DEVELOPING COUNTRIES AIM FOR GREATER COORDINATION

6:20 AM Sep 2, 1993

DEVELOPING COUNTRIES AIM FOR GREATER COORDINATION
Geneva 2 Sep (TWN) -- The informal group of developing countries at the GATT, after a stock-taking exercise of sorts, decided Thursday, to have a few core groups to closely follow the Uruguay Round negotiations, keep members better informed, and undertake some coordination.

The new chairman of the group, Malaysia's Haroon Siraj, chaired the meeting.

Haroon Siraj, who himself is likely to be away for 3-4 weeks, said he planned to consult delegations and set up the informal coordination groups.

The groups are expected to look into issues in the areas of market access, agriculture, services, institutional issues (the Multilateral Trade Organization and Understanding on integrated dispute settlement) and problems relating to least developed countries.

Though it had been originally expected that the negotiations would resume after the summer recess at an accelerated pace, it is now clear that nothing will move until the EC's position on agriculture is clear, perhaps by 20 September (when there is a meeting of the EC Council of Ministers with participation of foreign and agriculture ministers) or by 4-5 October when another meeting of the Council of Ministers is expected.

GATT Director-General, Peter Sutherland, who visited Germany Tuesday and Wednesday, addressing a meeting of German industry and meeting German ministers and the Chancellor Helmut Kohl, is due next week to visit Paris. Later, he is also due to go to Washington (for the annual Fund/Bank meetings) and then visit Latin American countries and meet with Ministers of the Rio Group at Montevideo on 17 September.

The Sutherland visit to Bonn does not seem to have clarified matters very much or removed the uncertainties caused Chancellor Kohl's press conference statement of 26 August and an interview to a German weekly on Sunday which seemed to imply support for the French call for changes in the Blair House accord.

Sutherland met Kohl and later told a news conference in Bonn that in the time scale now remaining it was not conceivable that the Blair House accord on agriculture could be renegotiated, and that the repudiation of the accord would create enormous problems for the conclusion of the Round.

Kohl's remarks that there had been no change in the German position, though interpreted as reiterating the German support for the Blair House accord, has not removed the uncertainties and ambiguities.

Media reports from Bonn make clear that Kohl reiterated his support for the Blair House accord, but also repeated his call for compromises to accommodate French demands for revisions.

The government spokesman, Dieter Vogel, said after the meeting that Kohl had emphasized to Sutherland that the difficult and complex Uruguay Round negotiations could be successfully concluded only if all participants were fundamentally prepared to compromise and that "a position of all or nothing leads nowhere".

As one EC Commission official in Brussels has been quoted as saying, the Commission would now have to "square the circle", and meanwhile the developing countries and others have to keep waiting.

Third World delegations in Geneva have noted that, apart from the agriculture problems and uncertainties, it was not clear to them at all how the Sutherland process will deal with such issues as the US insistence on changes in other parts of the text, and how Sutherland would hold consultations and how plurilateral negotiations among concerned countries would be held.

A leading trading country delegate referred in this connection to the US attempt to have looser disciplines on itself over anti-dumping (thus requiring modifications to the Draft Final Act text), the US opposition to the MTO and the disciplines (on the US) involved through such an organization, the French position on the MTO and the EC's own anti-dumping actions.

In such a situation of uncertainties, he said, it would be difficult for his country to make any "conditional offer or improvements" in market access, as suggested by Sutherland.

Some of the participants at the informal developing country group meeting said that there was general concern about the uncertainties over the Round (following the differences on agriculture within the EC and the efforts to reopen the Blair House accords) as well as on how the key questions were going to be negotiated and agreed under conditions of transparency.

One of the participants said that so far nothing very much had been happening at the GATT and there had been only procedural decisions and at the moment the new Director-General appeared to be attempting to deal with Heads of governments.

But things have to come back to Geneva for substantive negotiations, and at that juncture issues of consultations and transparency would be important, he said.

The new Director-General, he said, appeared to be still undecided on how he would hold plurilateral consultations on matters of substance and this would be important for the developing countries.