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DG Azevêdo: WTO members have identified a road to success in Nairobi

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DG Azevêdo: WTO members have identified a road to success in Nairobi

DG Azevêdo: WTO members have identified a road to success in Nairobi
Photo credit: WTO

Director-General Roberto Azevêdo addressed all WTO members on 8 October at a meeting of the General Council in Geneva. He looked ahead to the prospects of success at the WTO’s 10th Ministerial Conference which will be held in Nairobi from 15-18 December this year, and reported on recent discussions in Geneva and other discussions, including among G20 trade ministers in Istanbul.

He reported that some areas of negotiations still seemed more likely to yield outcomes in Nairobi than others. These include: development issues with a particular focus on least-developed countries (LDCs); export competition in agriculture; and a set of possible outcomes to improve transparency in a number of areas. He said that work should be intensified on these issues, but also that this did not preclude identifying other outcomes wherever members thought they could be achieved.

“Through the various consultations over recent weeks I think members have identified a road to success in Nairobi. Clearly there are many obstacles along the way, but none in my view are insurmountable. 

“I think we have a general sense of what may be on the table in terms of substantive deliverables – though it is not a closed package, or a sure package. And I think we should recognize that agreement on the elements we are talking about would represent real progress. They would have a major economic and developmental impact, even though we must strive to do much more in the future. So now we need to firm these up with textual proposals that can be advanced through the negotiating groups.” 

The Director-General also asked members to look beyond Nairobi. Pointing to differences in members' positions on the future of the Doha Development Agenda (DDA), he said:

“Clearly these views will be extremely difficult to reconcile. However, I think we cannot disregard important commonalities when thinking about the way ahead. For example, I think we all agree that: i) we want to deliver something in Nairobi and that it should be meaningful; ii) whatever we deliver will not be agreed to be the end of negotiations on the DDA issues and; iii) we are still ready to keep pursuing the core issues of the DDA and their development dimension after Nairobi – although there is no agreement on how to do this, whether under the DDA framework or whether under a reformulated architecture. The question is whether we can – or whether we want – to capture these and other possible commonalities in a consensual text in Nairobi.”

He continued: “I would suggest that we start working on the basis that we will have a Ministerial Declaration that would take stock of the decisions taken at the 10th Ministerial Conference and that gives us guidance on our future work.” 

The meeting saw a debate on these issues, with a range of views being expressed. The Director-General concluded the conversation by suggesting there was a need for further consultations with members on the substance of any potential Ministerial Declaration and the process of producing such a document.

These consultations will begin in the coming days. Negotiations on the potential deliverables for Nairobi will also continue, mainly through the formal negotiating groups and other relevant committees. In addition, the Director-General will be consulting ministers at forthcoming meetings of the African Union, the African, Caribbean, Pacific Group of States and a meeting of Arab Trade Ministers.


Report by the Chairman of the Trade Negotiations Committee

I’d like to add a warm welcome to those who are joining us today at their first General Council meeting. You chose an interesting time to arrive!

To those of you who are leaving, I wish you all the best and thank you for your contribution to our work.

At the last General Council meeting, on the 28th of July, I reported that limited progress had been made on developing a work programme by the July deadline.

I then convened a TNC meeting on the 31st of July to take stock of progress and to discuss the way forward.

That meeting ended with an unequivocal and united message from members that we must now focus our efforts towards delivering outcomes in Nairobi.

With that in mind, we restarted our work in September with renewed impetus.

I held a Room W meeting with heads of delegations on the 17th of September to report in detail on the consultations to date.

I gave my assessment of the situation at that point. I said that progress on some key issues, like domestic support, and market access in agriculture, NAMA and services was looking very difficult.

While continuing our work on those efforts, I said that it was time for us to start working more intensely on issues where there appeared to be more convergence and which might be potential deliverables for MC10.

These included – but were not necessarily limited to:

  • development issues with a particular focus on LDCs,

  • export competition in agriculture,

  • and a set of possible outcomes to improve transparency in a number of areas.

A range of consultations have taken place since that last Room W meeting which have further pointed things in this direction, even though it is not the preferred outcome for many of you.

