Agricultural News
WTO AG Talks Continue
Fri, 18 Feb 2011 16:47:27 CST
WTO Agriculture Talks chairperson David Walker reported Friday that - in almost two weeks of meetings and consultations, he has heard little that is "audibly" new. After 10 days of talks, - some delegations said they were disappointed with the lack of progress in the latest round of talks. Others said some of their consultations had been useful, and some repeated their call for issues that they have raised over the past months or years to be discussed seriously.
Some of the areas being worked on by negotiators include: tariff simplification, the special safeguard mechanism which allows developing countries to raise tariffs temporarily to deal with price falls or import surges, and tariff quota creation which implies countries would be allowed to label products as "sensitive", with a smaller than normal tariff cut, even if the products do not currently have tariff quotas.
Walker compared the task of revising the draft modalities to landing an airplane, the time left until 21 April being the runway, He said, the task is "to get the plane on that runway and stopped before the runway ends."
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