Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest • Volume 6 • Number 3 • 29th January 2002

Doha Talks Slowed Over Procedural Differences


Efforts to establish the body that will oversee WTO negotiations mandated in Doha, Qatar in November 2001 hit a serious snag on 28 January as Members failed to agree formally on who would chair the Trade Negotiations Committee (TNC) and its sub-groups. General Council Chair Stuart Harbinson has been leading consultations for a number of weeks on how to structure the TNC (see BRIDGES Weekly, 22 January 2002) but told Monday’s formal meeting of the TNC that further consultations with some Members were necessary. The meeting was suspended, and will be re-convened on 30 January. In Doha, the WTO agreed to conclude negotiations by 1 January 2005.

A group of developing countries that includes Pakistan, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and China is pushing to have the negotiations led by a Geneva-based WTO Ambassador that would be re-selected each year. These countries fear that developing country interests would not be fairly represented by the Director-General. Most of the rest of the Membership — including India and Malaysia, who tend to align themselves with the former group - - are not opposed to having the Director-General chair the TNC, as was the case in the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations from 1986-1994.

Trade diplomats said that a fix to the impasse is likely to emerge in proposed guidelines for how negotiations should be run, including how the TNC will be overseen by the General Council. One delegate said that a balance needed to be sought that afforded the negotiations proper accountability to the General Council without "freezing" the process with rigid rules that might constrain the progress of negotiations. He was "cautiously optimistic" that agreement could be reached by the end of this week.

Neither Pakistan’s Ambassador Munir Akram nor WTO Director-General Mike Moore believed the delay was a bad sign. According to Akram, there was "no major block in the process", while Moore said, "this is an absolutely predictable situation. Members [of the WTO] want assurances that it will be run in a way with which they are comfortable."

BRIDGES Weekly Trade News Digest will report further on the outcome of the TNC in next week’s issue.

"Trade round start delayed as poor states baulk," REUTERS, 28 January 2002; ICTSD Internal Files.