WTO agenda setting complicated
SINGAPORE (JP): Singapore's Minister for Trade and Industry, Yeo Cheow Tong, suggested yesterday that rules be established to guide countries in determining which issues are relevant to be discussed at the World Trade Organization (WTO).
Yeo told the closing session of the two-day World Trade Congress here that without clear-cut rules, the first ministerial meeting of the WTO here in December might be overloaded with irrelevant issues.
Yeo pointed to the different stances between the developed and developing countries regarding emerging issues that should be brought up at the meeting.
He said that several of the issues which have been raised -- mostly by the developed countries -- should be tested to ascertain their relevance to international trade.
Among the most contentious issues preoccupying the discourses during the two-day meeting here were corruption, investment and competition rules and labor standards.
"The proponents of these issues should clearly and unambiguously demonstrate their linkage with trade. Otherwise, they would not be relevant for discussion at the WTO meeting," Yeo said.
The emerging trade-related issues are among the five-point agenda suggested by Singapore for the ministerial meeting. The others include a review of the implementation of commitments, an endorsement of the results of negotiations in services, a report from the Committee on Trade and Environment and the initiation of the preparatory process to advance work on built-in agenda.
He emphasized the fear on the part of the developing countries that the issues on the proposed agenda might divert WTO from its important task of implementing the agreements reached under the Uruguay Round negotiations, and of completing ongoing negotiations on unfinished business.
"We need a mechanism to systematically evaluate and -- where necessary -- incrementally address emerging issues within the WTO," he pointed out.
He argued that even some issues which were trade-related should be addressed by the WTO in an innovative and educative manner to help raise awareness among members to a common level.
The developed countries, however, see the upcoming ministerial meeting as the best opportunity to start negotiations on those issues, because the next ministerial meeting would not take place until 1998.
"By waiting for subject matter that is of obvious relevance to trade liberalization, we would run the risk of the WTO to be caught lagging far behind the reality of economic integration," Jean Pierre Landau, France's under-secretary for external economic relations at the ministry of economics and finance argued yesterday.
If that happened, Landau said, the WTO might become progressively irrelevant, whereas its main task is to be at the forefront of the moves towards greater integration.vin)