Signs of agreement in fluid situation

By C. Rammanohar Reddy

DOHA, NOV. 12. On a day when the state of negotiations changed by the hour, delegates to the fourth Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organisation appeared close to reaching an agreement on the launch of what was already being christened the ``Doha Development Round'' of trade liberalisation talks, though negotiators cautioned that while there was progress in some areas, others, environment in particular, were still deadlocked. Mr. Murasoli Maran, Union Commerce Minister, said this evening at a press briefing that while some officials claimed that the end of the game was in sight, he did not see any light at the end of the tunnel.

Trade officials said that in a fluid situation, with each contentious issue connected to the other, the lack of agreement in one could cause an overall collapse.

Mr. Maran said India's position on all issues and, especially on the ``new issues'' of foreign investment and competition policies remained unchanged.

On textiles, where India stands opposed to the U.S., he said India's final position would be guided by that of the Like-Minded Group (LMG) of developing countries. Ministers now have just 24 hours to sew up the entire package and a new, revised draft declaration is expected to be presented tomorrow to the Ministers.

While progress was made today in resolving differences in two contentious areas, the agenda for renegotiating the agreement on anti-dumping duties and the political declaration on drug patents and public health, there were at least three other sets of issues - agriculture, environment and the implementation issues of developing countries - where there was little progress.

On a day when rumours and misinformation were rife in the corridors of the convention centre - including false allegations by a couple of countries in Africa that India had deserted the developing country cause - a breakthrough came when the U.S. signalled that it was willing to put anti-dumping duties on the agenda. This removed a major contentious area since this had been a case of the U.S. versus the rest of the world. Officials said it was now a question of the E.U. obtaining some compromise by which its major concerns on food safety, the precautionary principle and other issues falling under the rubric of environment issues would be included in the WTO's future work programme, and if that was done there was little likelihood of the developing countries being able to stop the launch of a new WTO round of talks.

However, a big question mark still is if France would finally agree to negotiations to liberalise trade in farm products.

The developing countries could claim some progress in their demands when the ministerial declaration that is expected to assert that the TRIPS agreement had flexibility on drug patents was considerably advanced in its finalisation.

The most important subject in the developing countries' implementation issues was, however, still unresolved since the U.S., with its hands tied by the Congress, was insisting that it could not agree to one particular set of concessions on textile imports. This is of considerable importance to India with one estimate suggesting that it involved a potential annual gain of $100 million to exports.

Negotiators said that if the E.U. obtained acceptable language on the environment, it would be willing to back down on its insistence for talks on new agreements on foreign investment and competition policies - since the environment issue was more important to the E.U.

The watering down of the proposals on at least two of the four ``new or Singapore issues'' would meet India's interests to a considerable extent. The other two Singapore issues are transparency in Government procurement and trade facilitation. Much of all this was uncertain since a final agreement would have to be based on a single package.

One development, however, is that the unity between India and Pakistan at the WTO that had been built over the past few years had been breaking up. Though Indian officials denied that this was the case, independent sources said that Pakistan had been indicating that it is willing to accept the WTO talks on the Singapore issues, a position that is the opposite of India's.

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Section  : International
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