US confident about upcoming trade talks

By Donna Ortega, News Editor

DEPUTY US Trade Representative Peter Allgeier said on Friday that the US was confident that a new round of negotiations would be launched when the Fourth World Trade Organisation (WTO) Ministerial Conference is held in Doha, Qatar, early next month.

Ambassador Allgeier was speaking from Washington D.C., in a tele press conference with journalists from Latin America and Jamaica.

"We are absolutely convinced that the world economy, the trading system, individual countries including the US and countries of the Western Hemisphere need a global round of trade negotiations. This is very clear by the contribution that free trade makes to economic growth and development," he said.

He noted also that setting up a system of rules by which countries operate and a system for settling disputes worked more in the interest of smaller economies than larger ones.

On the verge of the Doha Ministerial, "We are getting ready to launch, we hope, a new round of negotiations. We are very optimistic that we will," he said.

However, several Caribbean countries, including Jamaica, view the launch of a new round as premature and have stressed that it is necessary for the concerns of developing countries to be meaningfully addressed first. Outgoing Minister of Foreign Trade, Anthony Hylton, said recently that CARICOM was not unalterably opposed to a new round, but "is unconvinced of its necessity and appropriateness at this time".

He expressed concern with the number of difficulties in the implementation of World Trade Organisation (WTO) agreements, particularly given the lack of human, technical and financial resources among the majority of member states in the WTO.

CARICOM is examining the arguments carefully to determine whether any widening of the existing negotiating agenda is warranted and in the region's best interest. Jamaica and other CARICOM countries believe that the focus of the WTO's work programme should be on implementation issues and the mandated negotiations.

A number of developed countries are pressing for some implementation issues to be addressed as part of a broad-based round of multilateral negotiations to allow for trade-offs and concessions. However, Mr. Hylton has urged for efforts to be made to address and resolve these issues on their own merit.

Ambassador Allgeier conceded last Friday that in order to launch a new round, there would have to be a negotiation agenda that was appealing to a variety of countries - industrialised, agricultural, smaller economies and least developed economies.

"I think we are getting to the point where we have such a balanced agenda," he stated confidently.

Among the items proposed for the agenda were, a look at market access both in industrial goods and in agriculture, and addressing how the WTO is compatible with other social values and objectives such as health crises (HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis in Africa and elsewhere). Also included were the concerns of developing countries on the ways in which the agreements of the Uruguay Round were implemented. "I think there will be a large number of decisions made in Doha to address the majority of those concerns and we will set up processes to address the outstanding concerns," he said.

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