COMMITTEE OF THE WHOLE (COW) OF UNCTAD-9

9:51 PM May 8, 1996

COMMITTEE OF THE WHOLE (COW) OF UNCTAD-9
According to some of the NGOs, with access to their own country-delegation meetings, the US tactic is said to be to remit as many of the issues as possible to the COW or the President's Contact group, get a smaller informal negotiating group to redraft the final document, and present it to others virtually on a take-it- or-leave-it basis. The three drafting/negotiation exercises and running into the hard more problem areas of the pre-conference texts, and where the issues are seen to be those needing some 'political understanding' are being remitted to the COW.

In this last category, the Drafting Group I, has remitted to the COW questions relating to the future work of UNCTAD on external resources for development and debt questions.

The US, Canada and Japan have been strenously opposing any UNCTAD work, arguing that it duplicates work in the IMF and the World Bank.

However, several of the developing countries, including the African and Asian Groups have not accepted this. Some of these delegations privately note that but for the pioneering work of UNCTAD in highlighting the need for debt writedowns, the Fund and the Bank would never have moved in this direction.

Even now, the two institutions have been most reluctant in doing anything on the multilateral debt itself. And in the Paris Club, far from being of assistance to the individual developing countries negotiating debt reschedulings, these two institutions have been using that format by and large to add strength to their own conditionalities and pressure for reforms in the debtor countries towards the neo-liberal order.

Another area of difficult negotiations concerns the 'institutional area' issues that UNCTAD will be dealing with in the trade areas --the monitoring of the implementation of the Uruguay Round accords, the built-in agenda of liberalisation, and the new issues being mentioned for the trade agenda. The four majors (Canada, EU, Japan and the US) do not want UNCTAD (or for that matter any other UN body) to focus on the implementation issues -whether of difficulties of implementation for developing countries or partial or non-implementation of commitments by the industrialized world.

However their stance appears to be is nuanced - whether merely to postpone issues to the permanent machinery, where there will be less political pressure on them or in a genuinely conciliatory mood.

The EU appears to be willing to have a work programme for further work at UNCTAD on new issues, as appropriate. The US wants to have generally worded formulations on this front, rather than a listing of the areas of work.

While some of the developing countries are willing to find a compromise to help the US negotiators get pass the Congressional 'land-mines', they and others want to make sure that the general formulations does not result in a new battle over terms of reference of subsidiary bodies, as happenned after UNCTAD-8, that would paralyse the continuing machinery for a year or more.

The Japanese appear to be ambivalent -- suporting UNCTAD research and analytical work and policy advice to African and other poorly performing countries, using the successful staregies of East Asia, while at the same time having a hard stance on debt, trade and other issues.