UN trade chief welcomes breakthrough in export talks between rich and poor

The decisions adopted last weekend by the World Trade Organization (WTO) to end export subsidies and reduce import tariffs around the world gives a welcome push to the deadlocked Doha negotiations that is of great importance to developing countries, especially in agriculture, the United Nations trade chief said today.

The round of talks on a Development Agenda was launched in 2001 in Doha, Qatar, but ran into an impasse over rich countries' export subsidies for their agricultural products, which developing countries said distorted the market for their own primary products. The talks broke down last September in Cancun, Mexico.

"It is encouraging that the decision brings the Doha negotiations back on the right track by focusing on the core agenda of multilateral trade negotiations of importance to developing countries, involving agriculture, non-agricultural market access and services," the Secretary-General of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Rubens Ricupero, said in cotton-exporting Benin.

The West African country is the coordinator of trade affairs for the Group of Least Developed Countries (LDCs).

Mr. Ricupero said he expected that the promise that cotton subsidies "would be addressed ambitiously, expeditiously and specifically" would be fulfilled for the benefit of the African LDC cotton producers already losing export income because of the subsidies to exporting cotton farmers in rich countries.

In the resumed Doha negotiations, UNCTAD would continue to give technical and analytical assistance to developing countries working to "derive development gains," he said.