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Who Gains from Farm Tariff Cuts?
Recent ICTSD, IPC and IFPRI analysis shows that the February 2008 draft agriculture modalities would lead to a significant overall reduction in EU and US tariffs. Many key developing country exports would nevertheless continue to face significant import duties. The average trade-weighted applied tariff would fall from 7.9 to 3.5 percent for goods entering the US…
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Burden-shifting in WTO Dispute Settlement: The Prima Facie Doctrine
The burden of proof in dispute settlement has been referred to as a legal response to ignorance. However, clarification is necessary to establish what constitutes the ‘prima facie’ evidence that allows a dispute to go forward under WTO jurisprudence. While the notion of prima facie (often translated as ‘on the face of it’) is a standard…
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Uneven Progress in New EU-ACP Trade Agreements
Negotiations on Economic Partnership Agreements between the European Union and regional groupings in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific are advancing in fits and starts, and will not conclude everywhere by the end of this year as the EU had hoped. As of January 2008, the European Union was supposed to have replaced its long-standing unilateral…
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Tropical Biomass and the Global Biofuels Market
The average productivity of biomass produced in tropical and sub-tropical climates is more than five times higher than that of biomass grown in the temperate regions of Europe and North America. In theory at least, this should give developing countries a tremendous comparative advantage. However, most research and development funding, as well as a considerable amount…
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Biofuels: Food vs Fuel Revisited
Soaring prices for staple commodities, such as wheat, soy and corn, have brought the food security implications of increased production of biofuels under greater scrutiny. Since the biofuel bubble burst into the public realm a few months ago, some countries have scaled back plans to increase the share of such fuels in their domestic energy mix.…
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Déjà Vu on Patent Rules in TRIPS Council
Despite growing support for requiring patent applicants to disclose the biological resources or traditional knowledge involved in their inventions, WTO Members remain divided on the issue. Nearly all developing country WTO Members – or 80 out of the organisations’s total membership of 151 countries – now support the inclusion of a disclosure requirement in the Agreement…
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WIPO Struggles with Enhancing Development Dimension
Member governments of the World Intellectual Property Organisation have taken a timid step toward implementing a development agenda for the institution. Frustration is growing, however, over the lack of progress on enhanced protection for genetic resources and traditional knowledge. Last September, the WIPO General Assembly adopted 45 recommendations aimed at making development the overarching goal…
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Panel Finds EU Beef Ban Unjustified by Risk Assessment
On 31 March, a WTO dispute settlement panel issued yet another verdict in a long string rulings that have faulted the European Union’s import ban on hormone-treated beef on the grounds that is not sufficiently backed by scientific evidence. Legal scholar Tim Josling has called the beefhormone conflict ‘the mother of all food safety trade disputes’,…
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NAMA Talks Budge at Last, but Major Differences Persist
While some flexibility has appeared in WTO talks on how developing country interests could be accommodated in the long-stalled negotiations on industrial market access, the larger question of balance between developed and developing country commitments remains unresolved. Despite their deep-seated differences with regard to the February 2008 negotiating draft on industrial market access (NAMA), WTO…
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No Consensus Yet on Fisheries Subsidy Rules
Exemptions from proposed subsidy disciplines and requirements related to stock management remain the main points of contention in WTO negotiations on a new agreement aimed at reducing fleet overcapacity, widely recognised as a key contributor to the global fisheries crisis. At its March meeting, the negotiating group on WTO rules completed its initial review of the…
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Market Access Continues to Divide Farm Negotiations
Derogations from new market access disciplines in agricultural trade were once again the focus of WTO discussions in March. While limited progress was achieved on sensitive products, deep divisions persist on exemptions available only to developing countries. Both developed and developing countries will be able to apply smaller tariff cuts to a number of ‘sensitive’ products…
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WTO Approves Aid for Trade Roadmap
Increasing developing country ownership of Aid for Trade and identifying ways to measure the impacts of such assistance will be the WTO’s main objectives for 2008. The Aid for Trade (A4T) initiative was formally launched at the WTO’s ministerial conference in December 2005 in Hong Kong, where the EU, Japan and the US pledged funds for…
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Least-developed Countries Seek Seat at WTO Table
The world’s poorest countries have identified a common set of objectives aimed at securing tangible benefits from the Doha Round. Among their top priorities are full duty- and quota-free market access and the elimination of rich country cotton subsidies. The objectives agreed by least-developed country (LDC) trade ministers in Maseru, Lesotho, in late February are unusually…
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Fail or Succeed: It’s Time to Choose
The ever-shifting goalposts for a preliminary Doha Round deal have been pushed to late May despite small signs of movement in technical talks on industrial and agricultural market access. Intense discussions took place in March among eleven key agricultural net exporters and importers on quota expansion for the ‘sensitive’ products that countries may partially exempt from…
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Food Aid Impacts
•The United Nations World Food Programme is facing an ‘unacceptable’ choice of either providing 40 percent less food per recipient or reaching out to 40 percent fewer people due to a budget gap of US$500 million for 2008. The shortfall was mainly caused by a 40-percent rise in commodity prices since 2007. Among examples of…
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UNCTAD XII Preview
The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) will hold its quadrennial summit on 20-25 April in Accra, Ghana. The overarching theme of this year’s meeting is addressing the development opportunities and challenges of globalisation, with a high-level segment focusing on Africa. Although the continent’s GDP is estimated to have increased by 7 percent…