I have continued my consultations in a variety of configurations. I held numerous bilateral meetings with ministers where possible – for example in the margins of the Public Forum, the G20, or the UN Sustainable Development Summit in New York.

In addition, on the 29th of September I convened a meeting focused on advancing LDC issues.

And on the 1st of October I held a meeting to start discussing how we approach our work after Nairobi.

I have also taken part, by invitation, in a number of meetings convened by members, including meetings in Istanbul with a small group of ministers, and then with G20 trade ministers at the invitation of the Government of Turkey.

I think it would be helpful to give a short overview of each of these meetings, before drawing some conclusions about where things stand today.

Report on recent consultations

I will start with the meeting on LDC issues which was held on the 29th of September.

Given the emerging view in favour of delivering an LDC package in Nairobi, I asked the Group Coordinator, Ambassador Shameem Ahsan of Bangladesh, to give an indication of what their forthcoming proposals might contain.

He gave a helpful overview of the potential issues, which included:

  • Some elements of S&D treatment,

  • All issues of interest to LDCs in Agriculture, including domestic support,

  • Action on Non-Tariff Barriers, including a horizontal mechanism,

  • Binding DFQF market access through scheduling,

  • A reflection of flexibility that has already been agreed upon in various decisions, guidelines and Ministerial declarations in trade in services,

  • Adoption of simplified procedures for taking anti-dumping action for use by LDCs and increasing the threshold on non-application of anti-dumping duties for LDCs,

  • And strengthening of technical assistance.

There was not a detailed discussion of these issues in the meeting. Rather, reflecting the proximity of MC10, there was a desire to move to discussing textual proposals as soon as possible.

We also briefly reviewed progress on implementation of the Bali issues. I won’t say too much about this now as the General Council Chair will cover these issues under agenda item 2. However I did want to mention Rules of Origin – and the submission from the LDC Group on this issue – as this falls under the TNC.

I am pleased to say that I have appointed Steffen Smidt, who you all know in his role as LDC Facilitator, to take forward this proposal on my behalf, as TNC Chair – so he will be a Friend of the Chair. I thank Steffen for his continued commitment to LDC issues and wish him luck in this important role, where he will have my full support.

While I am talking about LDC issues I would like, very quickly, to mention a few other points.

First, I was delighted that the terms of Liberia’s WTO membership were agreed earlier this week. I congratulate the Government of Liberia on this achievement – and all those in Geneva who have been involved in making this happen. I very much look forward to formally agreeing this accession in Nairobi.

Second, I would like to remind members that we are holding an LDC event on Monday at 10am in Room W, looking at 20 years of supporting the integration of LDCs in to the multilateral trading system. That will be an important opportunity to discuss what has been achieved on this front since the WTO was created – and, perhaps more significantly, what we can aim to deliver in the future.

Third, preparations are underway for the Pledging Conference to support Phase Two of the EIF. I will be chairing the event, which will be held in Nairobi on the 14th of December. A successful pledging conference would be a significant outcome of the ministerial and I strongly urge all existing and potential donors to be ready to lend their support.

Now, continuing with my report of recent consultations, I held a meeting last Thursday, the 1st of October.

My preference was in fact to call another Room W meeting, but with the Public Forum still ongoing and in full swing most rooms in the house were occupied. The Forum is an important outreach event and a symbol of our openness as an organization, so I did not want to disrupt proceedings. Instead I convened a session in my own meeting room so we were quite crowded in, with some 48 delegations attending.

This meeting was a chance to update members on the state of play. We also discussed the question of how we can intensify our work, including on the specific outcome documents for Nairobi, and how we will continue our work after Nairobi.

A range of views were expressed. I floated an idea at the meeting on a possible way forward. In concluding the meeting I promised to bring that idea to the General Council today – so I will come back to this point in a moment.

Indeed, the post-Nairobi issue has become a feature of many of my consultations over recent weeks, and I will come back also to this point in a moment.

I want to turn now to meetings convened by members.

On the 28th of September and the 1st of October, I was invited to participate in a meeting hosted by Australia. It included representatives from Brazil, China, the EU, India, Japan and the US.

The Chairs of the General Council, the Special Session of the Agriculture Committee and the NAMA Negotiating Group also joined the meeting.

