SERVICES CHAIR ANNOUNCES WORK PROGRAMME FOR AUTUMN

Services negotiators from some 14 WTO Member states including the EU, the US, Japan, Canada, Hong Kong, Chile, Mexico, India, and Australia met behind the scenes during the week of WTO meetings at the end of the July to hammer out a work programme for the services talks leading up to the Hong Kong Ministerial Conference in December. They came up with a comprehensive schedule for weekly informal consultations to be hosted by the Chair of the Council for Trade in Services Special Session starting from 5 September. The current Chair, Ambassador Alejandro Jara of Chile, announced the plan in a 27 July 2005 note.

The meetings were, as one delegate described them, partly a reaction to the negotiations of July 2004, in which services remained largely neglected until the very last minute, when Members agreed on a May 2005 benchmark for the submission of revised market-opening offers.

Technical talks demand intensive work

Delegates involved in the initiative point out that the services negotiations will require consistently intensive work and engagement until the very end of the Doha Round. This is in part due to the sheer number of services sectors involved and the highly technical and resource-intensive nature of the bilateral request-offer process through which market access is extended. Moreover, the services negotiations would actually require continuous revisions of these requests and offers, if Members' common objective is to attain deeper and broader levels of specific commitments.

This task would appear to be particularly relevant given the widely-held perception that even though the 'critical mass' of initial -- thought not revised -- offers appears to have been reached, (with more than 70 offers representing nearly 100 Members already on the table), the quality of offers is generally regarded as quite low and unresponsive to the respective needs of trading partners on both sides of the fence.

To this end, the consultations will focus on issues identified in the CTS-SS Chair's 11 July report to the Trade Negotiations Committee (TN/S/20), including further identification of expectations by Members in all areas of negotiations; means of intensifying the request-offer process; the use of complementary approaches as proposed by Members within the parameters of the WTO rules and existing guidelines for the services negotiations; the implementation of agreed modalities for special and differential treatment (S&D) for LDCs in the negotiations; consideration of relevant S&D proposals; and targeted technical assistance.

Developing countries: offers linked to agriculture, mode 4, rules

Many developing country delegates emphasise that the quality of offers is inextricably linked to the lack of progress in the other critical negotiating issues of the round, specifically agriculture. Furthermore, they maintain that for the current offers on market access commitments to improve substantially, developed trading partners must lead by example and offer commercially meaningful offers in mode 4 (which covers the cross-border movement of individuals to provide services), particularly of the type relevant to developing countries' needs.

The negotiators also insist that deepened market access offers would also require equal progress in the rules aspect of the services negotiations, where a number of developing countries appear to be the primary "demandeurs." The rules talks cover disciplines on domestic regulation, subsidies to the services sector, and a possible safeguard mechanism to protect domestic services providers in emergency situations. These delegates have indicated that they will ensure that their concerns are taken into account in the consultations under the post-summer work programme.

Chair Jara appointed to be WTO Deputy Director-General

Lending further complication to the services negotiations is Chair Jara's appointment as one of the new Deputy Directors-General of the WTO (see "WTO In Brief," this issue). Jara is expected to sit as CTS-SS Chair in the upcoming services cluster in September and to oversee the work programme until he assumes his new responsibilities in October. However, given the critical phase of negotiations in the run-up to Hong Kong, some concerns have been raised about the wisdom of adopting a new Chair so close to the Ministerial Conference, notwithstanding the qualifications of two potential successors, Tony Miller of Hong Kong-China and Ambassador Fernando de Mateo of Mexico.

Trade sources say that some influential delegations have indicated preliminary interest about whether Jara could actually remain CTS-SS Chair while serving as the WTO Deputy Director-General until December. They suggest that this would be akin to the accommodation made with Mr. Stuart Harbinson, who previously chaired the agriculture negotiations while serving as chef de cabinet to outgoing WTO Director-General Supachai Panitchpakdi.

ICTSD reporting.