Indonesia calls for more fairness in WTO discussions

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)