In both meetings, discussions revolved around our possible outcomes for Nairobi. In particular, participants discussed the possibility of agreeing on a subset of DDA issues in Nairobi, combined with a statement on our post-Nairobi work.

On the Nairobi package itself, participants mentioned again, export competition, a development and LDC package, and some transparency provisions. They all agreed, however, that there would be challenges in negotiating these issues. These were promising issues, but not “sure outcomes”. Participants did not discuss the details of the difficulties that they thought they might face.

Again, a key issue discussed was our post-Nairobi work. Here, the views were quite divergent. Some wanted to continue our work and reaffirm the Doha architecture and constructs. Others said they would be prepared to engage on issues we have been negotiating under Doha, but were not willing to pursue them under the current DDA framework.

Participants also acknowledged that it would be difficult to find common language on the post-Nairobi work, but no-one disagreed with the importance of trying to work out a common message on the future, which would form part of the overall Nairobi outcome.

Participants explored their commonalities in terms of guidance for our future work. If members deliver the package that has been outlined for Nairobi, centred around development, transparency, and export competition, no-one disagreed that it would be a meaningful outcome.

Participants also argued that such a package would not mean that it would successfully address the DDA single undertaking.

After Nairobi, participants would be willing to think about how to make progress on issues that might not have been fully addressed by MC10.

I must say this was a very preliminary conversation. Some participants noted they had no instructions on these issues. It was clear that, even if there were some commonalities about our future work, important differences still existed.

Finally, participants went through the different possibilities in terms of the nature of the outcome documents. Again, I will come back to this point in a moment.

Those same participants accepted Australia’s invitation and met at the Ministerial level in the margins of the G20 trade ministers meeting in Istanbul earlier this week. This time, Ambassador Amina Mohamed, as Chair of MC10, joined the meeting as well.

The conversation focused on what issues participants thought could be dealt with in Nairobi and what the approach should be to post-Nairobi work. So as you can see, it is a repetition of the familiar conversation – focusing these two points.

Participants were asked to say whether they were prepared to proceed on a package of issues which would be DDA minus, along the lines of what I have already outlined. And they were asked if they were willing to evaluate whether and how we should start working on a final Nairobi document.

The conclusion that I took from that meeting was that participants were willing to work on both fronts. This is encouraging.

In addition to the arguments made in previous meetings, some other elements emerged more clearly this time. Some participants said that reassurance regarding post-Nairobi was needed for a successful outcome in Nairobi. No-one seemed to fundamentally disagree with this. Some stressed the importance of a balanced outcome even in the context of a package containing some issues only.

Some noted that the post-Nairobi agenda should be open to issues that are relevant to all members, and some made the point clearly that the DDA issues must remain the primary focus and cannot be forgotten. No-one disagreed that development should stay central to our conversations after Nairobi and that principles like S&D treatment and less-than-full reciprocity should be kept in our post-Nairobi work.

Differences still remained on the role of the DDA framework in the post-Nairobi agenda. In spite of that, there was no apparent disagreement on the desirability of a consensual document, a Ministerial Declaration, as part of the outcomes for MC10.

I told participants that I would bring these discussions to the General Council, as I am doing now.

I also stressed the importance of not leaving the discussion about our future work to the last minute, so as to avoid the risk of having a chaotic process in Nairobi.

I was reassured by the participants. All of them expressed willingness to engage in negotiations in Geneva along the lines of what I described here, and they underscored the need of discussing these issues with the wider membership, which we are doing here.

On Tuesday I attended the G20 trade ministers meeting in Istanbul. Again Cabinet Secretary Amina Mohamed also joined the meeting.

I set out the shape of the potential deliverables that had been discussed in Geneva and posed the two key questions:

  • First: was there a willingness to proceed on the basis of a package of specific issues which is DDA-minus – and therefore should we intensify our work on the more promising issues that I outlined earlier, without prejudice to the other items we were already negotiating?

  • And second: should we start work on a final Nairobi document immediately, without prejudice to the outcome of this exercise, either in terms of substance or format?

I was pleased with the response.

There was strong support to begin working – in the negotiating groups – more intensively on a package of specific substantive outcomes for Nairobi, with a focus on areas where outcomes seem to be more likely to be successfully concluded.

