Indonesia along with other developing nations will attend the WTO Doha round in Geneva, trying to bridge the differences with developed nations on several burning issues such as agricultural subsidies and special safeguard mechanisms, a paper said here Friday.
Director general for international trade cooperation of the Trade Ministry Gusmardi Bustami was quoted by the Jakarta Post as saying that non-agricultural issues would also be discussed in the trade summit on Dec. 17-19 in Switzerland.
He said that Indonesia, as chairman of a grouping of developing nations called G-33, would "actively take part" in the summit, in particular on how to best implement special safeguard mechanisms in developing countries.
The mechanism refers to certain allowable measures which can be adopted by governments to provide protection, to some extent, of their domestic interests.
The director said meetings of senior official have been trying to seek solutions to this deal-breaker, that has become one of the main thorny points causing deadlock in these trade talks.
In these sessions of senior officials, the U.S. and the European Union have proposed to cut their direct annual subsidies to their farmers from 22.5 billion U.S. dollars to 14.5 billion U.S. dollars and from 33 billion U.S. dollars to 22 billion U.S. dollars, respectively.
"The proposed cuts would be fully implemented within two years once an agreement is signed," he said, without explaining whether the proposed cuts would be sufficient to meet the demands from developing nations.
Gusmardi also said developed countries the U.S., the EU, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Japan, would also have to eliminate export subsidies in the form of export insurance and interest rate subsidies.
Besides, the U.S. and the EU have agreed to gradually cut tariff barriers to a maximum of 80 percent within five years, while developing countries would only be required to gradually cut tariffs by a maximum of 36 percent within 10 years.
Among other issues to be additionally discussed he said, were sensitive products, special products, tariff simplification, quotas and subsidies, while on the part of developing nations there would also be discussion on issues such as the liberalization of certain business sectors.
The 2005 declaration, signed in Hong Kong, stated developing countries should voluntarily participate in tariff elimination in a number of business sectors.
Source:Xinhua
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