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Lamy Tapped to Lead the WTO for another 4 Years
Pascal Lamy, who has served as director-general of the WTO since September 2005, will continue to lead the organisation for another four years, WTO Members unanimously confirmed last week.
The announcement came as no surprise, as Lamy was running for the position unopposed. The former French bureaucrat has won many supporters at the WTO. Members often speak favourably of how he has managed the organisation, especially how he has balanced the interests of developing countries with those of the group’s rich-country Members, over the past four years.
Several ambassadors praised Lamy’s reappointment, saying that his staying on in the post would bring critical continuity to the WTO’s work.
The day before he accepted the reappointment, Lamy outlined his priorities for the organisation in a speech to the General Council.
Lamy stressed that concluding the Doha Round of trade talks should continue to be the organisation’s first priority. He also rejected suggestions that the Doha Round, which has been eluding closure for nearly eight years, be expanded to include issues such as climate change, food security, and labour concerns, and other issues that lie beyond the current mandate.
The director-general told delegates that he wanted to ‘de-dramaticise’ the organisation’s periodic ministerial conferences, which in the past have been marked by violence and protests. Lamy then suggested that such a high-level meeting could occur before the end of the year.
EU, US Strike Provisional Deal to End 13-Year-Old Beef Dispute
Trade officials from the US and the EU arrived at a provisional agreement that could mark the beginning of the end of a trade dispute over hormone-treated beef that dates back to 1996. The deal, which was announced on 6 May, would allow the EU to maintain its ban on imports of hormone-treated beef from the US. In exchange, US beef that is free of hormones would be granted much greater access to the European market.
But to the frustration of some in the US meat industry, the provisional deal effectively sidesteps the controversial question of whether, as the EU has long claimed, the ingestion of beef treated with the growth-promoting hormone oestridiol-17 is harmful to human health.
Under the terms of the provisional agreement, the US will refrain from imposing additional retaliatory measures, or ‘carousel sanctions’, that the outgoing Bush administration had threatened to slap on EU exports at the beginning of this year.
Washington will maintain the existing level of sanctions against European products, which are valued at US$ 37.8 million, for three years, then eliminate the sanctions altogether in the fourth year after the deal takes effect. In return, Brussels has said it would allow additional duty-free access for US beef that has not been treated with growth-promoting hormones.
The two parties also agreed to work to find a longer term resolution to the matter before the four years are up. For the next 18 months, both sides have agreed to refrain from pursuing further WTO litigation on the matter.
But the deal is still tentative, and has yet to be signed by either of the trade reps, who said they would discuss the proposed agreement “with our respective stakeholders and constituencies in an effort to finalise it as soon as possible.”
Anti-Dumping Activity on the Increase, WTO Says
The number of times WTO Members launched new investigations into unfairly priced, or ‘dumped’, imports jumped 17 percent in the second half of last year while the number of new anti-dumping tariffs that Member governments applied increased by 45 percent, the WTO has reported.
‘Dumping,’ in trade parlance, refers to the practice of exporting goods at a price that is below what they would command in their home market. The WTO Agreement on Anti-Dumping allows Member governments to place retaliatory tariffs on dumped goods, so long as they can prove that dumping is indeed taking place and that it is injuring the competing domestic industry. Governments also have to be able to calculate the ‘dumping margin’, the gap between the home market price and the export one.
An increase in such activity could signal a turn to protectionism amid dismal economic times, but it could also indicate that Members are putting ever greater faith in the WTO’s mechanisms for resolving trade disputes.
Fifteen Members reported initiating a total of 120 new investigations in the second half of 2008, compared with the 103 investigations that were launched by 14 Members for the same period in 2007. Overall, last year saw a total 208 new anti-dumping investigations, up from 163 in 2007 but down from the high of 366 that was reached in 2001.
The information on anti-dumping was taken from semi-annual reports that Member countries have made to the WTO’s Committee on Anti-Dumping Practices, the secretariat said, and thus the data are only as complete as Members’ reporting practices are thorough.
This information has been summarised from ICTSD’s Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest.
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