WTO seeks bigger slice of trade for poor nations

HONG KONG—Major powers on Monday promised to help poorest nations get a bigger slice of trade while Europe came under renewed pressure to lower farm tariff barriers on the eve of a key World Trade Organization (WTO) conference. Although the WTO shelved plans for a draft free trade deal at the six-day conference, U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman (news, bio, voting record) made clear that he had come “to work” and was looking for progress in contentious areas of the troubled negotiations.
With continuing deep differences between developed and developing countries — particularly over agriculture — forcing the WTO to drop the bar for the Hong Kong meeting, assistance for poor states, including duty-free access, have become a litmus test for success at the WTO’s 6th ministerial conference. “I think it would earth these negotiations in the real world,” European Union Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson told reporters. “It would give them (the talks) a human face.”
The United States and Brazil, two other leading participants in the 149-state conference echoed Mandelson’s call, but they also kept up pressure on the EU over farm reform. The EU’s refusal to offer more than an average 39 percent cut in tariff barriers has been blamed by many farm goods exporters, most notably Brazil and the United States, for a stalemate in agricultural talks, the lynchpin of the WTO’s Doha trade round. “Unless the European Union is able to improve substantially its offer on agricultural goods there will not be a successful (trade) round,” Brazil’s Foreign Minister Celso Amorim told a news conference. But the EU and other big farm goods importers, such as Japan, hit back saying that too much attention is being focused on agriculture, which makes up only a small part of global trade.
“We need to solve the problem of imbalance. We cannot allow some wealthy importing countries and some strong exporting countries getting together and make the trade rules,” Japanesese Agriculture Minister Shoichi Nakagawa told a meeting of farmers. Around 10,000 anti-globalisation protesters, including South Korean farmers angry at the prospect of more rice imports into their long-protected market, are converging on Hong Kong. “We are determined to voice out our resistance in a peaceful and legal way, but also in a very affirmative and strong way,” Yang Kyeong Kyoo of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions told a news conference. Hong Kong has blacklisted some people, particularly from South Korean farmer groups with a reputation for violent protest, in the hope that the territory will be able to avoid the violence that marked the last WTO conference in Cancun, Mexico, in 2003.—APP