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WTO countries agree how to run negotiations

World Trade Organisation member countries on Friday agreed on a negotiating structure for new global talks on cutting tariffs on goods and opening markets for farm produce and services.

The trade liberalisation round was launched officially by ministers meeting in Doha, Qatar last November, but the formal start had been delayed by squabbles about how the three-year negotiations would be managed.

In a statement issued by the European Union's office in Geneva, where the closed-door WTO session was held, EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy welcomed the breakthrough.

"WTO members in Geneva have taken the first, important, indeed necessary, step toward implementing the negotiating mandate agreed in Doha," Lamy said.

"These decisions mean the WTO is now able to start the actual work of the negotiations," the Frenchman added.

The agreement ended nearly a month of wrangling over how a free trade round, due to have been formally launched last Monday, would be managed and who would chair its key body, the Trade Negotiating Committee or TNC.

Under the accord, resisted by a core group of dissenters including a number of African countries, Pakistan and the Dominican Republic, the WTO director-general will preside over the TNC.

Major powers -- including the United States, EU, Canada and Japan -- and most developing countries in Asia and Latin America, had favoured this approach.

They argued that the WTO's top official -- Mike Moore of New Zealand until September and then Thailand's Supachai Panitchpakdi -- should chair the round's steering body to ensure continuity.

But the dissenters -- who had some support from WTO newcomer China -- feared that this would give too much power to the WTO secretariat, which they suspect of being more interested in driving talks forward than in ensuring that the views of all 144 members, especially the smallest, are taken into account.

This will be the ninth free trade round since 1947. The last one was completed before the WTO came into being in 1995, succeeding the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

Its aim is to reduce tariffs around the world on goods, open wider markets to services, and create better conditions for development in poorer countries by boosting markets for their products.

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