At a short meeting of the WTO Aid for Trade Task Force on 18 April, Chair Ambassador Mia Horn Af Rantzien of Sweden suggested that Members are seeking clarity on the scope of the task force's work, and in particular want to know how the WTO can add to existing initiatives on aid for trade.

Drawing on informal consultations held with Members, international organizations and other stakeholders, she suggested that it would be difficult for the task force to answer the latter without more information about the new resources that would fund the implementation of its eventual recommendations to the WTO Membership on how 'aid for trade' could contribute most effectively to the development dimension of the Doha agenda.

Since WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy's consultations with various international and regional financial institutions about funding for aid for trade are still in progress, his expected presentation on them was postponed until the next task force meeting, which sources suggested will be held in mid-May. Delegates believe that Lamy's presentation will provide information necessary for the scope-setting exercise, and have thus pushed those discussions back until then (see BRIDGES Weekly, 8 March 2006).

Some delegates expressed disappointment that the meeting was unable to achieve progress on the architecture of WTO work on Aid for Trade. Nonetheless, Zambia on behalf of the least-developed countries group (LDCs) submitted a paper that suggested that value chain analysis could be a useful tool to identify measures necessary to enhance supply-side trade capacity in developing countries (WT/AFT/W/1). On behalf of the African Group, Benin presented a report from a 7-8 April meeting in Montreux of African ambassadors and stakeholders on Aid for Trade (TI/TMIN/EXP/8(IV)Rev.1). The report suggests that trade capacity building and financing needs must be identified and that any funds offered under the initiative must come over and above existing development aid while being predictable and unlinked to conditionalities.

ICTSD reporting.

DSU REVIEW: MEMBERS CONTINUE TO DISCUSS REVISED CONTRIBUTIONS

WTO Members focused on four proposals for changes to the global trade body's dispute procedures at the Special (negotiating) Session of the WTO Dispute Settlement Body (DSB) on 24 April.

The EU and Japan submitted a supplement to a 2005 joint proposal in which they suggest procedures to follow in cases where the target of a dispute had taken a measure to comply with the DSB's recommendations and rulings, while at the same time, the complainant had been granted authorisation to retaliate (see BRIDGES Weekly, 6 April 2005).

Building on a previous proposal from the so-called 'G-7' group of countries focusing on issues related to enhanced third party rights in WTO disputes, Hong Kong tabled a contribution calling for both respondents and complainants to have an equal right to reject or accept all third party requests to join consultations. The G-7 advocates an "all or nothing" approach to third party participation -- according to which the responding Member would have the option of accepting or rejecting all such requests, but would not have the option to discriminate among would-be third parties. (see BRIDGES Weekly, 29 March 2006). The G-7 also introduced some modifications to their earlier proposal which sought to give a disputing party the right to request the DSB to send an appealed case back to the original panel in the event that the Appellate Body finds that the panel's report did not provide a sufficient factual basis to complete the analysis. Finally, drawing on a 2002 proposal, the US continued to call for enhanced transparency in the dispute settlement system, notably by opening dispute settlement procedures to the public and formalising the handling of so-called amicus curiae ('friend of the court') briefs (see BRIDGES Weekly, 18 September 2002).

Delegates present at the meeting reported that there is no consensus yet on any of these issues, and that a "chair's text" in which Ambassador Ronald Saborio Soto (Costa Rica) would compile the issues on which he felt there was or could be consensus, is not yet in sight. The next DSB Special Session is scheduled for 22-23 May.

ICTSD reporting.