Again, however, it was clear that work on these issues should not preclude work on other areas where some members felt consensus may still be achievable.

I cautioned ministers that there was still a great deal of intensive work ahead if we were to narrow the gaps between positions and reach outcomes, even on the specific issues identified as part of the potential package.

Ministers also gave their backing to a parallel discussion on the path of future work on unresolved Doha issues after Nairobi.

No-one disagreed with the continuing central importance of development to this work – nor that core DDA issues which remain unresolved, such as agriculture, industrial goods and services, will continue to be an important part of the post-Nairobi discussion.

Overall I think a very clear, high-level political message emerged from this meeting that the political will exists, among these important players, to make Nairobi a success.

Post-Nairobi

So, drawing on all of these meetings and consultations, let me now focus on the issue of our post-Nairobi work in a bit more detail.

While there is a potential package on the table, it seems that, whatever we deliver in Nairobi, it will not be viable or credible, to announce it as an agreed conclusion of the DDA single undertaking. This seems to be a consensual view.

In this scenario, the unavoidable question is: what to do with the DDA issues that are not properly addressed in the Nairobi package?

At this point, there are divergent views on what happens after Nairobi. Many say that if there is no consensus to end the Doha Round then it will simply continue – you would need consensus to end it – and that we should state this clearly. Others say that if we do not deliver Doha by Nairobi then that will be it – even without a formal statement affirming the demise of the DDA.

Clearly these views will be extremely difficult to reconcile.

However, I think we cannot disregard important commonalities when thinking about the way ahead.

For example, I think we all agree that:

  • We want to deliver something in Nairobi and that it should be meaningful.

  • Whatever we deliver will not be agreed to be the end of negotiations on the DDA issues.

  • We are still ready to keep pursuing the core issues of the DDA and their development dimension after Nairobi – although there is no agreement on how to do this: whether under the DDA framework, or whether under a reformulated architecture.

The question is whether we can – or whether we want – to capture these and other possible commonalities in a consensual text in Nairobi.

We have a number of options in terms of the type of document that could result from the Ministerial. It could be:

  • a Ministerial Declaration, which is the usual type of document that you get from these meetings;

  • a non-consensual Chairperson’s statement, which is something we have done before;

  • or a hybrid of some sort – for example it could be partly consensual text and partly non-consensual text.

So those are the potential options.

Then we arrive again at the question of how such a document can be produced – how do we get there?

This is not a small challenge and it is important that we need to think now about the process that would allow us to find convergence on a satisfactory solution.

I would suggest that we start working on the basis that we will have a Ministerial Declaration that would take stock of the decisions taken at MC10 and that gives us guidance on our future work.

Of course, this would be without prejudice to what outcome we will have in Nairobi, but it is important to start somewhere and to aim for the highest possible result.

My proposal to you therefore is to start a process that will lead us to text based negotiations on an MC10 Ministerial Declaration.

There are still different views on what this process would look like and I will be informally consulting you about this.

Whatever this process is – and as I say, I don’t know what it will look like – we should bear some things in mind:

  • It must be progressive (for example, right now we still don’t know what the Nairobi package will look like);

  • It must be a bottom-up, transparent and inclusive process;

  • It will not deal with substance – that will happen in the negotiating groups;

  • My instinct is that it should probably start with a focus on the post-Nairobi elements of the declaration.

These are just my preliminary views. As I have indicated, I will be holding consultations to hear your own views.

Conclusion

Through the various consultations over recent weeks I think members have identified a road to success in Nairobi. Clearly there are many obstacles along the way, but none in my view are insurmountable.

We have very little time remaining.

I think we have a general sense of what may be on the table in terms of substantive deliverables (though it is not a closed package, or a sure package) – and I think we should recognize that agreement on the elements we are talking about would represent real progress. They would have a major economic and developmental impact, even though we must strive to do much more in the future. So now we need to firm these up with textual proposals that can be advanced through the negotiating groups.

But it is now very clear that the post-Nairobi conversation must take place at the same time. These two elements need to move in parallel. Otherwise the differences we already see today could compromise any chance of success on the substantive issues.

So this is where we are today Mr Chairman. I hope it provides food for thought.

Thank you.

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