Upholding the interest of LDCs

World Trade Organisation (WTO) Director-General Roberto Azevêdo is now in town. Significant as it is, the visit, the first by the new WTO boss, is likely to familiarise him up-close with the issues Bangladesh is fraught with for quite sometime. Since the WTO ministerial conference held in Bali, Indonesia last year, the Director General has been hoping for things to turn more and more congenial for implementation of the DDA (Doha Development Agenda) work programme. He has been holding meetings, visiting countries, talking to stakeholders of all hues so that what has been achieved at Bali should now be worked on to deliver the results for the collective benefit of all WTO members.
Himself a long time trade negotiator for Brazil, Azevêdo had experienced the pains of negotiating on uneven planes, and, like most negotiators of the developing world, suffered the pangs of well-crafted texts that often tend to be soothing to the ear with hardly any mandate to follow up.
Given the complex and at times tortuously time-consuming culture of international trade negotiations, the outcome of the Bali ministerial no doubt speaks volumes about the painstaking effort of the director general in having all stakeholders on board while trying to address some of the longstanding issues of the Doha Round.  In fact, success of the Bali ministerial may be seen primarily in its being able to revive the Doha talks and strike a deal for advancing future negotiations. That the stalled talks are on for negotiations is no mean achievement, and as has been rightly said, this has 'saved the WTO from becoming a defunct organisation.'
The question now is: how far will the efforts of the director general go in the way of promoting the interest of the least developed countries (LDCs), especially in easing their conditions in the global trading atmosphere? Issues of importance to the LDCs at Bali included, among others, duty-free quota-free (DFQF) market access, monitoring mechanism on special and differential (S&D) treatment, preferential treatment to services and service suppliers of LDCs in terms of waiver, preferential rules of origin, Aid for Trade etc. Most of the deals, as many analysts agree, are left to 'best endeavour' spirit, dependent on how the developed-country members wish to define and determine their levels of delivery. Hence, lack of binding commitment does not inspire optimism for the deals to be implemented, as they stand now.
True, the DFQF market access provision, the key concern of the LDCs, has been much diluted from what it was in the Hong Kong ministerial declaration in 2005. Although the Bali ministerial declaration recalls the crucial decision of DFQF market access for the LDCs (mentioned in Decision 36, Annex- F) of the Hong Kong ministerial, it has relegated the prospect of LDC's full DFQF market access to the confines of the 'contentious' 97 per cent of goods in tariff lines originating from the LDCs, that too in an unbinding manner. The formulation of the Bali declaration in this regard says: 'Developed-country Members that do not yet provide duty-free and quota-free market access for at least 97% of products originating from LDCs, defined at the tariff line level, shall seek to improve their existing duty-free and quota-free coverage for such products, so as to provide increasingly greater market access to the LDCs, prior to the next Ministerial Conference'--(WT/MIN(13)/W/16). Clearly, implementation of full DFQF treatment is no longer a binding obligation; even fulfilment of 97 per cent appears to be non-binding. The DG may hear more about the issue during his discussions with stakeholders in Dhaka.
The DFQF issue is integrally linked to the issue of rules of origin which need to be simplified to facilitate LDC exports. The text of the agreement reads, 'given the limited productive capacity in the LDCs, it is desirable to keep the level of value addition threshold as low as possible, while ensuring that it is the LDCs that receive the benefit of the preferential trade arrangements. It is noted that the LDCs seek consideration of allowing foreign inputs to a maximum of 75% of value in order for a good to qualify for benefits under LDC preferential trade arrangements'-- (WT/MIN(13)/W/4. There is nothing in it in the form of commitment to engage the donor countries in any binding commitment.
Aid for trade - another significant product of the Hong Kong ministerial - has only been touched upon with no concrete actions to be taken. The aims of the aid for trade package are to bring greater coherence to existing trade-support programmes and to generate additional funds to assist developing countries to build supply capacity and trade-related skills so that they can adjust to the post-Doha trading environment. Since the Aid for Trade programme is yet to take off in the key areas it was meant for, the Bali deal was expected to suggest meaningful action programmes, beyond simply recognising 'the continuing need of Aid for Trade for developing countries,  in particular the LDCs'-- (WT/MIN(13)/W/5).
The decision on the LDC services waiver (WT/MIN(13)/W/15) calls for convening a high-level meeting of the Council for Trade and Services six months after the submission of an LDC collective request identifying the sectors and modes of supply of particular export interest to them. At that meeting, developed and developing Members, in a position to do so, shall indicate sectors and modes of supply where they intend to provide preferential treatment to the LDC services and service suppliers. In the absence of a transparent principle to be followed by the Council, it seems to be complex and fraught with challenges for both sides to work out a mechanism to proceed in a meaningful way.       
These being some of the ramifications, one has reasons to worry whether the Bali package, despite its success to renew negotiations on the stalled Doha issues, is going to deliver positively for countries like Bangladesh? The basic premise of an agreement is that it has to be implementable by rules guiding its course. Now, if rhetoric predominates the decisions with little or no scope for implementation, the entire exercise is bound to be self-defeating.
Director General Azevêdo has already proved that he loves to take challenges. As the chief coordinator at the world trade body to set things in motion, he deftly steered a number of critical issues (public stockholding for food security being the most remarkable one), and in the run up to post-Bali Work Programme, Bangladesh hopes he would continue to prevail as a powerful catalyst to protect the interests of the LDCs. It may be worthwhile to recall his statement at the WTO General Council on May 12 when he called upon the members 'to get ready -- it's time to start putting our Work Programme (on concluding the Doha Round) together ... You'll be seeing me constantly and I will be inviting you -- individually or in groups -- for some difficult and frank conversations.' He also said more pointedly about taking 'our work into a new phase, focused on resolving the problems that we have been outlining, testing what went wrong and putting forward potential solutions.'
As Bangladesh welcomes Director General Azevêdo, it wishes him all the best in his endeavour in shaping things as they should be.
wasiahmed.bd@hotmail.com