WTO general council meets today to revive talks

The World Trade Organisation's (WTO) general council meets tomorrow in Geneva to discuss the stalled trade negotiations.

The meeting will review the progress made after the Cancun talks failed, identify the key issues and revive the negotiating machinery under the Trade Negotiations Committee of the multilateral body.

While the atmosphere is more conducive for negotiations now than it was at the time of the Cancun meet, much needs to be done to bridge the differences on the major issues, says an Indian negotiator.

Even the Chairman of the GC, Carlos Perez del Castillo of Uruguay, has publicly indicated that he will only make a report under his own responsibility.

The only consensus, as of now, is that talks should continue. Even the recent meet of the G-20 -- the coalition of developing countries -- in Brasilia ended with a resolution seeking to take the trade talks forward.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva proposed a free trade area (FTA) for the developing south, an indication that multilateralism may not deliver the goods.

The meeting, which included informal consultations with EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy, issued a joint communiqué stating, "The dialogue proved to be fruitful and positive with both sides explaining their own positions in a business-like manner and acknowledging the importance of this dialogue to achieve progress in the negotiations."

The statement said there was "a general agreement that we need to intensify negotiations early next year" with a view to finalising the Doha round of talks by the 2004 WTO deadline.

Lamy said while the EU was more willing to remove it's own export subsidies, it wanted to see emerging developing countries make some progress on market access.

A recent European Commission paper on trade, put up for discussion by EU trade ministers, said on market access the EU wanted emerging developing countries to providing duty-free and quota-free access for least-developed countries to their markets in order to compensate for the erosion of preferences of LCDs in rich country markets.

Also, the EU is unwilling to unilaterally lower its defences without any similar commitments from the US, the other big provider of subsidies in agriculture.

With the gap between the developing and the developed countries showing no signs to be bridged, the Brazilian President's suggestion to developing countries "to carefully reflect" on his proposal of setting up an FTA within the developing south becomes significant.

Even the US had said after Cancun it would go in for bilateral agreements if multilateralism failed to work.

On the proposed FTA, however, Lamy said any initiative for free trade among countries and blocs was positive, but that the EU would still give priority to multilateral negotiations.

As a commerce ministry official says: "Bilateralism cannot be a substitute for multilateralism. A multilateral set of rules, common to all, would need to be the foundation."