Bangladesh expects to win big at the 10th World Trade Organisation Ministerial Conference in Nairobi, Kenya, where a crucial round of negotiations on agriculture have caused the closing session to be delayed by several hours.
Negotiations to reach a compromise on preferential conditions provided for under services waivrs for LDCs were still under way last night.
There was some possibility that the conference would be extended by a day, or at least until midnight Kenya local time, morning in Dhaka, so that crucial agricultural negotiations could build enough consensus to enable a declaration to be issued.
The Bangladeshi delegation felt that the conference had given the country several gains.
“We are going to benefit from the ministerial conference,” Commerce Minister Tofail Ahmed said hours before the closing session of the conference had been scheduled, at 7pm Kenya local time.
A clean text of the relaxed rules of origin (ROO) had been prepared and negotiators moved fast to bridge small differences of opinion on the services waiver issue, with Bangladesh officials saying both issues would be of benefit for the country.
Talks go into overtime
In a hurriedly called press conference, just an hour and a half before the scheduled closing session, conference chair Amina Mohamed said it would take several more hours to conclude the negotiations.
“The negotiations are gathering momentum now … we are very, very close. We hope to get there within a few hours,” she told a crowded press conference. “We will have a Nairobi declaration.”
Asked which issue had caused the negotiations to stall and to compel the organisers to postpone the closing session, Amina would only say: “The agriculture negotiations are delicate.”
Observers agreed that the agriculture issue has been the most crucial part of the negotiations since the beginning of the conference.
Tofail, the coordinator of the group of Least Developed Countries (LDCs), together with other Bangladeshi officials, were hopeful of a declaration based on the extended negotiations.
“I hope the interests of the LDCs are protected,” Tofail said, adding that there were some differences between the developing and developed country groups on the services waiver issue. “Whatever portion of the issue comes through in the declaration, we’ll benefit.”
The facilitator on the services waiver issue, Rwandan Minister of Trade and Industry François Kanimba, was expected to release a draft shortly which would extend the waiver until 2030.
The text no longer refers to LDC requests to facilitate administrative procedures via work permits and qualification requirements, officials said.
Trade ministers and officials hectically tried to get to an eleventh hour agreement to finalise a document for declaration at the closing session, which had already been postponed once, by seven hours, to allow negotiators to reach a consensus.
“We had a clean text on the rules of origin and the [WTO] director general reported that we were close to a very clean text now on LDC services waivers and provisions for preferential treatment for service providing entrepreneurs of the LDCs,” WTO spokesman Keith Rockwell told a press briefing on Thursday night.
“The outcome for poor members is significant,” he said. “But there are members for whom agriculture is so important that it’s hard to imagine an outcome without [a result in] agriculture.”
Food for thought
The agriculture negotiations, especially aspects dealing with finance and vulnerability, caused the closing session to be postponed again.
At the heads of delegation (HODs) meeting on Thursday night, Director General Roberto Azevedo reported that there were still some points of divergence blocking a consensus.
By yesterday afternoon, some members had expressed positive views of a new agriculture text, saying it provided a good basis for negotiations.
But there were concerns over shortcomings in the text on the special safeguard mechanism and on public stock holding for food security purposes.
Some parties complained that the language on food aid had been watered down too much. Others members said the text was not sufficiently balanced.
Disagreements remained over the long phase-out theory for agricultural export subsidies and over export credit repayment terms, which opponents said were too low.
On the special and differential treatment proposals, consultations were being held, Rockwell said. But negotiators said discussions on special and differential treatment (S&DT) remained divisive.
The latest updates on the issue indicated that members were keen on agreeing to an outcome, with support emerging on the bulk of the proposals, though divisions remained on sanitary and phyto-sanitary measures (SPS) and technical barriers to trade (TBT).
One LDC delegate said talks on S&DT would necessarily have to be taken up after Nairobi, while referring to the text which contained a set of LDC-specific decisions.
Supporting the margins on a majority of proposals, there remained divisions over two proposals on sanitary and phyto-sanitary measures, and on technical barriers to trade, Rockwell quoted the WTO director general as saying.
He said some parties wanted to reintroduce proposals that had previously been discarded, but the director general said others had little appetite to reconsider them.
Following intensive consultations, the facilitators were able to broker a clean text on the paragraphs relating to the WTO’s achievements on LDCs, small and vulnerable economies, and recently acceding members, Rockwell said.
“But consensus remained elusive on issues for net food importing developing countries and regional trade groups,” he added.