11:44 AM Mar 4, 1997
SOUTH NEEDS POSITIVE TRADE LIBERALIZATION AGENDA
Geneva 4 Mar (Chakravarthi Raghavan) -- The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) hopes to be a catalyst, working with various regional and subregional organizations and institutions of the South to develop a positive agenda for developing countries in the next round of trade negotiations, UNCTAD Secretary-General Rubens Ricupero said Tuesday. At a press briefing on a two-day expert meeting convened by him, Ricupero noted that one of the striking features of the recent Singapore Ministerial meeting of the WTO was the agreement in principle to liberalise trade in Information Technology Products. The IT products issue and negotiations was different from the negotiations on basic telecommunications services or financial services which were part of the negotiations on trade and services and carried over into the WTO. The IT products issue was a sectoral negotiation in goods, where trade in one sector was taken up for liberalization of the trade. This issue, he noted, had not figured very much in the preparatory process and had received at best a passing mention. But suddenly it gained momentum and resulted in an agreement in principle. Ricupero said he was passing no judgement on the agreement as such, but on the process whereby an agreement (for zero tariff liberalisation in four years) with such major implications was practically improvised on the basis of understanding among the four quad members (Canada, Europe, Japan and the USA). Some countries in Asia also found they stood to gain and joined it. Some of the Asian developing countries were exporters of some IT goods and therefore would benefit from the agreement and joined it. But as far as the rest of the developing countries, while their consumers might benefit from lower tariffs on the products, they had no export capabilities to benefit from an export trade. Never before had such a thing happened in the entire GATT negotiations. In the case of the Uruguay Round there had been four years of preparations before the programme of negotiations was accepted at Punta del Este, and it was a compromise involving interests of the industrial countries and developing countries. But if what happened at Singapore was to be the pattern for the future, the developing countries need to be better prepared and for this they needed assistance, since they had no national or international institutions. The meeting he had convened, Ricupero said, would set in motion an open process in which the participants would continue their research and other efforts to make a contribution to the objective of liberalisation of trade, but from a development point of view. A positive agenda for the developing countries could not be one based on the lowest common denominator, but had to take account of the increasing degree of divergences among the developing countries, and take account of the unfinished business of the Tokyo and Uruguay rounds, such as tariff escalation and tariff peaks. Citing his own experience, as former ambassador of Brazil to Washington, Ricupero noted that Brazilian orange juice, exported by Brazil as a concentrate, carried a specific duty which in some instances resulted in a 70% duty on the price paid by the consumer. There were other such cases involving a number of developing country exports - leather goods, tropical beverages etc. "If zero tariff on information technology is good, why not zero tariff on orange juice or other agricultural products imported by Europe," asked Ricupero.