WTO Plans Bali Pack Around Trade Facilitation, Food Security and LDC

The 159-member WTO is hoping to clinch a small package of deliverables from the long-running round of Doha trade talks, which were formally declared at an impasse in December 2011, in time for the upcoming Bali gathering.

Activity in Geneva has ramped up in light of an unofficial Easter stocktaking deadline, sources say, especially given that a meeting of the WTO’s Trade Negotiations Committee - tasked with the Doha Round negotiations - is currently scheduled for mid-April.

The global trade body’s outgoing Director-General, Pascal Lamy, has already warned that the membership must “run faster” if they hope to achieve results in Bali and avoid another “housekeeping ministerial”.

Trade Facilitation – 600 Brackets

The proposed centrepiece of any Bali deal is an agreement on trade facilitation, which deals with topics such as easing customs procedures and cutting times at border crossings. Trade facilitation negotiators met in Geneva last week in an effort to advance these talks forward, only for several brackets - numbering well over 600 - ultimately remaining unresolved in the trade facilitation draft text.

A new consolidated trade facilitation draft text is expected to be released in the coming days, reflecting revised language on areas such as publication, penalties, appeals, separation of release, e-payment, and perishable goods, which were adopted via the facilitator’s process. The next meeting of the trade facilitation negotiating group is currently scheduled for 21-24 May.

Agriculture – Food Stock Holding

Meanwhile, trade officials have come to the end of a month’s intensive discussions on food stockholding schemes, as part of an attempt to understand how best to respond to a negotiating proposal on this question that was tabled ahead of the Bali conference. The proposal was first submitted by the G-33 group of developing countries with large populations of smallholder farmers.

Developing, LDC Issues

The third section of a planned Bali package would likely involve issues of interest to developing and least developed country (LDC) members. The Special Session of the Committee on Trade and Development has been meeting every couple of weeks in an open-ended format during the first part of this year, with the latest one reportedly being held last Friday.

Sources familiar with the talks in this area note that the 28 Cancún proposals - part of a group of 88 proposals aimed at strengthening the special and differential treatment (S&DT) provisions in the various WTO agreements that were agreed, but not harvested, ten years ago - are still being discussed in this setting, as is the so-called Monitoring Mechanism, which would review the functioning of provisions in WTO rules for S&DT treatment in favour of developing countries and potentially suggest improvements.

Topics related to the WTO’s Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures are also being reviewed, delegates familiar with the talks noted to Bridges.

The question of which LDC-specific issues - such as duty-free quota-free market access, rules-of-origin, and cotton - might be included in a December package is also expected to emerge again ahead of MC9, sources say. These topics had also generated substantial discussion ahead of the last ministerial, only for the planned “LDC-plus” package for the 2011 conference to ultimately fall through.