SAARC forges common front on WTO

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI, AUG. 23. Commerce Ministers of SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) today forged a common front on multilateral trade issues affecting developing countries in the context of the Fourth Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to be held at Qatar. They underlined the importance of ensuring a consensual outcome of the conference from the standpoint of developing countries.

In a joint statement issued at the end of a two-day meeting here, the Ministers stressed that implementation issues as a fallout of the Uruguay Round agreements must be meaningfully resolved upfront without any extraneous linkages.

Simultaneously, they have resolved to discuss the issue with other developing countries to ensure that the South presents a united stand at the Doha conference. After a meeting by the heads of SAARC delegations with the Prime Minister, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, Pakistan's Commerce Minister, Mr. Abdul Razzak Dawood, told newspersons that SAARC will strive to rope in other developing and like-minded countries to ensure that there is consensus among this group.

He said there was unanimity among SAARC countries about the need to effectively safeguard their interests in trade- related areas before any step is taken to broaden the agenda to include non- trade issues like labour and environment. Mr. Dawood said further discussions will be held at the proposed informal WTO Ministerial Conference in Mexico as well as at Geneva.

The SAARC Commerce Ministers meeting was attended by Sri Lanka, Nepal's Agriculture and Cooperation Minister, Mr. Mahesh Acharya, the SAARC Secretary-General, Mr. Nihal Rodrigo and the Bhutan Commerce Secretary, Mr. Karma Dorjee. Maldives did not attend the meeting which was held to coordinate national positions in view of the forthcoming WTO Ministerial Conference.

At the outset, the Commerce and Industry Minister, Mr. Murasoli Maran, stressed that it would be prudent to confine the WTO agenda to already mandated negotiations and reviews and not take on board any new issues unless there was convergence of views in the entire membership of the WTO. The Doha Ministerial Conference, he said, should make an assessment of the progress made in the mandated negotiations and reviews and give necessary policy directions besides reviewing the progress of resolution of implementation issues. It should also do stock taking and reviews as envisaged in the Marrakesh Agreement establishing WTO, he added.

Any further delay in the upfront resolution of the implementation concerns of the developing countries was likely to send a ``wrong signal'', which could lead to further negotiations in the credibility of the WTO, Mr. Maran said.

``We cannot afford another Seattle and as such no contentious issues or issues on which there has been no consensus, should be pushed into the WTO agenda as it may risk a failure, which may not augur well for WTO,'' he said.

Referring to implementation concerns, Mr. Maran stressed that almost all delegations in the WTO and trade policy experts acknowledged for the first time that a group of developing countries had been able to bring to the centre stage their concerns and problems. The group had also engaged the developed world to address these concerns, he added. He maintained that it was a matter of concern that a rule-based global trading system had been unable to make any worthwhile increase in the share of developing countries in world trade and at the same time, the world's 200 richest people had more than doubled their net worth in 4 years from 1998. ``We are concerned that while wines and spirits can get a higher level of geographical indication protection, other products of interest to developing and LDCs are not given a similar protection,' he said.

Speaking of medicines and drugs based on biological and genetic resources of developing countries, Mr. Maran emphasised that such patents should reveal the country of origin of biological and genetic resources and traditional knowledge used in it and there should be equitable sharing of benefits.

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