Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest • Volume 6 • Number 5 • 12th February 2002
WSSD Prep Meeting Highlights Importance Of Equitable Trading System
Delegates at the second meeting of the Preparatory Committee (PrepCom II) for the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) on 28 January - 8 February in New York moved a significant step closer to developing a programme of action for WSSD by adopting the Chair’s Paper which will form the basis for discussions at PrepCom III and ultimately the World Summit. Clustered under nine focus points, the recommendations for immediate action, inter alia, call for a trading system that promotes sustainable development in a globalising world, improved market access for poor countries and the reduction of environmentally harmful subsidies.
Despite demands by some countries — notably Japan — to remove references to the WTO from the Chair’s text, trade-related issues, including the outcomes of the Fourth WTO Ministerial Conference in Doha, subsidies and intellectual property protection of traditional knowledge, feature throughout the Chair’s Paper. References to the "Doha Development Agenda", however, that had been included in the initial list of issues and proposals proposed by the Chair were dropped following India’s remarks that no development agenda had resulted from the Doha meeting.
Many developing countries, including Indonesia, China, Costa Rica, Iran and Argentina, stressed the need for improved market access for their exports to developed country markets. Thus, the Chair’s paper calls for a "universal, rule-based, open, non-discriminatory and equitable multilateral trading system that benefits all countries in the pursuit of sustainable development". To this end, the Paper encourages WTO Members to implement the outcomes of Doha, in particular by improving preferential market access for least-developed countries, increasing technical cooperation and capacity building, and making special and differential treatment for developing countries an integral part of the negotiations.
Regarding subsidies, the Paper requests countries to eliminate environmentally harmful and trade-distorting subsidies that encourage unsustainable consumption and production patterns. To fulfil the WTO Doha commitment to improve market access for agricultural products, countries are called upon to phase out export subsidies and substantially reduce trade-distorting support. Regarding fisheries, the Paper asks countries to eliminate all subsidies that contribute to the over-capacity of fishing vessels.
At a press conference following the meeting, PrepCom II Chair Emil Salim (Indonesia) stressed that his paper contained only realistic, achievable suggestions aimed at implementing Agenda 21. "The intent is not to talk about lofty ideas - there have been too many speeches already," he said. "We are building up implementation in a globalised world." NGOs generally welcomed the Paper. Daniel Mittler of Friends of the Earth International highlighted in particular the inclusion of globalisation and international governance for sustainable development as important issues of discussion, but also expressed concern that the process was biased towards free trade and that the outcomes of WSSD would be subordinated to the trade regime negotiated in the WTO.
PrepCom III will again take place in New York from 25 March to 3 April. Discussions are expected to focus in particular on the final cluster of the Chair’s Paper — strengthening governance for sustainable development at the national, regional and international levels — for which no recommendations were developed at PrepCom II. WSSD is currently scheduled to take place in Johannesburg, South Africa, from 26 August to 4 September 2002.
Documents of PrepCom II, including the Chair’s Paper, are available online at http://www.johannesburgsummit.org/html/documents/prepcom2.html. For daily coverage of the meeting, see IISD Linkages at http://www.iisd.ca/linkages/2002/pc2/.
"Action Agenda comes into sharp focus as Prepcom II concludes," UN PRESS RELEASE, 8 February 2002; IISD ENB Vol. 22, No. 19.