negotiations on fisheries subsidies, mandated under both Rules and Environment, will take place.

Informal consultations led by General Council Chair Stuart Harbinson have been taking place continually between smaller groups of Members, including the Quad. Sources indicate that an open-ended informal session for all Members on the TNC is likely to be held sometime next week before the formal meeting.

ICTSD Internal Files.