Lamy urges WTO members to accelerate trade liberalization talks
10/10/2007 15:44
World Trade Organization (WTO) chief Pascal Lamy urged the organization's
151 members yesterday to accelerate their pace of negotiations in order to make
the Doha Round of global trade liberalization talks a success.
"We have
regained a good level of momentum in our work, and the challenge now is to
accelerate it in the days and weeks ahead, so that the necessary compromises can
be found," Lamy told WTO ambassadors at a meeting of the organization's
governing General Council.
"Now more than ever, time is running against us
... we must increase the pace at which we move ahead in agriculture and NAMA (
non-agricultural market access)," he said.
Lamy said WTO members' work in the
coming days should aim at developing enough common ground on agriculture and
NAMA, the two most crucial fields in the Doha Round, so that related compromise
texts issued in July could be revised.
The compromise texts were drafted by
the two chairmen charging agriculture and NAMA negotiations respectively aiming
to provide the basis for a final deal.
"I remain convinced that this deal is
as doable as it is essential," Lamy told the meeting yesterday.
The Doha
Round of trade talks were launched in 2001 with an aim to bring down trade
barriers to help the global economy, particularly those of developing
countries.
The WTO director-general had indicated earlier that the talks must
be concluded by the end of 2007 or early 2008, otherwise they may be frozen
infinitely mainly due to political factors.
But latest signs show that WTO
members are still far apart on agriculture and NAMA, the two major fields that
have blocked the progress of the talks for six years.
While most WTO members
accept the agriculture text, which requires the United States to cut its overall
trade-distorting farm subsidies to between 13 billion and US$16.4 billion, as
the basis for talks, sharp differences remain on the NAMA text.
At the
meeting yesterday, many developing members reiterated that the Doha Round is a
developing round and major concerns of developing members must be addressed in
any final deal.
South Africa, representing a group of developing members,
proposed that more flexibilities should be given to them in terms of industrial
tariff cuts. The current NAMA text is considered as too tough for developing
members.
South Africa's proposal was supported by many developing members,
but was rejected by the United States, which insisted that the current text
should be the basis for further talks.
Xinhua
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