May 12, 1988

BOARD CALL FOR EXPEDITING TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE FOR MTNS

GENEVA MAY 10 (IFDA)— The trade and development board of UNCTAD has asked the secretariats of UNDP and UNCTAD to finalise expeditiously their consultations on the Uruguay Round technical assistance projects, so as to make these programmes operational.

The board, on the recommendation of its sessional committee, adopted Tuesday a decision on this issue.

Three regional projects for technical assistance activities (for Africa, Asia and Latin America and Caribbean regions), and an inter-regional project, to help Third World countries participate more effectively in the Uruguay Round have been drawn up and presented by the secretariat of UNCTAD to the UN development programme for funding.

While preliminary phases of these projects are sanctioned and carried out, the board was advised at its current meeting by the UNCTAD officials, further phases of the project for substantive activities are still to be cleared by the UNDP, and consultations on these were continuing.

The final act of UNCTAD-vii asked the secretary-general of UNCTAD to provide technical assistance to Third World countries, on request, in connection with the Uruguay Round MTNS so as to facilitate their effective participation in these negotiations.

UNDP was also 'invited' to consider favourable the requests for provision of adequate financial resources to UNCTAD and to individual countries for this purpose.

Rapid implementation of the projects is considered of prime importance to enable Third World countries to engage actively in the 14 negotiating groups on issues in ‘goods’ and the separate one on 'services'.

In the sessional committee last week when the decision was adopted, Canada for the group 'B', India for the G77, Hungary for the socialist group, and China welcomed the adoption of the decision and hoped the UNDP would act quickly.

Third World sources however later commented privately that though there is this unanimous public support in the board, they still do not expect smooth sailing over the projects. But armed with this board decision, key Third World delegations plan to raise the issue, if necessary, at the next session of the UNDP governing council.

Based on discussions here, and on information received from their counterparts in New York, the key G77 delegations have the impression that every time UNCTAD had put forward project proposals, the UNDP had been sending them back with comments on one or two aspects, and when these are satisfied new ones were being raised.

G77 sources suspect there is a behind-the-scenes effort by the U.S. and other donors to make sure that the technical advice by UNCTAD would be in line with the viewpoints advocated by these donors in the round, and the difficulties in getting UNDP approval for the projects is tied to this.

At UNCTAD - itself, the group 'B' countries, and particularly the U.S. have been trying, under the plea of ' transparency’, to insist on UNCTAD making available to them the technical advice and papers that the secretariat was providing to the Third World participants in the round.

G77 sources noted that given the nature of international secretariats, there was little doubt that the papers prepared inside the secretariat are available sub rose to the delegations of industrial countries. But what the latter want is to get them officially, so that they could 'discuss' them in UNCTAD bodies, or officially with the secretariat, and 'persuade' the secretariat to change its policy advice or line.

Another decision that the sessional committee recommended, and which the board adopted Tuesdays was to authorise the UNCTAD secretariat to make available more widely information contained in its database on trade measures.

The UNCTAD’s data base on trade measures is considered the most comprehensive data base of this sort, and contains considerable information that is not easily available to Third World countries, about the type of restrictions their exports face in individual markets.

The issue of providing this information to member-states has been pending in UNCTAD for quite some time, and has been resisted by the European community and other industrial countries, who do not want their various ‘grey area' measures and other restrictive actions to become widely known and publicised.

Some others like the U.S. have been reluctant to allow the data base information to be made available widely, since they do not want their actions like anti-dumping and countervailing, often used for trade harassment, not to figure in the data base as they do now, and do not like the UNCTAD analysis and comments of these measures.

The board also asked the secretariat to take appropriate action in conformity with recommendations that the inter-governmental group of experts (IGE) on definition and methodology in the database might wish to make at its second session.

The IGE itself has been asked to provide 'a means for comments from member states to be reflected in the database when accessed'.

From the warding of this, it was not clear whether the comments from member-states would relate only to data concerning trade measures in their own countries, or in respect of others too.