Commonwealth Business Wants WTO to Stick to Trade
11/12/99
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: Commonwealth Business Wants WTO to Stick to Trade
Source: Reuters News Service
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: November 12, 1999
The Commonwealth Business Council called on the 54-nation body today
to push for the exclusion of labor and environmental issues from the
forthcoming round of World Trade Organization (WTO) talks.
"We've taken a line that the WTO should concern itself purely with
trade matters. While environmental and labor matters are important it
would be dangerous to bring them into the WTO," CBC chairman Lord
Simon Cairns told a news conference.
"There are governments in the developed world who have sought to use
these issues to obscure distinctly trade issues and sometimes create
trade barriers. Business and the developing world seem to us to be at
one on this issue," he said.
The council, which ended a three-day forum in Johannesburg on
Thursday, is due to present its recommendations on the WTO to the
Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) later on Friday.
Ministers from the nations of the 134-member WTO will meet in Seattle
on November 30 to negotiate the text of a declaration on starting up
a new round of trade talks next year.
Cairns said business also wanted the Commonwealth leaders to call for
the WTO to discuss trade facilitation measures for developing
countries trying to break into world markets.
"The WTO should help create the capacity to facilitate a much faster
and efficient form of trade," he said.
Cairns said Commonwealth business leaders were worried that some
industrialized nations threatened by the competitiveness of poorer
countries could introduce environmental and labor standards as
barriers to trade.
"What we are worried about is that certain countries may use these
concerns to increase protectionism," he said.
WTO Director General Mike Moore warned on Thursday that the launch of
new talks next year could be under threat, with negotiators still
split over the agenda for the Seattle meeting.
Agriculture, particularly the system of farm subsidies in place in
the European Union and other countries like Japan, has been one of
the main obstacles.
The United States and other countries grouped in the Australia-led
15-nation Cairns group in the WTO want agriculture to be at the
center of talks and attack the farm subsidies.
But the EU, Japan and South Korea say farm products should not be
treated like normal industrial products as they play a special role
in food security and in protecting the environment and rural culture.
Australian Trade Minister Mark Vaile said this week that these
countries were using non-trade concerns to deflect attention from
their own inflexible stance on agriculture.