Alexandre Rocha
São Paulo – The third round of negotiations of the Global System of Trade Preferences Among Developing Countries (GSTP), released on Wednesday 16 at the 11th United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad), is not going to discuss only the reduction of tariff barriers between the 43 countries that are members of the mechanism, but is also going to consider non tariff barriers (sanitary for example).
"The group has decided to include non tariff barriers in the discussion," stated ambassador Alfredo Chiaradia, head of the Argentine permanent representation at the United Nations (UN) in Geneva (Switzerland), who is currently the president of the committee of GSTP members.
Chiaradia added that the negotiations might also advance beyond goods trade, and include, for example, service export. But it is still not possible to guarantee that the item will be included in the agenda, as the modalities of trade to be discussed will only be defined in November.
Up to November the structure of the negotiating committee will be defined, then, up to June 2005, the areas included in the system will be debated. It is hoped that the accord for tariff reduction be concluded by November 2006. From then on, implementation will take some time, as the treaty must be ratified by local governments – in the case of Brazil, by the National Congress.
Concrete measures
Unctad secretary general Rubens Ricupero added that the release of this third round of negotiations was one of the most "concrete" items of the conference, and one of those with "most immediate application."
He recalled that an Unctad study showed that if the member countries agreed to reduce their reciprocal tariff barriers by 30%, trade between them could rise by up to US$ 9 billion. If the reduction is 50%, the organization forecasts an injection of business of up to US$ 19 billion. This estimate is more optimistic than that by UN secretary general Kofi Annan, who mentioned US$ 15.5 billion.
