Trade officials meet to salvage global pact
Disputes remain over farm policies May derail WTO’s December meeting
HONG KONG—
Trade ministers from around the world are to hold meetings today in London and tomorrow in Geneva in an effort to rescue plans for a global trade pact that is at an impasse over agriculture issues. The talks in Europe coincide with concerns that differences over farm policies could derail a December gathering in Hong Kong of trade ministers from 148 countries and customs territories. The World Trade Organization conference here is intended to complete most of the work for a global deal to reduce tariffs, quotas, subsidies and trade barriers.
Critics have warned that the Hong Kong conference could produce little progress while possibly setting off street violence as protesters from many countries converge, as occurred during WTO ministerial conferences in 1999 in Seattle and in 2003 in Cancun, Mexico.
Alfred Ma, the chief spokesperson for the Hong Kong police, said at a trade- related conference at Hong Kong University on Friday that the government had received specific intelligence of plans for violence. The police here will respond with their largest deployment ever, exceeding the security that surrounded the handover of the territory from British to Chinese rule in 1997. Top trade officials from the United States, European Union, India, Brazil and Australia will begin meeting this afternoon in London and are scheduled to negotiate late into the night over agricultural issues. The ministers and their aides will then fly to Geneva tomorrow morning, where they will be joined by more trade ministers — the exact number has not yet been decided — for further negotiations, said Keith Rockwell, chief spokesperson for the WTO. The trade ministers for India and Brazil will attend the London meeting as representatives of the Group of 20 developing countries, which includes China. The group has argued that industrialized countries should do more than developing countries to reduce trade barriers. Australia will represent the Cairns Group of 17 food- exporting countries. The United States and the European Union have each made fresh offers in the last three weeks to reduce subsidies and tariffs. Both sides have criticized each others’ offers as inadequate, but Pascal Lamy, the director general of the WTO, has said that each deserves consideration.
Particularly controversial is
the European Union’s insistence, under pressure from France, that no deal go beyond changes in domestic subsidies for Europe’s farm program that were made in anticipation of a deal that never materialized.
In addition to insisting that the details of the offer are not negotiable, the European Union has said the deal can be valid only if other countries agree to a list of rules, including a limit on the United States’ practice of shipping large quantities of food to poor countries as aid. The United States has been pushing for deeper cuts in agricultural tariffs and subsidies than the European Union, although it still has not offered big enough reductions to satisfy developing countries. “World agriculture markets are a mess; we’ve got all kinds of distortions and trade- distorting measures,” said a U. S. trade official who spoke at Hong Kong University on a videoconference link. The official insisted on anonymity, citing policies on the discussion of talks that are in progress.
Conspicuously missing from the London meeting will be the group of 10 countries, including Japan, South Korea and Switzerland, that have been among the biggest beneficiaries of free trade in industrial products but also have some of the most stringent limits on food imports. This group has opposed any significant dismantling of restrictions on imports of the most politically sensitive agricultural products.
Congress has granted special authority to the Bush administration to negotiate trade pacts through June 30, 2007, and the administration has said it needs three months to put a deal into legal language and another three months to secure passage.
Because of the American legislative calendar, the deadline for reaching a global pact is the end of next year. But Rockwell and trade specialists said that the broad outlines of a deal on agriculture policy and tariffs must be reached at the Hong Kong conference to leave enough time to work out the details and put them in proper legal form.