manny_ramirez
27.06.05, 17:17
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Poor countries call for immediate free trade DOHA ROUND PREPARATIONS.
By ALAN BEATTIE
631 words
27 June 2005
Financial Times
London Ed1
Page 6
English
(c) 2005 The Financial Times Limited. All rights reserved
Ministers from the world's poorest countries yesterday called for complete
and immediate trade access to the rich world's markets and criticised the
EU's proposal to slash the price it pays for sugar, saying it would damage
the economies of poor producers of the crop.
Meeting in Zambia this weekend to discuss strategy for the current Doha round
of trade talks ahead of December's World Trade Organisation meeting in Hong
Kong, ministers from the 50 least-developed countries (LDCs) called for rich
countries to grant a "binding commitment on duty- free and quota-free market
access for all products from LDCs to be granted and implemented immediately".
The access should come without demands that poor countries reduce their
tariff barriers in return, ministers said.
The EU already extends free access to its market for products from LDCs
through the "Everything But Arms" programme, though free entry for some
sensitive products has been delayed. Sugar exports from LDCs, for example,
will only become completely free from tariffs and quotas in 2009.
Moreover, in presenting her proposal last week to reform the EU's sugar
regime, Mariann Fischer Boel, the agriculture commissioner, warned that sugar
from LDCs could swamp Europe if the guaranteed EU price, currently at three
times world levels, was not cut.
Though 19 LDCs produce sugar, few currently have large quotas to export into
Europe, raising the prospect of a sharp increase in sales after they gain
free access in 2009. "An EU price at the current level would draw in more
imports than we could absorb and our market would be in danger of imploding,"
Ms Fischer Boel wrote last week in the FT.
Graham Clark, chairman of the LDC London Sugar Group, an industry body, said
such arguments were based on an unrealistic fear that nations such as
Ethiopia, Zambia and Mozambique would import cheap sugar from the world
market to satisfy domestic demand and export their entire domestic production
to the EU. "There is complete paranoia at the EU about least-developed
producers," he said. "No country like Zambia is going to take the risk of
becoming dependent on a single export market for its sugar output."
Dipak Patel, Zambia's trade minister and co-ordinator of the LDC group in the
WTO, yesterday sent a strongly worded letter to Ms Fischer Boel arguing: "To
now be cited as one of the principal reasons for radical reform is an
inaccurate representation of the truth."
Ministers urged the EU to consider a slower and smaller price cut to give the
poorest countries more time to build up their sugar industries. "The European
Commission has proposed a radical reform primarily designed to serve the
interests of a few large EU sugar producers," Mr Patel said.
The ministers' call for completely free trade access with no reciprocal
tariff cuts stakes out an ambitious negotiating position ahead of the Hong
Kong meeting. Pascal Lamy, the former EU trade commissioner who will become
director-general of the WTO in September, once said that the Doha round of
talks should be a "round for free" for the poorest countries, in that they
should receive more trade access without having to cut tariffs themselves.
But even the EU's Everything But Arms programme has been criticised by
developing countries for restricting exports with tough "rules of origin"
against the use of imported components and exacting food hygiene standards.
The US has its own programme for poor African countries, the African Growth
and Opportunity Act, which is regarded by some beneficiaries as less
restrictive on rules of origin and hygiene than the EU's scheme, but does not
cover all least-developed countries.
