4 February, 2008Talks at the WTO on the Doha trade agreement reach a critical stage and trade unions remain extremely concerned about the repercussions an agreement will have on sustainable development and employment.
GLOBAL: New texts on Agriculture and Non-Agricultural Market Access (NAMA) are expected to be released this week, as negotiations on the Doha trade agreement at the World Trade Organisation reach a critical stage.
The process over the coming weeks, as proposed by WTO director-general Pascal Lamy and agreed upon by Ministers in Davos, includes the release of new texts for analysis and further talks in the Agriculture and NAMA groups separately. This will be followed by a horizontal process at senior official level that will enable discussion on the Agriculture and NAMA texts together, allowing for trade-offs. The WTO expects this process to be finalized around Easter, after which ministers will take the final positions on remaining modalities.
As the negotiations reach a critical stage and trade-offs are becoming more likely, trade unions remain alarmed by the negative effects an agreement will have on sustainable development and employment and are planning a series of lobbying meetings in Geneva at the beginning of March.
On January 17, two trade union declarations on NAMA were released, one by the NAMA 11 trade unions and one by the Latin American trade union group on NAMA (in Spanish and English). Both statements are in response to communications tabled by Canada, the European Community, Iceland, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland and the United States proposing to restrict the level of flexibilities that could be available to developing countries in the NAMA agreement.
"The communications therefore completely deny the employment needs in our countries, many of them facing unemployment levels above 10 per cent and high rates of underemployment and informal work," states the NAMA 11 trade unions.
The unions call on governments to ensure that developing countries can apply a tariff reduction in line with their stage of development, that flexibilities for developing countries are expanded substantially and that the flexibilities can be changed over time. The unions also reaffirm that no proposals should be made in an attempt to break developing country groupings in NAMA or regional integration groupings.
Copies of both trade union statements are available on the IMF website.