A week of discussions in the WTO Negotiating Group on Rules came to a close on 3 June. The talks consisted largely of formal and informal meetings on aspects of the antidumping agreement and fisheries subsidies, but the closing session saw Members calling for speedier progress in the run-up towards a July target for coming up with "first approximations" of an eventual deal to be reached at December's Ministerial Conference in Hong Kong.

Heads of Delegations call for acceleration...

Ambassadors and senior officials from several countries attended the negotiations in an attempt to generate some momentum in the group's work towards the December. Although Members largely agreed about the need for acceleration in the talks, opinions diverged as to how this could be best achieved.

Ambassador Alejandro Jara of Chile stressed the importance of getting things down on paper, stating that sooner or later the Negotiating Group would have start drafting texts. He also called for informal meetings prior to the mini-ministerial meeting scheduled to take place in China on 12-13 July.

Mexico suggested that the WTO Secretariat update the compendium of proposals in order to facilitate the negotiations. Several members were sceptical about this, pointing out that the proposals submitted represented different levels of maturity in the debates and thus did not constitute a real basis for a legal text. Several Members including the EU, the US, Brazil and India, suggested that instead of helping the talks, such a compilation might backfire and unintentionally lead to polarised and hardened positions.

The debate also illustrated the sheer number and diversity of modalities the group is dealing with. While Jara was calling for written proposals on clarifying specific parts of the Anti-dumping Agreement, some Members said that it may be too early to expect written proposals in other areas, such as fisheries subsidies disciplines.

The meeting had no definitive outcome, but Chair Ambassador Guillermo Valles Galmés of Uruguay described it as a good first step. He will now start crafting his report for the Trade Negotiations Committee meeting in July. In order for the document to reflect Members' ambitions in the lead up to Hong Kong, Valles Galmés said that delegations must provide explicit signals about their positions. This will also be crucial for determining how the group's work should proceed after the summer break.

...But slow progress in technical talks

In informal sessions earlier in the week, the Negotiating Group discussed two papers submitted by the 'Friends' of anti-dumping negotiations (FAN*; TN/RL/GEN/44 and TN/RL/GEN/43) as well as a paper from Japan on potential ways to determine whether 'material injury' to domestic industries is occurring as a result of dumping (TN/RL/GEN/42).

A 15 February 2005 statement (TN/RL/W/171) from the FAN, a group of countries seeking to tighten rules on the application of anti-dumping measures, identified "preventing AD measures from becoming 'permanent'" as of one of the group's six broad objectives (see BRIDGES Weekly, 2 March 2005). It said reviews of such measures were crucial to their eventual withdrawal, but that existing disciplines on such reviews were "unclear and deficient." In order to improve clarity on how to review imposed AD measures, the FAN submitted a paper on Article 9 of the AD Agreement, which deals with the imposition and collection of AD duties. The paper also aims to avoid an "arbitrary application of rules, procedures, and methodologies in reviews that differ substantially from those in original investigations."

The debate on these issues, described by delegates as substantive and very technical, revealed that Members lacked a common understanding with regards to what the paper tried to achieve. Several parts of the Agreement refer to review procedures, but Members are not clear on how these would apply to different situations. Some of the debate was undertaken in plurilateral mode among the active players in the AD negotiations to allow for substantive discussions. However, no agreement was reached.

In a short formal session the Norwegian delegate presented a submission (TN/RL/W181) on behalf of the FAN on the investigation procedure to be employed when the number of companies involved in a dumping allegation is too large for authorities to investigate them all individually. The paper illustrated two ways in which sampling could be done: statistically and representatively. For the latter, it suggested, the sample should include at least two-thirds of the imports under investigation. Drawing on previous jurisprudence, the paper states that for all companies not investigated individually a single rate of AD duties -- equal to the weighted average of the dumping margins for all the investigated actors -- should be applied. The US said that the two-thirds threshold was too high. The EU, for its part, called for a clearer distinction between co-operating and non co-operating actors. The paper will be further discussed when the group meets next to discuss AD matters on 11-12 July.

Enforcement and decommissioning in fisheries discussions

The US presented a paper on government support for decommissioning vessels that it considers a candidate for the "green-box," i.e., permitted subsidies (TN/RL/TEN/41). The EU, in its submission, continued to focus on transparency and enforcement (TN/RL/GEN/39).

ICTSD will provide more detailed coverage of the debate on fisheries subsides in the forthcoming issue of BRIDGES Trade BioRes.

*The friends of anti-dumping include Chile, Costa Rica, Hong Kong China, Japan, The republic of Korea, Norway, Switzerland, the Separate Customs Territory of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu, Thailand and Turkey.

ICTSD reporting.