GENERAL COUNCIL APPOINTS COMMITTEE CHAIRS FOR 2006

At its 8 February meeting, the WTO General Council formally assented to the list of chair appointments for 2006 to the thirteen regular WTO committees and eight Doha Round negotiating bodies. Ambassador Eirik Glenne (Norway) replaces Ambassador Amina Chawahir Mohamed (Kenya) at the head of the General Council. His foremost task will be to work with Director-General Pascal Lamy to help guide the troubled Doha Round negotiations through the end of the year, when Members are hoping to finalise an agreement. Malaysian Ambassador Yacob Muhammed Noor replaces Glenne as chair of the Dispute Settlement Body, and Ambassador Claudia Uribe (Colombia) becomes the new head of the Trade Policy Review Body. The Council for Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) will be chaired by Ambassador Trevor Clarke of Barbados.

Several of the negotiating body chairs will remain unchanged. Ambassador Crawford Falconer (New Zealand) will stay at the helm of the farm trade talks, where he has been since September 2005. Another relatively recent appointment, Ambassador Fernando de Mateo (Mexico), will continue to chair the Special Session of the Council for Trade in Services. Ambassador Toufiq Ali (Bangladesh) and Ambassador Guillermo Valles Galmes (Uruguay) will stay on as chairs of the environment and rules negotiations, respectively. New appointments include Canadian Ambassador Don Stephenson, who becomes the chair of the Negotiating Group on Non-Agricultural Market Access (NAMA), and Tony Miller (Hong Kong), who will take over the trade facilitation talks. Singaporean Ambassador Burhan Gafoor is the new chair of the Special Session of the Committee on Trade and Development (CTD-SS), replacing Faizel Ismail (South Africa), who will instead chair the regular session of the CTD.

The slate of candidates was put together by outgoing General Council Chair Amina Mohamed, on the basis of consultations with the Membership.

The complete list of chairs for 2006 is available online at http://www.wto.org/english/news_e/pres06_e/pr433_e.htm.

ICTSD reporting.

COTTON FOUR ASK FOR MONITORING MECHANISMS TO ENSURE COMPLIANCE

In the first meeting of the WTO Sub-Committee on Cotton since the Hong Kong Ministerial Conference, the four proponents of the WTO cotton sectoral initiative called on Members to spell out in greater detail how they plan to implement and monitor the stipulations set out in the Hong Kong Ministerial Declaration. At the 31 January gathering, they also indicated that they would soon put forward a proposal for reducing domestic farm subsidies.

Benin, on behalf of Burkina Faso, Chad, and Mali, asked for the creation of a mechanism to monitor the implementation of the requirement set out in Paragraph 11 of the Hong Kong Declaration for developed countries to eliminate all forms of export subsidies for cotton in 2006. Since no other developed countries subsidise cotton exports, this essentially refers to certain US export subsidy and export credit programmes -- both ruled illegal by the WTO in April 2005. The US Congress voted on 1 February to end payments under the condemned 'step 2' cotton subsidy programme as of 1 August.

The countries also requested Members to develop more precise modalities for fulfilling the obligation to reduce trade-distorting domestic cotton "more ambitiously than under whatever general formula is agreed" and "over a shorter period of time than generally applicable."

Sources report that the so-called 'Cotton Four' asked the WTO Secretariat to work with partner institutions, donor countries, and cotton producers to find way to deal with fluctuation in cotton prices, especially in cases where external circumstances are responsible for the price volatility.

ICTSD reporting; "Congress ends cotton subsidy," UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL, 2 February 2006.