Chinese Minister of Commerce Bo Xilai made a three-point proposal on the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) when he attended the ministerial meeting of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris last Wednesday, a source with the Commerce Ministry News Office said Sunday.
Firstly, Bo proposed, the Doha round should make a substantial realization of its theme of development, noting that the Doha round is a round of development and 85 percent of the members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) are developing members.
Whether these developing members can benefit from the Doha negotiations "is a crucial criterion of the success of the Doha Round", Bo stressed, calling for necessary special and differential policies to be reserved to the developing members.
Secondly, the round should make substantial promotion of the free trade process which is an important objective for the negotiators to achieve, Bo said.
The developed countries are the biggest beneficiaries of world trade liberalization and they should act like advanced players in realizing the objective, the Chinese trade minister said, adding that China, with tens of millions living in poverty according to United Nations standards, is willing to make efforts to push forward the realization of this major objective.
Thirdly, according to Bo, the negotiation results of the Doha round should be substantially observed.
Doha round is a new round of negotiation for the international trade rules and it will be meaningless to make new rules if the negotiation results are not observed, Bo said.
Pragmatism should not be encouraged. Citing the textile issue as an example, some developed countries kept preserving the 70-percent quota for textile products until the end of last year, and now blame China for the surge of Chinese textile exports, Bo said.
Trade protectionism can only undermine the seriousness of WTO rules and impact negatively upon the ongoing new round of negotiation, Bo noted.
On some specific issues of the Doha negotiations, Bo said the agriculture issue is the key and the negotiation progress on the agriculture issue will decide the success of the Doha negotiation.
In addition, negotiation on service trade and market admittance to non-agricultural products should also be further promoted for the final achievement of a "package agreement", Bo added.
Bo also expressed hope that the world major trading partners would make efforts to maintain the stability of a multilateral trade system, abandon trade protectionist thoughts and actions, resolve multilateral and bilateral trade disputes through consultation and make concerted efforts to achieve major progress for the DDA in this December.
(Xinhua News Agency May 9, 2005)
