Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest • Volume 9 • Number 5 • 16th February 2005

WTO General Council Appoints Chairs For 2005

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At its 15 February meeting, the WTO General Council formally approved the list of committee chair appointments for 2005. Ambassador Amina Chawahir Mohamed of Kenya became the chair of the General Council, making her the first woman (and second African) to head the WTO’s highest-level decision-making body outside the biennial Ministerial Conferences.

Challenging year ahead for Mohamed

General Council Chair Mohamed will immediately be faced with two challenging tasks: leading the selection of the next WTO Director-General and helping guide the preparatory work for the Hong Kong Ministerial Conference in December.

Members are supposed to agree by the end of May on one the four candidates to succeed Supachai Panitchpakdi as head of the WTO (see BRIDGES Weekly, 26 January 2005). In her role as chair of the General Council, Mohamed will conduct several rounds of consultations with Member delegations, with the ultimate aim of identifying a candidate on whom Members can reach consensus. She will be supported in this task by fellow new appointees Norwegian WTO Ambassador Eirik Glenne, chair of the Dispute Settlement Body, and Canadian WTO Ambassador Don Stephenson, who will head up the Trade Policy Review Body. There is a danger that the Director-General selection process will draw time and attention away from concrete negotiations in the ongoing Doha Round talks. Skilled leadership will be necessary to keep the negotiations on track and avoid a repeat of the rancorous leadership race of 1999.

In interviews with the press, Mohamed vowed to ensure that both objectives are met "in an orderly and harmonious manner" while making sure that the "developmental component of the Doha negotiations is not diluted."

Other new chairs include Committee on Trade and Development Chair Ambassador Gomi Tharaka Senadhira of Sri Lanka, and Committee on Trade and Environment Chair Ambassador Shree Baboo Chekitan Servansing of Mauritius. A complete list of committee chairs for 2005 is available online at http://www.wto.org/english/news_e/pres05_e/pr396_e.htm.

Accession requests: Iran rejected again; Serbia, Montenegro in separately

The meeting started with the standard rejection of Iran’s accession request by the United States. Several countries, including EU member-states, India, and China said that if Iran was fulfilling all of the WTO’s requirements for would-be Members, they failed to see any reason not to start an accession process. They expressed hope that the matter would be resolved soon.

Serbia and Montenegro’s separate requests for accession were accepted; two Working Parties will be set up to start their respective negotiation processes. The joint application of "Serbia and Montenegro" for WTO membership was withdrawn.

In his report on the discussions in the Work Programme on Small Economies, Chair Ambassador Trevor Clarke of Barbados said that more work was necessary. However, it wasn’t clear how progress would be possible without creating a new sub-group or category of countries — something precluded by the Doha mandate. Differentiation among developing countries at the WTO is a charged and problematic topic; most Members are reluctant to create a separate sub-group even for small economies.

Members gave outgoing General Council Chair Ambassador Shotaro Oshima a standing ovation for his work over the past year, which saw the Doha Round talks reanimated by the July Package.

The next General Council meeting is scheduled for 23-24 May.

ICTSD reporting; "WTO accepts Serbia, Montenegro applications, rejects Iran again," XFN-ASIA, 16 February 2005; "WTO’s all male citadel broken," DECCAN HERALD NEWS SERVICE, 16 February 2005.