Global services group tells G8 get WTO deal done

Geneva, Jul 14: Service industry chiefs from around the globe appealed to Group of Eight leaders to break the logjam in world free trade negotiations and rescue a deal that could open the way to prosperity for all.

A Global Services Coalition, in a statement issued in Geneva, said yesterday the blockage in the World Trade Organisation's Doha Round over farm subsidies and goods tariffs was making ''a quality agreement'' in their sector more and more difficult.

Leaders of the seven G8 countries in the WTO, Britain, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Japan and the United States, meeting with Russia in St Petersburg this weekend must mandate their negotiators to find a way out of the impasse, it said.

''This logjam is standing in the way of global economic growth because WTO members refuse to make substantive progress in services until the fundamental issues in agriculture and manufactures trade are resolved,'' the Coalition declared.

Services, which include huge global industries like telecommunications, banking, insurance and tourism, are the third main plank of the deeply troubled Round, launched at the end of 2001 and facing a final deadline at the end of this year.

The Coalition includes service groups from the United States, the European Union, Japan, Canada, Australia, China, Hong Kong, Switzerland and Brazil.

Coalition heads told a news conference that both developed and developing countries stood to gain enormously from a good deal on freer trade in services, very much more than from agreements on tariffs and on farming.

But a European farmers' grouping, in a statement issued from Brussels, said the agricultural accord currently being pushed by developing countries like India and Brazil as well as the United States would destroy the European farm sector.

''We are on the brink of total disaster for European agriculture,'' said the grouping, the General Confederation of Agricultural Cooperatives in the EU and the Committee of Professional Agricultural Organisations.

''This is not a matter of a few sectors or a few regions in the EU being hit,'' their statement said.

''Mainstream sectors, beef, poultry, pigmeat, dairy, cereals, fruit and vegetables, would be decimated, with knock-on effects right across the board,'' it said.

REUTERS

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