URUGUAY ROUND HAS ENTERED "CONCLUDING PHASE", SAYS DUNKEL.

Nov 11, 1991

URUGUAY ROUND HAS ENTERED "CONCLUDING PHASE", SAYS DUNKEL.

GENEVA, NOVEMBER 7 (CHAKRAVARTHI RAGHAVAN) – "We have now entered into the concluding phase of the Uruguay Round negotiations", GATT Director-General Arthur Dunkel announced to newsmen thursday after an official-level meeting of the Trade Negotiations Committee where he called for "continuous and simultaneous" negotiations starting Monday in all the seven negotiating groups.

Dunkel told newsmen that this had been agreed to and everyone was working to a deadline, namely concluding the Round before end of the year.

He told the TNC that the continuous negotiations would be with a view to establishing agreed texts in individual areas and "by the end of this month, on the understanding that nothing is final till everything is agreed, we must be in a position to consider in the TNC the results achieved across the Board".

While publicly echoing similar sentiments, many delegates however remained sceptics. They noted that, privately, Dunkel too was admitting that his public optimistic statements are now increasingly losing credibility with the media and the business community.

Apart from the need, as head of the GATT secretariat, to keep things going, Dunkel is also known to have been persuaded by the U.S. and EC negotiators (Warren Lavorel of the U.S. and Hugo Paemen of EC who met him jointly) to put a positive gloss, particularly in the light of the saturday U.S.-EC summit at the Hague.

Dunkel referred at his press conference to the scheduled weekend U.S.-EC summit meetings (between President Bush and EC Commission President Jacques Delors) where the Uruguay Round will be high on the agenda, the commitments of the U.S. and EC to conclude the Round by the end of the year, the demands and pressures from the business community for early conclusion of the Round and the support for it from the Finance Ministers at the recent Fund/Bank meetings.

Dunkel even cited the consumers organisations in support, though the statement of the International Organisation of Consumers Unions and the Bureau of the European Union of Consumers, on major issues, were diametrically opposed to what the U.S., EC, the GATT and the transnational enterprises are pushing for through the round.

It was clear from his statements that Dunkel's hopes for ending the Round hinges on the U.S. and the EC reaching a modus vivendi on their various differences, and particularly in agriculture, and being able to persuade others to accept it and push through a final package.

Tempering his hopes thursday was a report in the U.S. Mission daily bulletin on the U.S.-EC bilateral agricultural talks, which quoted a U.S. trade official as saying that while the U.S. and EC had made some progress in resolving their differences "much more is needed" if the Uruguay Round talks were to avoid collapse.

The U.S. official was also quoted as cautioning against expecting "any major developments" from the meeting thursday in Brussels of U.S. Agriculture Secretary Edward Madigan and EC Agriculture Commissioner Ray MacSharry and saying that if no further real progress was made before Christmas, and without considerably greater effort over the next few months, the Uruguay Round "is going to die".

Dunkel told the TNC, and his press conference, that the negotiators had just about five weeks in their "last window of opportunity" to conclude the Round.

Blurring the various negotiating areas, he presented his stock-taking under four headings (market access, rule making, agriculture and textiles and institutional issues), but conceded that in an MTN with "such a degree of ambition and foresight", every detail mattered, and referred in this connection to the detailed annotated agenda of issues to be resolved.

He supplemented his six-page "stock-taking" statement at the TNC with an 11-page annotated agenda of the issues in the various negotiating areas where substantial breakthroughs were needed to bring the negotiations to a successful conclusion.

But to gloss over the long list of items needing solutions, items which have been on the table since before the Brussels meeting and with signs of little movement in the nine months of negotiations since February, Dunkel said the size of the document was misleading since it took more space to describe a problem than write a solution for it.

He tried to project a similar picture to newsmen and told them they should not see the documents as a list of problem areas and that each one of the many questions listed there could be solved in five minutes if there was political will.

However, a cursory glance through that 11-page text suggested to careful observers that many of them were very basic and fundamental, particularly in the light of the hopes raised or promises given by the governments to domestic lobbies in the major Industrial countries and not easy of solutions.

To the TNC, Dunkel noted that the Ministers at Brussels had been expected to conclude the round on the basis of the draft Final Act (MTN.TNC/W/35/Rev 1) and that he was now suggesting several weeks for negotiators to achieve the same goal, namely, a complete revision of this text.

Through October and on November 1, the GATT spokesman had envisaged all the negotiations on texts to be concluded by end of November, but with negotiations on market access, initial commitments on services and institutional issues continuing into January and perhaps early February, so as to complete and conclude the negotiations by end February.

Dunkel's statement to the TNC today merely suggested that as a result of the simultaneous and continuous negotiations to establish agreed texts in all the areas, and on the understanding that nothing was final until everything was agreed, by end of November the TNC should be in a position to consider the results achieved across the board.

Negotiators, while agreeing that if there was political will many of the problems and issues posed could be resolved very quickly, suggested however that there was just no way of concluding the market access negotiations until compromises in agriculture were clearly there.

Also, until the market access situation was clear many Third World countries would continue to insist on square-bracketed texts in other areas and not give anything away, since once they agreed even tentatively it would be impossible for them to go back if they were not satisfied in the market access areas.

At the TNC, after the Dunkel's statement, Morocco's Amb. El Ghali Benhima, chairman of the informal group of developing countries, made a statement about Third World concerns and said that the outcome would have no real significance for the developing world without real amelioration of market access for products of particular export interest to the Third World and that if the situation remained as it currently was the Round in peril.

Benhima's statement, which received warm praise from Dunkel at his press conference, was however less specific than what had been expected by the developing countries who at their meeting on Tuesday had mandated him to make several points.

At the informal group meeting, Benhima had been asked to outline specifically concerns over a number of issues including market access questions, the issues in rule-making areas, the lack of transparency and negotiations being conducted elsewhere than in the negotiating structures and to give opportunity to all countries to participate in the negotiations.