Geneva, Oct 10 (Xinhua) World Trade Organisation (WTO) chief Pascal Lamy has urged the 151 members of the WTO to accelerate their pace of negotiations in order to make the Doha round of global trade liberalisation talks a success.
“We have regained a good level of momentum in our work and the challenge now is to accelerate it in the days and weeks ahead so that the necessary compromises can be found,” Lamy told WTO ambassadors at a meeting of the organisation’s governing general council Tuesday.
“Now more than ever, time is running against us. We must increase the pace at which we move ahead in agriculture and NAMA (non-agricultural market access),” he said.
Lamy said WTO members’ work in the coming days should aim at developing enough common ground on agriculture and NAMA, the two most crucial fields in the Doha round, so that related compromise texts issued in July could be revised.
The compromise texts aim to provide the basis for a final deal.
“I remain convinced that this deal is as doable as it is essential,” Lamy told the meeting.
The Doha round of trade talks was launched in 2001 with an aim to bring down trade barriers to help the global economy, particularly those of developing countries.
The WTO director-general had indicated earlier that the talks must be concluded by the end of 2007 or early 2008, otherwise they may be frozen infinitely mainly due to political factors.
But latest signs show that WTO members are still far apart on agriculture and NAMA, the two major fields that have blocked the progress of the talks for six years.
While most WTO members accept the agriculture text, which requires the US to cut its overall trade-distorting farm subsidies to between $13 billion and $16.4 billion as the basis for talks, sharp differences remain on the NAMA text.
At the meeting Tuesday, many developing countries reiterated that their major concerns must be addressed in any final deal.
South Africa, representing a group of developing countries, proposed that more flexibility should be given to them in terms of industrial tariff cuts. The current NAMA text is considered too tough for developing countries.
South Africa’s proposal was supported by many developing countries, but was rejected by the US, which insisted that the current text should be the basis for further talks.