News: WTO Negotiators Reach List-Minute Deal

whoknows

By FOSTER KLUG, Associated Press Writer

HONG KONG - Trade negotiators reached a breakthrough Sunday on a last-minute deal, likely averting a collapse of the six-day meeting that could have seriously crippled the WTO's credibility.

But the modest progress achieved in cutting trade barriers left some disappointed — and puts pressure on the WTO if it hopes to forge a global trade treaty by the end of next year.

The agreement was "not enough to make it (the meeting) a success, but enough to save it from failure," said EU trade chief Peter Mandelson, whose delegation came under heavy pressure during the gathering to open up Europe's farming market.

Outside, at least 5,000 demonstrators marched in an anti-WTO parade through downtown Hong Kong, a day after hundreds of protesters were arrested in one of the city's worst spasms of street violence in decades.

The demonstrators chanted "Sink WTO" as trade ministers from around the globe wrapped up six days of negotiations at a World Trade Organization meeting. The protesters claim that the WTO's attempts to open up markets benefit big companies and the rich at the expense of ordinary workers and the poor.

After all-night negotiations, delegates resolved the most contentious issue of the meeting: agreeing to eliminate farm export subsidies by 2013, according to a copy of the final draft that was circulated Sunday.

The tentative agreement, subject to final approval by all 149 member countries and territories at a meeting later Sunday, also addressed cotton export subsidies and a package granting the world's poorest nations special trade priviledges. Since the WTO is a consensus-based organization, an objection by even one member could torpedo a final deal.

But delegates appeared to be moving toward agreement.

Brazil Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said the draft was "reasonable" and hopes it will adopted by all WTO members later Sunday.

"We welcome it," said India's Trade Minister Kamal Nath. "It is focused and it strikes at various problems of developing countries."

Still, the draft represents a far less ambitious agreement than delegates had originally hoped to achieve in Hong Kong: a detailed outline for a binding global free trade agreement by the end of 2006, concluding the current round of development-oriented trade talks that began in 2001 in Doha, Qatar.

In a step that moves members toward that treaty, the revised text also sets April 30, 2006, as a new deadline to work out formulas for cutting farm and industrial tariffs and subsidies — the nuts and bolts of an eventual trade pact.

The draft agreement noted "the compelling urgency of seizing the moment and driving the process to a conclusion as rapidly as possible. We must maintain momentum. You don't close divergences by taking time off to have a cup of tea," it said.

Pushing back the date 2013 date for eliminating farm export subsidies was a key demand of the 25-nation European Union, which held out against intense pressure from Brazil and other developing nations to end the payments by 2010. Developing nations say the government farm payments to promote exports undercut the competitive advantage of poor farmers.

Brazil's Amorim was still satisfied with the agreement because it included a provision that a substantial part of the subsidies would go by 2010.

The final draft also calls on wealthy nations to allow duty-free and quota-free privileges to at least 97 percent of products exported by the so-called least developed countries by 2008.

In a victory for West African cotton-producing nations, the text retained an earlier proposal that rich countries eliminate all export subsidies on cotton in 2006.

It also represents a concession by the United States, a major cotton exporter, and U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman had said the proposal would be a hard sell to U.S. lawmakers. Cotton growers in Burkina Faso, Benin, Chad and Mali say the U.S. farm aid drives down prices, making it impossible for small family farms to compete in international markets.

Portman was noncommittal, saying he had concerns about the final draft but hoped to end up with an acceptable version.

"Some members have concerns as we do, but in the end there is an overriding need to come together and work out our differences so I'm hopeful we can do that," Portman said as he headed from his hotel to the convention center after reading the draft.

碧空天

the rulers were made by some people ,then for some peole.

GinTonic

What did it(joning-WTO) bring or change to you/your life?

whoknows

nothing change for me but for the country

liver411

Really?

whoknows

can you give some examples?

GinTonic

You have to obey the international laws once you join the WTO. You can't get rich by stealing...now the whole country turns into stealing...professors, researchers are stealing other's paper, students are stealing other students' work...everyone is looking into cheap incorrect way to get "rich"...

Mainland China is the piracy capital of the world. China's imitation industry feeds not just its own economy, but those of other nations as well; 46 percent of the pirated goods sold in America come from China, according to the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA). The Quality Brands Protection Committee (QBPC), an anti-piracy body under the auspices of the China Association of Enterprises with Foreign Investment, claims that government statistics show that counterfeits outnumbers genuine products in the Chinese market by 2 to 1. Pirated audiovisual materials occupy 95 percent of the market in large cities, and the proportion approaches 100 percent in the rural interior. Stricter laws have stemmed the tide only slightly, because anti-piracy law, like most of Chinese law, is enforced haphazardly at best, and everyone knows it.

Enforcement efforts are made even more futile by popular acceptance of piracy. Rising incomes have created an enthusiasm for foreign goods and brands, but Chinese consumers have become so accustomed to cheap, pirated goods that they are unwilling to pay full prices for the real thing. Traditional Chinese moral relativism combines with a modern sense of short-term opportunity cost and self-interest to justify what everyone knows to be wrong and illegal.

GinTonic

Dollar figures for losses attributed to counterfeit goods are notoriously hard to pin down, but there appears to be little question that whatever the numbers are, they are big -- the Business Software Alliance (BSA) claims that software piracy in China alone costs the industry $4 billion a year worldwide. And while the multinational giants will hardly be sunk by piracy's encroachment on their profit margins in China, the situation is especially grim domestically. Piracy severely hampers the international competitiveness of Chinese companies, and the lack of adequate intellectual property protection dampens the impetus for local corporate, scientific and artistic innovation.

And yet, China's intellectual property mess isn't entirely bleak. Piracy may be bad for business, but it's great for consumers, and in some ways good for society. By providing small-business opportunities to the uneducated, unemployable underclass, piracy helps relieve China's mounting social unrest. The production of imitation goods, or "daoban" in Chinese, has become one of the country's major light industries, employing both the growing masses of workers laid off from state-owned industrial behemoths and the floating population of illegal migrant laborers.

Copycat publishing also serves as one of the only chinks in the armor of state censorship. Banned books, even a Chinese version of the scandalous "Private Life of Chairman Mao" and the works of Nobel Prize winner Gao Xingjian, can be found at pirated book vendors, usually operating from bike carts parked near busy bus stops. Films from the U.S. and elsewhere can take as long as three years to arrive at local theaters and even longer to come out on legal DVD. But illegal copies of Hollywood blockbusters appear in video compact disc format weeks after their release -- and sometimes they appear even before their release, as copies of promotional versions. Without piracy, the Chinese music scene would still be relying on home-copied cassette tapes and John Denver for inspiration, as it did in the 1980s.

GinTonic

Piracy is one of the largest flies in the ointment of China's supposed economic miracle.

In China, the forces of 21st century technology, consumer choice and pop culture are converging on a society struggling desperately to modernize, producing contradiction after contradiction. China in some ways represents a nightmare scenario for corporate America, a post-Napster Wild West chaos where any intellectual property can be illegally copied, and commonly is. But China is also emblematic of the growing pains of much of the developing world. Blame Confucius, blame Mao, blame Deng Xiaoping's trickle-down economics, or blame Western companies' unrealistic pricing policies: Imitation is a way of life in modern China, and it will take more than diplomatic pressure or a handful of laws to eradicate it.

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See, not only country build more "image constrctions", consumers also "reward" with illegal practice.