NAIROBI, Dec 19: Members of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) finally reached a 'compromise deal' on Saturday afternoon after lots of haggling on sticking points at the 10th ministerial conference (MC10) in the capital city of Kenya.
The Nairobi Ministerial Declaration was adopted in the formal closing session in the evening at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre, the venue of the meeting.
Conference chairperson Amina Mohamed, also the Kenyan cabinet secretary for trade, presided over the session. Director-General of the WTO Roberto Azevedo also delivered his valedictory speech.
The declaration made a mention of the differences among the members on continuation of the Doha Round of global trade negotiations, started way back in 2001.
As members failed to bridge the gaps on agriculture as well as continuation of the Doha Round Friday, the scheduled closing day of the conference, the talk ultimately entered into an extended time up to Saturday. Negotiators had worked until Saturday morning to reach a consensus on preparing a clean ministerial text for declaration.
Mr Tofail Ahmed, commerce minister of Bangladesh and also the coordinator of LDC group in the WTO, told journalists on Saturday morning, before leaving for Dhaka, that Bangladesh lost nothing as under the WTO framework all the LDCs already had received extensions of TRIPS waiver for pharmaceuticals up to 2033.
The declaration made a mention of this on a note of welcome.
"We have come here with an exception that we will move ahead to implement Hong Kong Ministerial and Bali Ministerial decisions," he said. "But we finally cut the expectations."
In part-II of the declaration, which bears the core decision, two LDC issues are mentioned. These are: preferential rules of origin and preferential treatment in services trade.
Thus the ministerial declaration agreed on relaxed rules of origin (ROO) for the exports of the least-developed countries (LDCs) and also services waiver. These two are considered gainful outcomes by the Bangladeshi trade minister.
But the declaration skipped commercially meaningful Duty-Free Quota-Free (DFQF) market access for the LDCs, reflecting the US stance on not allowing cent per cent DFQF for all LDCs under the WTO framework.
In reality, the US is the only developed country yet to provide full DFQF to Bangladesh, Nepal and Cambodia. Thus, clothing, the major exportable of these countries, is facing tariff peaks.
An analysis prepared by the WTO reveals that 82.6 per cent of the LDC products get DFQF access to the US market. But, on country-to-country basis, it varies.
For instance, the US provides 97.5 per cent DFQF access for African LDC beneficiaries under the US African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). Haiti also benefits from DFQF market access to the US through the Caribbean Basin Trade Partnership Act (CBTPA).
Rapid analysis, however, shows that the Nairobi Declaration doesn't consolidate the Bali Package for the LDCs.
The major issues of deadlock were reduction in agriculture subsidy and continuation of the Doha Round of trade negotiations.
Developing countries, led by China and India, argued that there should be legal provision to impose a special safeguard mechanism (SSM) to contain sudden or unexpected unforeseen surges in the imports of subsidised farm products.
They also demanded that a work programme must be there to reach permanent solution for public stockholding schemes for food security.
Finally, they pushed for eliminating subsidies on agriculture export provided by the developed countries.
On the other hand, the United States (US) and the European Union (EU) argued that there should be no mention of the Doha ministerial decisions in the Nairobi declaration as the 14-year prolonged negotiations failed to bring forth expected outcome. By this, they actually wanted to ditch the Doha negotiations with lot of decided tasks unfinished.
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