Nov 16, 1985

U.S. THREATENS TO CONVENE TRADE TALKS IF GATT ROUND FAILS.

WASHINGTON, NOVEMBER 14 (IPS) – The United States will organise its own round of trade negotiations outside of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade if no agreement is reached on starting a new trade round within the framework of the Geneva-based body at a Ministerial meeting later this month, a senior official told Congress Thursday.

If no progress can be made in setting a negotiating agenda for a new round to start in mid-1986, Washington "is prepared to use alternative ways of bringing about a more free and open trading system", U.S. Trade Representative Clayton Yeutter told the Senate Finance Committee.

"We could, for example, convene a Conference here in Washington to negotiate on trade matters of interest to the participants only", he said.

"Those attending would be countries which share our objectives of seeing trade disciplines and codes of conduct established in such areas as services, intellectual property and other mutually agreed subject matter", Yeutter said.

(...)

The administration should "bring congress along through periodic consultations, instead of resorting" to unilateral measures, Aho suggested. "Congress is the only leverage we have".

According to the authors, Washington will attempt to push the idea of starting the new round of talks next year at the annual GATT meeting later this month in Geneva.

The United States wants to extend the GATT to cover trade in services such as banking, insurance and data entry but Third World nations, led by India and Brazil, have balked at this arguing that unfinished business from the last GATT round should be cleared up before the organisation attempts to define rules governing these other areas.

"There is a genuine distrust" on the part of some developing nations towards the new round, conceded Aho, largely because key issues concerning agricultural trade and textiles have yet to be sorted out. "But it's also a delaying tactic" he said.-

Aho and his co-author, Stanford University Professor Jonathan Aaronson said the new trade round will be "markedly more difficult" than the previous eight rounds.

This largely because all the "easy issues" concerning rules of merchandise trade have been dealt with in the past and "what remain are barriers in politically sensitive industries and new issues which are not even covered by existing rules", the report said.

As such, "high level political involvement is needed" to strike a "far reaching global bargain" that will demand concessions not only from the United States, Japan and Europe but from the developing nations as well, the authors argued.

In addition, the study suggests, each nation should prepare a "wish list" of foreign restrictions it wants removed in order to mobilise private sector interests behind the negotiations.

"Without continuing high level political involvement and active support from the private sector, sustaining these negotiations together over the course of a decade will be impossible" the authors concluded.