NEW DRAFT REPORT ON S&D AS MEMBERS CONFRONT THIRD DEADLINE

Continuing their string of informal meetings in hopes of preventing a third deadline on the review of special and differential treatment (S&D) from slipping away unfulfilled, the special session of the Committee on Trade and Development met informally on 29 January, as well as on 3 and 6 February. The group met previously on 17 and 24 January (see BRIDGES Weekly, 29 January 2003). On the morning of 6 February, Members met briefly to receive a new draft report from Chair Ransford Smith (Jamaica), on which Members hope to be able to base a report "with clear recommendations for a decision" due for submission to the General Council at its 10-11 February meeting (see BRIDGES Weekly, 15 January 2003).

Compilation of agreement-specific proposals

According to a source closely monitoring the negotiations, the draft report (not publicly available) contains ten agreement-specific proposals that enjoy clear consensus among Members. These include four that were potentially ripe for harvest at year-end 2002 (see BRIDGES Weekly, 20 December 2002), as well as six new proposals (covering, inter alia, services, dispute settlement, rules of origin and Least-developed Countries). At time of press, discussions were slated to continue in the afternoon of 6 February in order to add additional provisions to the current list of ten. One trade source speculated that Members would likely continue to meet informally right up until and including the morning of the 10-11 February deadline.

The way forward

With perceptible progress on agreement-specific proposals to be adopted for early harvest, the second item in need of a solution is how to proceed in the future. The draft report tabled on 6 February reportedly offers three options, outlining that the special session will: 1) continue its work on agreement specific proposals until "[31 July 2003]" (the square brackets surrounding the date indicate the timeline is still up for negotiation); 2) suspend its work on agreement-specific proposals (noting that the General Council could conceivably assign some of the work to be pursued in the negotiating groups or other relevant bodies); or 3) "actively" send those proposals to the negotiating groups and other relevant bodies. Work on the Monitoring Mechanism (to monitor the outcome of the S&D review) would continue in the special session. On cross-cutting issues (such as defining the principles and objectives of S&D), the report apparently indicated that these may also be discussed further.

The formal meeting scheduled for 6 February was, at time of press, rescheduled for 7 February. BRIDGES Weekly will report further on this item, including country perspectives, in the following issue.

Background

The CTD received a mandate from Ministers in Doha agreeing "that all special and differential treatment provisions shall be reviewed with a view to strengthening them and making them more precise, effective and operational." Major elements of this review were initially scheduled to make up a report to the General Council "with clear recommendations for a decision" by 31 July 2002, however at this time countries found themselves widely divergent on how to deal with (and interpret) the mandate (see BRIDGES Weekly, 8 August 2002). Pushing the deadline off to 31 December 2002, Members met fervently in hopes of moving forward with the S&D review, but by year-end 2002, agreement could only be found on four of the 85-plus proposals submitted since February 2002 (see BRIDGES Weekly, 20 December 2002, link above).

ICTSD reporting.