WTO members gear up for focused agri talks next year

In light of the General Council decisions, WTO member states met on 4 December to discuss the way forward for the agriculture negotiations under the Doha Round.

by Kanaga Raja

GENEVA: An informal open-ended meeting of the Special Session of the WTO Committee on Agriculture on 4 December saw members welcoming the previous week’s General Council decisions in particular on public stockholding for food security purposes and on the post-Bali work.

According to trade officials, they also voiced their views on the way ahead for the future work of the Committee arising from these decisions, and committing renewed energy to meeting the two relevant deadlines in 2015.

The decision on public stockholding for food security purposes has set the Committee the target of agreeing on a permanent solution on public stockholding by 31 December 2015, while the decision on preparing a post-Bali work programme for concluding the Doha Round (which also includes the issue of agriculture) has set a deadline of July 2015.

Trade officials said that there was no discussion at the informal meeting on the substance of the permanent solution on the public stockholding issue, with the Chair of the Special Session remarking that the comments of members did not take the negotiations any further forward than the last meeting of the Committee on 23 July.

“I think for those who had forgotten the issues and the positions of each other on those issues, the meeting served a useful purpose, at least to bring us back to where we were, although I don’t think it’s really given us a clear indication of where we will go – that will need a significant change from where we are now,” said the Chair, Ambassador John Adank of New Zealand.

Future work plans

In his opening statement at the informal meeting, the Chair said that the purpose of the meeting was to review and discuss the organization of the future work programme across all aspects of the Committee’s mandate, including the decisions taken by the General Council on 27 November on post-Bali work and on public stockholding for food security purposes.

Referring to these two General Council decisions, Ambassador Adank said it was clear that “we have substantial work to progress in 2015 in the period ahead, with deadlines indicated for this work.”

He did not expect any intense work to start before the new year, but the purpose of the 4 December meeting was to give members an opportunity to express their initial views on how they may best prepare for the way ahead, “so as to leave you time over the year-end break to reflect on those views and come back ready to engage in intensive discussions.”

The Chair said that he would convene further meetings in the new year taking into account what was heard from the members at the 4 December meeting and any further consultations with members that may be held in coming weeks before the Committee next convened.

The Chair recalled that when members last met at the end of July, he had informed them about his informal consultations, aimed at clarifying the different perspectives members had on the way forward for the Bali work programme in agriculture.

As he had reported on 23 July, it was clear that all elements within the DDA agriculture framework are inter-related and there seemed to be a general acceptance that they will need to be dealt with as an overall package.

He had also commented that he felt that in terms of potential landing zones, the product of the past negotiations on export competition seemed to be accepted as an important basis for further work in this area, something that he thought ministers clearly underlined in their declaration on export competition in Bali.

However, it was also recognized that the domestic support and market access pillars – where he thought a range of significantly more contentious issues had been raised in discussions – were areas requiring more in-depth discussion among members.

Therefore, to take these discussions forward, he had circulated on 15 July a set of questions concerning these two pillars and encouraged members to reflect on them.

On domestic support, the questions to members were:

l “How do you see the various elements in the domestic support pillar now, particularly as they relate to level(s) of ambition, flexibilities, and the contributions envisaged for different members?

l “If you consider that some aspects/elements from past negotiations need to be reconsidered while still achieving the stated mandate, what alternative approaches would you suggest?”

On market access, the questions were:

l “How do you see the elements in the market access pillar now, particularly as they relate to level(s) of ambition and flexibilities, and the contributions envisaged for different members?

l “If you consider that some aspects/elements from past negotiations need to be reconsidered, while still achieving the stated mandate, what alternatives would you suggest should be explored?

l “Some members have suggested that a ‘simplified approach’ to market access might achieve an appropriate level of ambition while providing general flexibility for members. What would/might such an approach involve? What would this mean in terms of outcomes compared with approaches evolved in the past?

l “Do you see any other ways of assisting in achieving the stated mandate?”

According to the Chair, on 23 July, some members did provide initial reactions to these questions. But it was also clear that other members appeared somewhat constrained to engage more deeply in this discussion, given the fact not only that they may have felt that their own thoughts would need to evolve over a longer period of time, but also that it was still unclear at that time, and had remained unclear until very recently, how the impasse over public stockholding and trade facilitation would be resolved.

“Happily that is now resolved and behind us,” Ambassador Adank said, adding that he continued to think that these questions should provide a useful focus for further reflection and exchange of views among members as they approach the process for moving forward.

“So that’s where things were left four and a half months ago. It’s useful for members to reacquaint themselves with all of that at this point, because we need to build on where we got to, rather than start from scratch again. We need to take account of the discussions we had earlier in the year and try and work out how we can move forward according to the Bali mandate and now the more recent General Council decisions on post-Bali work and public stockholding for food security purposes,” said the Chair.

Members’ positions

Various member delegations then put forward their views at the 4 December meeting.

According to trade officials, the Cairns Group of agricultural exporters called for ambitious outcomes with respect to the work programme.

A number of delegations called for focus on the remaining difficult issues in the December 2008 Rev.4 draft agriculture modalities text without “destabilizing” the rest of the text.

According to trade officials, Japan called for disciplines on export restrictions.

Some delegations also suggested different types of meetings to enable a consensus on the work programme, including technical meetings or sessions involving ambassadors or officials from capitals.

According to trade officials, India welcomed the breakthrough on the Trade Facilitation Agreement/food security issue, saying that this had reestablished faith in the multilateral trading system.

