No Ministerial Declaration in WTO Dec Meet?

With barely two weeks left until the WTO Ministerial Conference, potential outcomes for the three-day event are now beginning to emerge.

The draft decisions expected to move forward for December include a continuation and extension of the work programme on small economies established in Hong Kong; an extension of the prohibitions on TRIPS non-violation complaints and e-commerce tariffs; LDC accessions; an LDC services waiver; the outcome of the Trade Policy Review Mechanism Fourth Appraisal; and an extension of the mid-2013 deadline for LDCs to comply with the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) Agreement.

Both the TRIPS non-violation and e-commerce decisions have already featured regularly at previous ministerial gatherings.

In the case of the former, TRIPS non-violation complaints concern whether countries should be allowed to bring trade disputes on the grounds that the spirit of the WTO’s TRIPS Agreement has been breached, rather than just the letter of the organisation’s intellectual property rules.

A five-year prohibition on such complaints was put in place at the WTO’s founding in 1995, and has been extended repeatedly at ministerial conferences ever since.

At the last ministerial in 2009, ministers had also agreed to extend the latter moratorium on e-commerce tariffs, which deals with tariffs on goods sold for online download, such as songs or films. A ban on such tariffs has been in place since the 1998 ministerial conference.

No declaration, only outcome document

The December gathering, rather than attempting a full-fledged ministerial declaration, will instead focus on having a chair’s statement as the outcome document, taken on the ministerial chair’s own responsibility.

The first part of the document is expected to include those elements in which ministers have reached a consensus; the contents of this section are the subject of today’s General Council meeting, and are expected to be finalised within the coming hours.

The second part of the document will be determined at the ministerial itself, featuring a summary of those items that trade ministers decide to bring up at the actual event.