Ex-US trade boss: WTO talks will miss deadline

By Brian Fallow

WELLINGTON - There is no way the next round of word trade negotiations will be completed within the planned three years, says Clayton Yeutter, who was the United States top trade official during the Uruguay Round.

"The chances are zero. It will probably take five or six years at a minimum," Mr Yeutter, a former US Trade Representative and Secretary of Agriculture in the Bush Administration, said at a Wellington symposium on free trade yesterday.

Apec trade ministers this week added their collective voice to calls for a comprehensive round of trade negotiations to be concluded within three years. The round is due to be launched in Seattle in November. The Uruguay Round turned into a seven-year marathon.

Information technology advances since then might speed up the logistics, Mr Yeutter said, but the political processes and challenges remained the same. Progress would be further delayed by the fact that next year is an election year in the United States.

Congress was also likely to continue withholding fast track authority - depriving US negotiators of the freedom to negotiate - until early 2001, the honeymoon period of the new presidential administration. Within the US, the proponents of free trade were attacked from the right over sovereignty issues and from the left on labour and environmental issues. Regrettably the middle ground had shrunk, Mr Yeutter said, and enlarging it again would take strong presidential leadership.

"But my view is that the American public is as free trade-oriented as any in the world and likely to remain so." Over the next few years there would be more debate in the trade arena over food safety issues than everything else combined, Mr Yeutter predicted. There was an imperative case for harnessing biotechnology in agriculture, he said, but people were frightened and unsettled by the sheer pace of change.

Dr Lorenz Schomerus, State Secretary at the German Economic Ministry, said future trade negotiations would increasingly be about harmonising national regulations.

"More and more disputes are about the effects of things like safety requirements and environmental policies."

While tariffs would remain on the agenda, they would increasingly be joined by issues about things like standards, intellectual property and Government procurement policies.

"It is very difficult to grow a world class industry in conditions where world class competition is excluded," Dr Schomerus said. "And as a European I should say that also applies to agriculture." The OECD estimates that last year developed economies spent $US274 billion on agricultural support of one kind or another.