Nov 23, 1988
MAJOR NEGOTIATIONS FOR MINISTERS AT MONTREAL
GENEVA, NOVEMBER 22 (IFDA/CHAKRAVARTHI RAGHAVAN)-- Third world participants in the Uruguay round appear to have won some tactical success at GATT this week in ensuring that the Montreal Ministerial mid-term review meeting would have composite texts, reflecting all view points and with clear options, to help ministers in their negotiations and decisions. This position became clear after the adoption, Monday night, by the Group of Negotiations on Goods (GNG) of its report for the Montreal meeting outlining recommendation in the area of trade in goods. The recommendations cover 12 of the 14 areas falling within the GATT MTNS in goods. Recommendations on tropical products and agriculture are yet to be readied and resumably would be provided directly by their respective chairman, who would draw up their reports after informal consultations within their group. The agriculture report would also appear to be dependent on decisions to be taken by the EEC Council of Ministers and some direct talks going on between the U.S. and EEC. The report of the separate negotiations on "trade in services" is still being negotiated within the Group of Negotiations an Services (GNS) and is expected to be adopted later this week. Third world participants said tuesday morning that while the Montreal agenda will by very heavy - with at least ten issues needing decisions by Ministers, as against only two at Punta del Este the assertion by the GNG of its role (against U.S. wishes) and the entire process had now ensured that Ministers will be faced with composite texts and clear options, and no one's viewpoint would be ab inito shut off as a basis. Several participants from the industrial and third world countries viewed the heavy agenda for Montreal as a "messy situation". But GATT spokesman, David Woods, in briefing newsmen Tuesday morning, sought to put a glass and painted an optimistic picture. He cited President Reagan’s speech to the U.S. chamber of commerce, where Reagan had said that the mid-term review had already focussed attention and accelerated the trade talks and that by the time Ministers met at Montreal the meeting would already have succeeded. This, Woods said, was also the GATT secretariat's view. The GNG report represented the present stage of negotiations. There were several areas of substantive agreements where ministers had merely to adopt the recommendations. There were others where the Ministers had clear options, and a third category where negotiations would have to continue between now and Montreal. Woods put in the-first category recommendations (procedural for continuance of negotiations) on subsidies and non-tariff measures. In the second, he listed some "institutional" issues like dispute settlement and Functioning Of the GATT System (FOGS), and put in the third agriculture and Trade-Related Intellectual Property Issues (TRIPS) where further negotiations would be needed between now and Montreal. The GNG report, while it has no recommendations on agriculture, has four options with square brackets in TRIPS. It has also square bracketed texts on tariffs, textiles and clothing, and safeguards - areas where there are sharp differences between industrial and third world countries. But the GATT spokesman was not very forthcoming as to how he would characterise these areas and differences. While he was not specific, the impression was left that the GATT secretariat hoped these "controversial" problems would disappear and not figure too much at Montreal. On the TRIPS issue, the GNG report has square bracketed texts in respect of recommendations of the chairman of the group, Amb. Lars Anell of Sweden, on his own responsibility, and those of Brazil, U.S.A. and Switzerland. The GNG put all the four an on equal footing, after third world participants objected to the formulation in the draft report that the chairman's texts had been considered by a number of participants as a "basis" for negotiations and/or decisions by Ministers. The draft had described the other texts merely as those put forward "by some participants for consideration and/or decision by Ministers". The GATT spokesman said that during discussion in GNG on the TRIPS report, India and Brazil, supported by a large-number of third world countries had referred to their earlier statement in July on issue. They expressed concern that there were a number of proposals in the texts for Montreal that exceeded the limits of the negotiating mandate. Other sources said that besides India and Brazil Thailand, Peru, Colombia, Tanzania, Cuba, Yugoslavia, Egypt, Nigeria, Chile and Nicaragua spoke in the same strain. All of them said that the chairman's texts did not adequately reflect the outcome in the group, and had not taken account of the views of third world participants. The TRIPS negotiations should only deal with "trade-related" aspects of intellectual property, and issue of substantive norms could not be dealt with in the GATT and Uruguay round. Jamaica agreed with the others that the chairman's texts could not be "a basis" for negotiations by Ministers, but reserved its position an the other texts, which had been put forward too late for adequate consideration in the GNG. In a more general intervention Jamaica also questioned the usefulness of section two of the GNG report where chairmen of individual negotiating groups had sought to provide summaries of work in the negotiating groups over two years, and which did not adequately reflect what had happened in these groups. In Jamaica’s view there was no need for such reports, since the full records of each negotiating group were there, and no summary could do justice to the nuances of various positions, and no such section should be there in future reports. Morocco supported this view, and said that these "descriptive" statements of the chairmen could not bind any of the governments, even if there had been no square brackets placed around them and no one had objected to them. The EEC delegate, Tran Van-Thinh would appear to have set off an uproar among the Africa-Caribbean-Pacific States grouped in the lame agreement, by suggesting that these states too would have to contribute to the liberalisation of trade in tropical products through erosion of their lame preferences in the EEC. The other third world countries and other industrial countries too would have to contribute, he added. A number of ACP representatives, particularly from Africa, reportedly took the floor criticising the EEC and making clear that their lame privileges could not be affected or erode by the Uruguay round. Other participants said that the EEC intervention appeared to be a calculated provocation aimed at creating a rift within the third world nations in the GATT. They noted that earlier Tran had said that while the industrial nations had gone to Punta del Este united and the third world nations had been divided, now on the eve of Montreal it was the other way round. This was seen as a reference to the common position of third world nations on issues like textiles and clothing and TRIPS. Participants said these remarks also seemed to be aimed at the United States. The EEC’s message was seen as a warning to the U.S. that by its "increasing irrationality" in efforts to achieve results at Montreal that would be acceptable to the U.S., even if other industrial nations did not agree with it, the U.S. was dividing the industrial nations stance against the third world and paving the way for lack of success at Montreal. The EEC complaint would appear to have been particularly provoked by the U.S. stand on agriculture and the hormone dispute over meat imports into the EEC. On textiles and clothing, Tran would appear to have remarked that the MFA had been in farce for 28 years and its phasing down would occupy equally long time. All countries, in his contentions, had contributed to the present state of the textiles and clothing industry, and all would have to "contribute" to obtain a balanced result in this area. He also argued that the MFA had not been without merits, and had helped industry in the north and new entrants in the south.