WTO trade talks slanted against poor nations: Brazil

from the Khaleej Times

GENEVA - The long-running Doha round of trade talks cannot succeed unless developing countries get a fair deal reflecting their needs, Brazil’s Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said on Wednesday.

Amorim told a news conference that the talks were still slanted too much in favour of rich countries.

‘I can’t come to a place in which everyone’s sensitivity is taken into account and my own sensitivity is not taken into account,’ he said. ‘That’s not fair and one thing that we’ll be demanding is fairness.’

The Doha round has made faltering progress on the complex and technical rules governing world trade. But the key outlines of any deal are clear.

The United States would cut its trade-distorting farm subsidies and the European Union would cut its farm tariffs, both creating more opportunities for developing countries on the global market for agricultural produce.

In return developing nations would cut tariffs on industrial goods to open their markets to companies from rich countries.
Big gains

As an emerging agricultural superpower, Brazil stands to be one of the big gainers of the Doha round, launched six years ago to free up world trade and help developing countries export their way out of poverty.

But Amorim said the benefits for developing countries were still not clear in the current negotiations, based on compromise texts issued in July by the chairmen of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks in agriculture and industry.

‘With the European Union the way the formulas are being calculated we don’t know what we will get. I know what I won’t get—I won’t get opening because the tariff cuts will still be very limited,’ he said.

If rich countries are allowed to treat only 4 percent of products as sensitive, or reserved for special treatment, that would be enough to exclude almost all the products Brazil is interested in selling, he said.

Rich countries say major developing countries like Brazil are resisting meaningful cuts in their industrial tariffs.

But Amorim said that a deal would involve Brazil cutting many of the actual industrial tariffs it applies, not just the maximum potential levels countries agree to bind in the talks.

‘Even when you take the applied rates ... we are offering more in NAMA than the rich countries are offering in terms of trade creation as a proportion of our total trade,’ he said, referring to industry by the WTO term Non-Agricultural Market Access.

Amorim was speaking after meeting the WTO ambassadors of the Group of 20 (G-20) developing countries, which groups major players like China, India and South Africa as well as Brazil.

Brazil has invited G-20 ministers to meet in Geneva on Nov. 15. Amorim said he hoped this would ensure their voice was heard in the revised texts that the WTO negotiating chairmen are issuing in the middle of next month.