MEDIA STATEMENT
BY A GROUP OF DEVELOPING COUNTRIES ON SINGAPORE ISSUES
Ministers and representatives
from 16 developing countries namely, Bangladesh (on behalf of
the Group of Least Developed Countries), Botswana, China, Cuba,
Egypt, India, Indonesia, Jamaica (on behalf of the Caribbean Community),
Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria, the Philippines, Tanzania, Venezuela,
Zambia and Zimbabwe met on 10 September, 2003 to discuss the Singapore
issues viz., relationship between trade and investment, interaction
between trade and competition policy, transparency in government
procurement and trade facilitation.
They expressed concerns
about the impact of multilateral rules on these Singapore issues
on their domestic policies and were yet to fully comprehend the
implications of having WTO rules on these issues. The issues are
technical and complex and some of them are quite unrelated to
trade.
Many developing
countries do not have the capacity to implement obligations arising
out of commitments such multilateral rules will entail, and there
were also doubts on the benefits of WTO frameworks on the new
issues.
As such, there
is no explicit consensus on the commencement of negotiations on
modalities.
They agreed
to transmit these views to the facilitator for the new issues,
together with a proposed language for the continuation of the
clarification process to be incorporated in to the final text
emanating from the fifth Ministerial.
