G90 poor nations hold strategy session over WTO trade talks

Articles: G90 poor nations hold strategy session over WTO trade talks

Posted by admin on Monday, July 12, 2004 - 12:46 AM

Trade ministers from the G90 developing nations open a strategy session on global trade negotiations, less than a year after a World Trade Organization summit saw their bloc pitted against the world's wealthiest nations.
The G90, formed at the WTO summit, is comprised of the members of the 79-state Africa, Caribbean and Pacific (APC) bloc, the African Union and nations known collectively in global trade bargaining as the "least developed countries". Also in attendance will be their two most important bargaining partners -- Pascal Lamy representing the European Union, and Robert Zoellick of the United States -- as well as WTO Director General Supachai Panitchpakdi. The trade ministers of several countries which banded with the G90 to fight for a fairer playing field at last year's failed WTO summit are also expected to attend the event, hosted by the Indian Ocean island nation of Mauritius. India's Kamal Nath, Pakistan's Humayu Akhtar Khan and Delso Amorim of Brazil will join the two-day Port-Louis event, which formally opens Monday afternoon but gets down to work with ministerial meetings Tuesday. The G90, which includes the world's poorest nations, is committed to a difficult task: forging a unified front to press the EU and US governments to scrap their billion-dollar agricultural subidies. The dispute over the subsidies, which distort prices and skew competition, was among the prime causes for the collapse of the WTO summit last September in Cancun, Mexico. West African countries have estimated that they lose one billion dollars a year on cotton exports because of Western subsidies. Summit host Mauritius has stressed that G90 states are now ready to be flexible in order to move forward on "Doha round" trade liberalization which has basically ground to a halt since the Cancun debacle. Mauritian trade representative Assab Buglah told AFP the G90 wanted to "send a strong sign to other WTO members that it will contribute positively to restarting negotiations and it will show it can be flexible". But acting prime minister Maurice Jayen Cuttaree, one of the founders of the G90, stressed here Sunday: "The Doha (trade round) process must be fully multilateral". "We must make sure that these negotiations will lead to fair and equitable results," Jayen Cuttaree told a meeting of ACP trade ministers ahead of the G90 talks. "The big developed countries can negotiate bilateral deals and seal free trade agreements and choose their partners," he said. "We don't have this possibility. Only a well-regulated trade system can protect the rights of small economies." Some analysts fear that the G90, which includes 63 WTO members, is too big a group to serve as a negotiating bloc and that their huddle comes too close to a end-of-July deadline. In order to meet the WTO's objective for the Doha round, begun in 2001, of closing a trade deal by the end of 2004, its 147 member states must agree on a draft framework by the end of the month. Global trade actors are scampering this month to cobble together support for a deal. Ahead of the G90 event, Zoellick and Lamy, the US and EU negotiators, met at the weekend with WTO trade representatives from Australia, Brazil and India in Paris in a bid to build common consensus on agricultural issues. The EU's executive arm, the European Commission, is also set to issue proposals on July 14 to reform its sugar trade, where massive subsidies have severely distorted the world market. But some G90 countries like sugar giant Madagascar have gotten around the problem through a special trade deal with the European Union -- which could now come under the axe in the Doha round. The EU has, however, offered the G90 a controversial "round for free" instead if it sticks to the Doha process -- meaning that its members would not have to make any concessions by reducing agricultural tariffs but could gain access to a more liberalized global market. That move has been attacked by some critics as a way to split the Group of 90, which mixes some desperately poor states with more dynamic ones, like South Africa, Morocco or Egypt. International organizations including Oxfam have urged the G90 to stick together, saying division within its ranks would give the world's wealthiest states yet another advantage.

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