October 7, 2013 — Members of the APEC should send a strong signal to fellow members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to make a break through in the upcoming ministerial meeting in order to salvage the Doha round of trade talks.
New WTO director general Roberto Azevedo said that the challenges in progressing with the preparatory talks for the meeting, scheduled in December, also in Bali, was political in nature, thereby, there was an urgent need for deeper personal engagement from ministers of its 159 members.
“What APEC can do is to send a message that this is for real, that we have now an opportunity to do something multilaterally before Bali and make a call for other members that are not in APEC to dedicate the necessary attention to conclude the deal and to get the ministers involved like they have been involved here to try to do the deal,” Azevedo told The Jakarta Post in an interview during his participation in the two-day APEC ministerial meeting at the end of last week.
“That is a strong message to engage other ministers,” he added.
Avezedo said that despite the progress made in the ongoing negotiations for draft deals and proposals for the meeting, the major challenge would be limited time as all the talks should be ready long before members convened in Bali.
“The other challenge is that the negotiations are not moving fast enough so we have to advance not only in terms of being more focused and more agile in finding solutions, but we also have key issues, which are lagging behind,” he said, citing differential treatment of provisions in the trade facilitation package and food security in the agricultural package.
Read the full story at the Jakarta Post