EU promises seeks to design bilateral trade deals that support future WTO-type pact
EU promises seeks to design bilateral trade deals that support future WTO-type pact
The Associated Press
Published : May 8, 2007
BRUSSELS, Belgium : The European Union will aim to design bilateral trade deals with other regions and countries that can be applied to a future world trade agreement even if last-ditch efforts to forge a global pact fail later this year, an EU trade official said Tuesday.
David O’Sullivan, the head of the European Commission’s trade unit, said the EU was working to broker deals that would add to the Doha round of World Trade Organization negotiations, not replace it.
If the Doha round collapses, O’Sullivan said the one-on-one deals would be used "to build a network of bilateral liberalization, on which we can renew and build a new multilateral commitment."
The EU is in talks with South Korea, India, Russia, the Gulf states and the ASEAN group of South Asian nations. It also wants to make its free-trade pacts with Central American and Andean trade blocs more open. South Korea recently struck a bilateral agreement with the United States.
"We’ve only launched these bilateral negotiations precisely because we are reaching the end of the road with Doha, hopefully with a success, maybe with a failure, but in that case we need another agenda," O’Sullivan told the European Parliament’s trade committee.
He predicted "a certain shock to the system" if the Doha round failed, saying that would trigger serious reflection about the WTO’s role and future. "But we have to be realistic. If this round does not succeed in the next few weeks or the next few months, probably the multilateral agenda is on hold for a number of years," he said.
O’Sullivan said the EU was committed to a WTO agreement, saying nothing could replace such sweeping efforts to tumble trade barriers across the world and reduce protectionist agriculture subsidies.
But the EU will continue it’s bilateral negotiations, in the meantime. Talks with India take place in May, and resume with South Korea in July, he said.
On negotiations with ASEAN, O’Sullivan said the EU would not strike a trade deal with the military dictatorship that rules Myanmar even though the country may take part in EU-ASEAN meetings.
"We will not sign a document which involves a country with whom we have political difficulty such as Myanmar," he said, stressing that this situation might change when talks finally wrap up in two or three years.
Laos and Cambodia would also likely be excluded from an agreement that would give them less favorable conditions than a wider EU deal with the world’s least developed countries.
The Europeans also hold a May 18 summit with Russia in a tense atmosphere - due partly to friction between Moscow and former Soviet bloc nations Estonia and Poland.
Further talks on planned trade deal with Russia must wait at least a year, however, until after the country joins the WTO, O’Sullivan said.