It referred to the development mandate and called on members not to “reinvent the wheel”,  in an apparent reference to using the Rev.4 draft modalities text of December 2008. It said that the focus should be on the 10 outstanding issues from that text.

On the issue of public stockholding for food security purposes, India believed there would be earnest discussions for concluding a permanent solution by 31 December 2015. It suggested basing the discussions on the G33’s July proposal on this issue, and said that the discussions should start in January next year.

Indonesia, speaking for the G33, said that the proposals on Special Products (SP) and the Special Safeguard Mechanism (SSM) should be in the work programme.

(At the 23 July meeting, the G33 had introduced three proposals – on public stockholding, on SP, and on the SSM.)

The SSM was among the outstanding issues from the Rev.4 text, Indonesia said, adding that the issue of SP was stabilized and could be seen as low-hanging fruit. It urged members to engage and make proposals on the 10 outstanding issues.

Brazil, on behalf of the G20, said that the Rev.4 modalities text remained the basis for the negotiations. Intensive work in different formats would be needed, it added. It stressed that agriculture remained a key determinant for the level of ambition, and that there was a need for balance in all three pillars of the agriculture negotiations (export competition, domestic support and market access).

Lesotho, for the African Group, stressed the importance of special and differential treatment, the development dimension, as well as balance across all three pillars in agriculture. It called for prioritization of the non-legally binding outcomes from Bali. It stressed that the Rev.4 text should be the basis for the negotiations. It also highlighted the importance of food security for net food-importing developing countries.

Burkina Faso, on behalf of the Cotton-4 grouping, stressed on the Hong Kong Ministerial Declaration of 2005 and the Rev.4 draft modalities text of December 2008 with respect to cotton.

Paraguay said that ambition meant eliminating all distortions. It wanted to see agriculture being treated on the same basis as industrial products. It said that export subsidies should be eliminated and this seemed to be the most urgent and doable.

Botswana, on behalf of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Group, stressed on the Rev.4 draft modalities text as the basis for the negotiations.

Zambia, for the LDCs, said that the LDC issues should not be reopened as they had been stabilized. It also stressed on duty-free, quota-free market access for LDC products.

The European Union said that members should focus on realism, doability and parallelism (among the three pillars).

The United States said that it was committed to moving forward. The task was to open markets, reduce distortions and improve food security, it added. It still believed that it would be useful for the discussion on public stockholding to be based on the experience of members in procuring stocks, while at the same time respecting the target date that was agreed in the General Council decision. It said that it was already starting to hold domestic consultations on this issue and that it stood by its previous statements.

“Reaching across to each other”

Following the statements by delegations, the Chair said: “I think for those who had forgotten the issues and the positions of each other on those issues, the meeting served a useful purpose, at least to bring us back to where we were, although I don’t think it’s really given us a clear indication of where we will go – that will need a significant change from where we are now.”

According to the Chair, the first six months of this year, “when we were carefully trying to scope out the issues, was a period where we ended up carrying out an overall survey of the concerns of members, the things that seemed to stand in the way of consensus. But it was also a period where to a large extent the discussions were going on within individual delegations or within individual groups.”

“I don’t think that things evolved very much beyond that in that period. It’s clear to me that in order to do what we said we would do – that we agreed to do last week in the General Council – that you will all have to reach across to each other to recognize the different perspectives that others may have, that stand in the way of where you may yourselves want to go, and recognize that we will need to arrive at some consensus that will necessarily involve compromises.”

Ambassador Adank further said that what he had always encouraged members to do was to go further than simply talk with members who shared their views and really spend a bit of time trying to interact with others who clearly did not, because “that’s the only way we will be able to take things forward, by facing up to the obstacles that we need to overcome in order to achieve consensus.”

“Now that we have these deadlines from last week, we have a much greater impetus to do that than before,” he observed.

In terms of how the work in the period ahead would be organized, the Chair said that for the 4 December meeting he did not plan to outline how that work would proceed.

“What we have recognized today is that we have two important strands to our work agreed last week in the General Council: dedicated sessions on public stockholding for food security, distinct from the dedicated discussions around the work programme, which will encompass those three pillars. There are differing levels of complexity around those pillars, and we also have to work out how those complexities can take us forward in a way that may take us towards consensus.”

He said he would like to have very focused discussions on a series of issues, noting however that how things evolved in the Committee would need to be driven by members.

His intention was to continue the practice of trying to engage very directly with delegations in a variety of formats, to take issues forward.

“Looking ahead, I would ask you all to reflect carefully on the challenge ahead until July and also until December of next year. In effect when we come back next year, given the fact that January often starts a little later than 1 January, with a whole range of other things that occur in our calendar in January, we have got a very limited and quite tight time-frame for taking our work forward. That will help ensure we take this task very seriously,” he told the members.

With regard to some delegations referring to the need for technical-level meetings and the importance of thinking about when capitals should engage in discussions, the Chair said that in both of these cases, the key thing was that members had to proceed such that they were prepared to take forward the substance of the issues before them. “If a more engaged working-level discussion may be required – sometimes ambassadors can benefit from those discussions too, I’ve found – then we will do that.”

Likewise, on the related issue of capital engagement, the Chair said the message he would send now was that “you should engage your capitals immediately on what we have to do here in Geneva in the next six months. Even if they’re not going to travel to Geneva immediately to sit in meetings like this, the key thing is they need to be informing what you are able to say and to contribute to this discussion.”

Ambassador Adank concluded that he would be in contact in January with further views on how to take things forward. (SUNS7933)                               

Third World Economics, Issue No. 582, 1-15 Dec 2014, pp7-9