GOODS COUNCIL ACTS ON SINGAPORE MANDATE

8:49 AM Jan 27, 1997

GOODS COUNCIL ACTS ON SINGAPORE MANDATE
Geneva, 27 Jan (Chakravarthi Raghavan) -- The Council for Trade in Goods at the World Trade Organization, in terms of the decision of the Singapore Ministerial Conference on trade facilitation, asked the secretariat to advise the Council by March of the work being done in various international organizations in the area of trade facilitation.

By May, the secretariat will produce a complete report on which organizations have done or are doing work in the area of trade facilitation.

This agreement, on the proposal of the European Commission as a followup to the decision in this area of the Singapore Ministerial Conference, came at the Goods Council after some prolonged discussion on Nigeria's request seeking clarifications on the scope of the secretariat's work.

In other actions, the Council adopted a decision relating to the requirement of the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing that the members of the Textile Monitoring Body act in their "ad personam" capacities.

The Council decided Monday that WTO Members, who appoint TMB members under Art 8.1 of the ATC, "accept" that TMB members discharge their functions on an ad personam basis and not as government representatives.

"Consequently, they shall not give TMB members instructions, nor seek to influence them, with regard to matters before the TMB".

This will also apply to alternates.

On trade facilitation, a new issue proposed by the EC in the runup to Singapore, the Ministers decided to ask the Goods Council to undertake exploratory and analytical work, drawing on the work of other relevant international organizations, on the simplification of trade procedures in order to assess the scope for WTO rules in this area.

In its proposal for Singapore, the EC had asked for the WTO to give "political backing" to the trade facilitation being carried on in several international and regional organizations -- ranging from the 20-year old work of the UN's Economic Commission for Europe (an important work during the cold-war divisions), to the UN Conference on Trade and Development, and various regional groupings including the EC, ASEAN etc.

The EC envisages the WTO creating a coordinated approach among various bodies on trade/customs procedures and to ensure world-wide multisectoral coverage in this area.

However, this approach towards harmonization has not been received enthusiastically by other members, and several members (even after Singapore) have been questioning the scope for any WTO rule-making.

The discussion at the Council Monday seemed to reflect these.

In agreeing to the secretariat work, some countries like Nigeria, Egypt and Zimbabwe insisted that the work should not lead to the establishment of a working group or a working party, but be carried out by the Council.

Nigeria's request for 'clarification' of what the secretariat would do, seemed also related to the view that the secretariat should not have an open-ended mandate, but it should be carefully set out by the Council.