Dec 22, 1989

"STAGE SET FOR NEGOTIATIONS PROPER", SAYS DUNKEL.

GENEVA, DECEMBER 21 (BY CHAKRAVARTHI RAGHAVAN) -- As negotiator wound up Wednesday an intense phase of. post-midterm accord discussions, the major Industrial Nations and the GATT Director-General exuded an air of accomplishment, brushing aside Third World complaints of increasing imbalance in the negotiating processes.

At its meeting Wednesday night, the Uruguay Round Trade Negotiations Committee (TNC) formally set December 3-7 as the dates for the final Ministerial meeting of the TNC to be held in Brussels, when the agreements are to be wrapped up and the round concluded.

In line with the guidelines set in the midterm accord, and the work programme adopted by, the TNC and its subsidiary bodies, the period till December was set as the time for participants to table their proposals in various areas, and the period till July 1990 as one for the "second phase" of the negotiations to reach agreements.

At the TNC meeting, as also at the meeting of the Group of Negotiations on Goods (GNG) that preceded it, Third World delegates took the floor to complain of imbalance and lack of progress in areas of concern to them.

But the United States dismissed these complaints with the remark that "balance like beauty is in the eye of the beholder", and delegations using the term "imbalance" should not make it an excuse for not negotiating.

Participants at the TNC meeting said that while there were differences between the U.S. and the EEC on Agriculture and Tariffs, it was clear that there was now a growing convergence between the two in major areas and the new themes, and both were moving in the same direction against the interests of the Third World.

Like GATT meetings, meetings of the Uruguay Round including those of the GNG and TNC are "private", the GATT press office normally holds briefings, even though the main emphasis even at such briefings is on the viewpoints of the U.S. and EEC. But no briefings were held at the end of the TNC.

In summing up the outcome at his press conference Thursday morning, GATT Director-General Arthur Dunkel said that the "main message" of the year-end meetings of the TNC and the GNG was that negotiations had now reached a "turning point" and that the scene was set for negotiations proper to begin in 1990".

He told newsmen that over the next few months when they heard talks of "blockage" and "crisis", it really meant that delegations were negotiating "seriously". In his survey of what had been "accomplished", Mr. Dunkel did not make any reference to dissatisfactions expressed bv Third World delegates inside the TNC, and even suggested that there had been "more talk about the future" than of the past and what had been done.

When a correspondent for an Arab media specifically asked him about how he saw it in terms of "balance of interests" of Third World countries, Dunkel tried to play down the talk of imbalance (as U.S. and EEC had done inside the TNC) by telling newsman that during the process of negotiations, "we will hear complaints about the lack of balance", but that "the balance is totally different according to the position of each country".

Some, he said, might talk of lack of balance taking into account progress in Services and lack of it in Textiles, "but I would like to draw your attention to the fact that at least one representative of a developing country did express great satisfaction at the progress in the area of services, because that country had great interest in services".

Over the last few days, Dunkel added, the U.S. and EEC were very much aware of the areas of great interest to a number of Third world countries, and then mentioned textiles, agriculture, services, tropical products "and so on".

"The picture is more diversified than is made out when there is talk of imbalance between ICs and DCs", Dunkel declared.

"This is not a North-South or East-West round, but one where diversity of positions cuts across levels of development and geographical positions of countries".

Participants at this week's meeting, however said, that a number of Third World countries had taken the floor, some in GNG and some in the TNC, and some merely to ask for reflection of their GNG statements in the GNG, to make the point about the "imbalances".

The complaints did not merely reflect concerns over "market access", another observer said, but even the so-called "rulemaking" areas.

Indonesia, speaking for the Asian countries, reportedly complained that even here there had been "greater concentration (of effort) on rules of interest to the industrial countries rather than those of interest to the developing countries".

In a reference to those who had merely spoken of the deadlock in the area of "tariffs" (where there are U.S.-EEC differences) as a result of which the July 1989 deadline for agreeing on the modalities had not been settled even in December end, Chile reportedly pointed out that the lack of progress was not merely in Tariffs but in the entire area of "market access".

Some Third world delegations even noted that the interest of ICs in the "market access" areas only seemed to be to "open up Third World markets" to exports of ICs. A number of Third World countries also complained that the development dimension which was to be a central focus of the negotiations, with trade and increased export earnings being the engine of development for the Third world, had been totally ignored or brushed aside so far.

Dunkel as Chairman of the TNC, would appear to have said that negotiators should set themselves July as the deadline to reach agreements of substance in various negotiating areas, so that thereafter these could be drawn up in legal language and readied for adoption.

At his press conference Dunkel dismissed the EEC Position in the agriculture group that several of its points were "non-negotiable" by telling newsmen that the EEC delegate was talking through the agricultural group to the media, and via the media to his member-states, and that this was all part of the negotiating process.

Dunkel was confident that early in the new year, the tariff discussions would start and they would be able to reach an agreement, and that other "market access" groups would also move forward.