Indonesia calls for more fairness in WTO discussions
JAKARTA (JP): The World Trade Organization (WTO) should listen to all member countries if it does not want a repeat of the failure of the Seattle meeting, a senior trade official said here on Wednesday.
Hatanto Reksodiputro, director general of international institutions and trade at the Ministry of Industry and Trade, said it was very important that agreements in the WTO context were made with the involvement of all members.
"We can't just be told that we are required to abide by the WTO agreements without having been involved in and listened to in the process of the creation of the agreements themselves," he said.
"Everybody has to make their contribution. We have to sit together, and if it is about a new round (of talks), we have to be involved in planning the agenda of that new round," he said.
Hatanto said failure in Seattle had to be corrected by efforts to launch another forum with more transparency.
Hatanto mentioned that the WTO director general, Mike Moore, was scheduled to start a series of visits to member countries on Feb. 15 to gather their aspirations regrading WTO agreements.
"Indonesia is included in the list of countries to be visited whose views, opinions and interests will be heard," he said.
Hatanto also said Indonesia would propose improvements to the decision making mechanisms at WTO meetings.
"We want to see that every decision is made after considering the interests of all member countries through a transparent mechanism," he said.
He said he knew it was impossible that all 132 WTO member countries could be directly involved in every decision making process.
However, he suggested WTO could work with some criteria on which a representative method of decision making could be based.
"The interests of member countries could be grouped based on each country's location, for example. There could be representatives from Southeast Asia, South America and Europe," he said.
He stressed there would be no backroom deals between member countries in any future WTO forums.
"No, we will not allow that to happen again," he said.
Hatanto said in the past developing countries were not very well-informed and had found themselves cornered with their own doubts at WTO meetings.
Vocal member countries were invited to a separate room to negotiate for concessions kept secret from other member countries, he said.
"It is not like how it was in the past any more. Now all member countries come to WTO meetings to contribute their ideas and defend their own national interests," he said.
He said the situation had changed now; information was open and accessible worldwide so that countries could easily know what the positions of potential opponent countries were ahead of WTO meetings.
"We have plans to deal with those countries whose interests differ with ours, that is the developed countries," he said, citing the last WTO meeting in Seattle as evidence.
Developing nations would now always reject moves by developed countries to table labor and environmental issues at WTO meetings as the motivation for protectionism.
Following the Seattle failure, Hatanto said, certain countries had started to form groups or trading blocks among themselves.
"Singapore for example, as an ASEAN member country, is about to complete negotiations to form a Singapore-New Zealand free trade area,"
Others are Thailand with South Korea and Japan with Thailand.
"The current conditions are such that we have to monitor closely what is going on in our neighborhood. We will probably have to make such moves ourselves," he said.
He hinted that the countries with which Indonesia might choose first to build bilateral free trade relations were Japan, South Korean and China.
On the ASEAN level, Indonesia was thinking about building a links between AFTA (the Asian Free Trade Association) and the Australia-New Zealand CER (Close Economic Relations), said Hatanto.
However, he maintained Indonesia should still stick with the concept of multilateralism despite the current proliferation of bilateral ties. (udi)