ISSUES

 

Agriculture                    

  • The coverage of agricultural products has been defined in Annex 1 to the WTO’s Agriculture Agreement. Agriculture does not include fish and forestry. Whether a product is considered as agricultural product depends on its degree of processing.
  • On agricultural issues, member states stressed in Hong Kong in December 2005 their commitment to the Doha Ministerial Declaration and the Frameworkadopted in Geneva by the General Council on 1 August 2004. The long-term objective of the Doha agreement was to “establish a fair and market-orientated trading system”. Members reaffirmed their will to establish strengthened rules in order to correct and prevent restrictions and distortions in the global agricultural market. This programme required deepened negotiations on improvements in market access; reductions of any kind of export subsidies (with a view to their phasing out); and significant reductions in trade-distorting domestic support.
  • Domestic Support(or internal support or domestic subsidies), in general, are a form of support that is not directly linked to exports. Particularly in agriculture, this form of internal support is intended to maintain producer prices above prices on the global market. They may include direct payments to producers such as deficiency payments, and measures to reduce input and marketing costs.
  • Export Subsidieshelp an exporting producer to reduce export costs. As a consequence producers can export to foreign markets which they could not access before. The Hong Kong Declaration aims at the “parallel elimination of all forms of export subsidies and disciplines on all export measures with equivalent effect”. This process should be completed by the end of 2013.
  • Market Access
    The objective of the negotiations is to define the modalities for the reduction or the elimination of tariffs (including reduction and elimination of tariff peaks, high tariffs, tariff escalation, or non-tariff barriers) as well as non-tariff barriers that may be used as obstacles to trade. The Hong Kong Ministerial Declaration puts a special emphasis on the products that matter in the export of developing countries. Developing countries are given a certain flexibility “to self-designate an appropriate number of tariff lines as Special Products guided by indicators based on the criteria of food security, livelihood security and rural development”. Developing countries have as well the right to have recourse to a Special Safeguard Mechanism based on import quantities and price triggers.

NAMA (non-agricultural market access)

  • NAMA concerns all the products that are not covered by the Agreement on Agriculture, i.e.industrial or manufactured goods, fish and derived products, forestry products, fuels and mining products. NAMA, makes up to nearly 90% of global merchandise exports.
  • The objective of the NAMA negotiations is to define the modalities for the reduction or the elimination of tariffs (including reduction and elimination of tariff peaks, high tariffs, tariff escalation) or non-tariff barriers that may be used as obstacles to trade, with a special emphasis on products that matter to exporting developing countries (e.g. by less than full reciprocity in reduction commitments).
  • Non-tariff barriers (NTBs)   generally refer to means other than a tariff by which a domestic industry is protected (e.g. health reasons).
  • Tariff or NTB reduction or elimination should proceed along a non-linear formula with certain coefficients that takes into account the special ends and interests of developing and least-developed countries (the so-called Swiss formula ).
  • In Hong Kong, Ministers instructed their negotiators to ensure that negotiations should be led with a “comparably high level of ambition in market access for Agriculture and NAMA” (known as “balance between Agriculture and NAMA”).

Services                         

  • Services cover a dynamic sector of a very broad range of activities in both developed and developing countries and are critical for any economy. As services matter as well with regards to the production of goods, the services sector is already contributing more to economic growth and job creation worldwide than any other sector. No country can prosper today without an effective services sector. The Uruguay Round of Trade Negotiations has included services through the General Agreement on Trade in Services(GATS) .
  • The services negotiations, which are based on requests and offers, have been pursued both bilaterallyand plurilaterally (i.e. either between two individual states or on the basis of joint requests by a certain number of countries to another group of countries). Since March 2003 some 70 WTO Members have submitted their initial services offers to other Members and since May 2005 some 30 Members have submitted their revised offers.
  • The Hong Kong Ministerial Declaration urged Members to participate actively in the DDA services negotiations in order to promote economic growth by achieving a progressively higher level of liberalization of trade in services, with appropriate flexibility for individual developing and least-developed countries.
  • The objective of the negotiations is to create new real business opportunities for the service providers in developed countries and in emerging economies. With regard to the least developed countries, the EU requests them to take commitments in only a limited number of sectors, which would underpin their economic development, such as telecommunication, financial, transport, construction and environmental services.
  • The WTO agreements distinguish four different modes of supply and consumption in the international trade in services: (1) cross-border supply, (2) consumption abroad, (3) foreign commercial presence, (4) movement of natural persons.

Other issues                  

   Apart from agriculture, NAMA and services, there are other negotiations on different items (15 all in all), such as:

  • Geographical indicators (GIs)identify products by referring to place names or words. This reference to the regional origin intends to stress a specific quality, property, or reputation of a particular good or service deriving from that place (e.g. “Champagne”, “Parmesan”, or “Feta”). Exceptions do exist however for geographical names that have become common (“generic”) or names that have already become a trademark. Wines and spirits thus are a major subject in GI negotiations.
  • Rules negotiations (or disciplines) deal mainly with anti-dumping and countervailing measures (deriving from GATT Art. 6, a.k.a. Anti-dumping agreement) and with subsidies and countervailing measures (deriving from the eponymous agreement). Disciplines on fisheries subsidies represent another eminent part of the rules negotiations. The general aim of the negotiations is to clarify and improve disciplines of the existing agreements. Additionally, WTO rules require regional trade agreements to meet specific conditions. This concerns most of WTO members as they often belong to regional trade agreements. The latter can play a crucial role in economic development.
  • Trade facilitation  concerns so-called informal or non-tariff barriers. After the minimization of tariff barriers, the lack of information on issues such as customs procedures or import/export regulations can hamper trade. Trade facilitation is intended to simplify trade procedures (i.e. expedite the movement, release and clearance of goods, including goods in transit) through the rationalisation of procedures, documentation, and information flows and through enhanced technical assistance and capacity building. Facilitation should lead to transparency and predictability and enhance cooperation and coordination in border crossing. Amongst other obstacles that need to be surmounted are corruption, lacking human and financial resources and deficient infrastructures.