Trade Facilitation Moves On at WTO

Over the last several months, members had been reviewing whether an agreement on trade facilitation could be put forward as an early Doha deliverable. Yet members had repeatedly disagreed over whether such a deal could stand by itself, or whether it would instead need to be balanced by another deliverable from a different negotiating area.

However, since members’ return from the August recess, a series of ideas have been raised as possible elements that could be delivered to balance an outcome on trade facilitation.

For instance, recent proposals have been raised in the agriculture negotiations by the G-20 group of developing countries, and other ideas regarding special and differential treatment and the monitoring mechanism, as well as non-DDA issues such as the expansion of the Information Technology Agreement (ITA), are also being discussed at an informal level.