|
World Trade Organization Secretary General Paul Lamy defended Thursday the decision to delay until early next year a global free trade agreement warning that "the risk of failure was too great".
If there's insufficient convergence to reach the December Hong Kong meeting then "we must necessarily recalibrate our expectations; we must carefully reflect on what we want to achieve at and after Hong Kong, in order not to reduce the level of ambition of the whole Round," said Mr. Lamy in Geneva. WTO members accepted this week, following simultaneous negotiations in London and Geneva that is was virtually impossible to reach a draft accord to reduce farm subsidies and lower tariffs in different sectors of the world economy on time for the coming Hong Kong mid December ministerial meeting. The postponement was approved unanimously but Mr. Lamy pointed out it was important that ministers keep advancing for when the new date is agreed sometime at the beginning of 2006. "We should try to capture as much as possible what has been achieved since July 2004, so that we have a package available for Hong Kong which is clearly a step forward compared to the July Framework, and also consider that whatever would be needed in terms of further concessions in order to achieve full modalities shortly after Hong Kong". This week's negotiations between United States, European Union, Japan, India and Brazil, who is the leader of the G20, were unable to advance in agriculture, industrial products and services, three crucial areas for any agreement. EU is resisting further concessions in agriculture, and Brazil and India are reluctant to indicate their proposals regarding industry produce unless advances are recorded in market access for developing countries farmers. "Reciprocity by some of our members in industrial tariffs and services is the crucial point of this negotiation", said EU Trade Commissar Peter Mandelson. "There's no time for another agriculture proposal before Hong Kong," he added. The WTO Doha round timetable actually has until early 2007 when US President George Bush's special powers to negotiate trade agreements expire. "We all know we need to go to Hong Kong with a draft text for Ministers to sign and, that we have less and less time in which to develop the elements of this text," indicated Mr. Lamy adding that a way must be found "to move towards these elements, in full knowledge of our recalibrated ambitions and the need to capture the progress we have made, and we must do this by helping the Chairs take advantage of the bottom-up approach". This article appeared originally in Mercopress – www.mercopress.com.
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.