Archive - jul 2015

The World Trade Organization (WTO) Director-General, Mr. Roberto Azevedo, in his current drive to conclude the Doha Development Round at the forthcoming Nairobi Ministerial meet, appears to have floated Thursday a concept on domestic agriculture support, upending all the collective efforts hitherto on further reforms in Agriculture, mandated by the Agreement on Agriculture of the Marrakesh Treaty of 1994.

Trade ministers of leading developing countries denounced at Paris on Thursday (June 4) attempts by major developed countries to force a decision on the so-called "re-calibration" approach to lower the level of ambition of the post-Bali work program to conclude the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) negotiations later this year, several officials said.

There is still no clarity on re-calibration, simplification and doabilities, India told an informal meeting at the level of Heads of Delegation (HOD) at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) on Monday (1 June).

The Director-General of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Mr. Roberto Azevedo, has issued to members what appears to be a sanitized version of his meetings and issues discussed with trade envoys in different configurations over the last one month. A glimpse of the closed-door consultations between the director-general and select trade envoys in various configurations were reported by different publications, including the SUNS.

Negotiations in the WTO are heating up – and they are going badly. In November last year, WTO members agreed to come up with a “Work Program” for resurrecting the Doha Round by July 31. In this article Deborah James of OWINFS network articulates civil society position on recent developments in WTO negotiations.

Today, 341 global civil society organizations – including development advocates, trade unions, farmers’ organizations, consumer and environmental groups from over 100 countries – sent a letter to WTO members today urging them to abandon the WTO expansion talks and instead focus on an urgent agenda to fix existing damaging rules in the WTO.

It’s almost impossible to keep anything secret these days – not even the core text of a hyper-secret trade deal, the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA), which has spent the last two years taking shape behind the hermetically sealed doors of highly secure locations around the world. According to the agreement’s provisional text, the document is supposed to remain confidential and concealed from public view for at least five years after being signed! But now, thanks to WikiLeaks, it has seeped to the surface.

One day after it leaked a trove of documents related to the massive, pro-corporate Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), WikiLeaks on Thursday published another four chapters of the proposed 52-nation trade deal, covering key areas ahead of the next negotiating round on Monday.

Today, Wikileaks released a second batch of the most updated draft texts on the proposed TISA, along with substantive analysis, on each of four massive services sectors: Financial Services, Telecommunications Services, Electronic Commerce, and Maritime Transport. This follows on their release yesterday of cross-cutting annexes on Domestic Regulation, the "Movement of Natural Persons," Transparency, and Government Procurement, and the Agenda for next week's negotiations, along with what Wikileaks called the journalistic holy grail: the Core Text of the proposed agreement.