Roberto Azevedo, Brazil’s WTO envoy, argued that negotiations under the Doha mandate for the reduction or elimination of tariff and non-tariff barriers to environmental goods and services (EGS) should include agricultural goods of particular interest to developing countries – not just industrial products.

Arguing that the chief objective of the negotiations was to deliver a ‘triple-win’ of environmental, developmental, and trade benefits, he stressed that the EGS were “not market access negotiations nor should they be turned into super sectoral market access negotiations,” in a reference to the sector-specific liberalisation initiatives that are part of the standard non-agricultural market access (NAMA) talks.

In his intervention in the Committee on Trade and Environment – special (negotiating) session, Azevedo underscored the need for an outcome that offers measurable environmental gains along with improved trade opportunities for developing countries. He criticised discussions in the committee for failing to “shed any light on how the environmental and developmental dimensions of the Doha mandate are to be fulfilled through tariff reductions [and/or] elimination on a list of goods of interest to some members only.”

The crux of Azevedo’s critique is not unique to Brazil. Several other developing countries, such as India, China, Argentina, and South Africa, have been critical of a list of 153 environmental goods submitted for prospective tariff elimination by a group of mostly industrialized countries in 2007. They argue that many of the items on the list have non-environmental purposes, and in general coincide with the export interests of industrial countries more than with any objective environmental measure.

Despite the contentious backdrop, WTO members have been engaging in simulation exercises to see how tariffs on the proposed list of 153 environmental goods might be reduced as part of a Doha Round agreement. China last week presented the results for three major industrialised members – the United States, the EU and Japan – and three major developing countries, China, India and Brazil.

Simulations reveal potential tariff cuts for specific EGs

Wuhan Steel is focused on developing its recently acquired iron ore mines to bring them to full production over the next three to five years and may package these assets into a holding vehicle for listing, WISCO’s President Deng Qilin told the paper in an interview.

Deng said it was still too early to determine where the assets would be listed, or if they would be injected into its current listed subsidiary, Wuhan Steel and Iron Ore Ltd (600005.SS: Quote), on the Shanghai exchange.

Deng also said he has not ruled out making further acquisitions, but that the firm’s main priority now was to develop mines recently acquired in Canada, Brazil, Australia, Liberia and Madagascar.

The Chinese steelmaker, which stepped up overseas acquisitions during the financial crisis, currently imports more than 85 percent of its iron ore needs, but aims to be able to supply all its demand in three to five years to end its reliance on foreign suppliers such as Rio Tinto (RIO.AX: Quote)(RIO.L: Quote), BHP Billiton (BHP.AX: Quote)(BLT.L: Quote) and Vale (VALE5.SA: Quote).

Deng complained on Saturday that China continued to have no say in setting global iron ore prices despite being the world’s biggest consumer of the key steelmaking ingredient.

China is furiously consuming iron ore and other commodities to meet industrial and export demand as the country grows at a breakneck pace. The demand has sent commodities prices soaring, leading China to play an increasingly strategic role in the acquisition and development of resource projects.
Continue with the Article here at Rueters  (Reporting by Fayen Wong, editing by Jonathan Hopfner)

Despite having lost several WTO cases on the issue, most recently against Brazil for duties on orange juice, Washington responded coldly to China’s challenge.

“The decision now by China to pursue new claims against the United States on zeroing only complicates resolution of this issue,” said Nefeterius McPherson, a spokesperson for the US trade representative’s office.

WTO rules authorise governments to levy ‘anti-dumping’ duties on goods it determines to be ‘dumped’, i.e., sold abroad for less than the price they command in the exporter’s home market, if they are injuring domestic competitors. ‘Zeroing’ refers to the practice by US commerce authorities of ignoring (or ‘zeroing out’) instances where imported goods cost more in the US than in the exporter’s market. Critics of zeroing argue that it artificially inflates anti-dumping margins, making them even more trade-restrictive. Last December, the US Department of Commerce proposed to end the use of zeroing in annual reviews of existing anti-dumping measures, in an effort to stave off retaliation from major trading partners (for more information on that proposal see here). The proposal is still open for public comment, but has drawn the ire of some lawmakers and industry representatives, according to Inside US Trade, a Washington-based trade publication.

China has decided to pursue what it sees as a legitimate claim. “Once the cancellation of zeroing was approved officially, it should have applied to all global trade cases,” Zhang Aiqing, a former director of the department of treaty and law in the commerce ministry, told China Daily.

At issue in the complaint are US anti-dumping duties on Chinese shrimp that date back to 2005. Initially fixed in the realm of 27 to 82 percent, the duties were dropped to 5 to 8 percent after Beijing successfully appealed to the US International Trade Commission (ITC), the quasi-judicial body that determines the rate of duties. Nevertheless, China’s Ministry of Commerce complains that the levies remain in violation of WTO rules, and continue to impair the interests of its shrimp producers.

The US ITC will next month vote on whether to extend its duties on imported shrimp from China and other countries for an additional five years. US shrimpers in the Gulf of Mexico are still reeling from the effects of last year’s massive BP oil spill, and have pushed for the extension of the duties.

China’s request for consultations is the first step in the WTO dispute settlement process. If the two sides cannot reach a negotiated settlement within 60 days, Beijing will have the option of requesting a panel to hear the dispute.

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WTO membership needs unanimous agreement; all the members should give their consent. The negotiations are generally conducted in multilateral format, while there are bilateral meeting if there are any special issues between the applicant country and a particular member country. Clearly in this case Georgia has particular interests concerning Russia’s entry to the WTO and if negotiations between the two countries are not concluded successfully the multilateral negotiations could yield no result whatsoever. Georgia set out and put forward its position well before the Russian aggression of August 2008. The major demand Georgia puts on the table is establishing and legalising the official border between Georgia and Russia at the Psou River in Abkhazia and the Roki Tunnel in Tskhinvali region. Both these territories are currently occupied by Russia and controlled by puppet separatist regimes.

Georgia has demanded that custom checkpoints be established with a secure presence of Georgian customs officers on the territories. Even before the war Russia ignored Georgia’s demand and it is unlikely that Moscow is prepared to consider this demand now when it exercises full control of the breakaway regions. Russian armed forces are deployed there and moreover Moscow has recognised the so called ‘’independent states’’.

Georgian analysts suggest that Japan might also veto Russian WTO membership. However if Georgia is alone in blocking Russia’s entry, it might yield to the pressure, retreat and make concessions. So for Georgia the situation is rather serious as ignoring Tbilisi’s demands, Moscow hopes that tiny Georgia will be forced by its western protectors to give up. The Kremlin is certain that Georgia’s consent is no longer its problem but the West’s who believe that with Russia in the WTO, Moscow will be easier to tame.

Others share similar opinions. Analyst Kakha Gogolashvili thinks that if Russia had been a WTO member in 2006 it would not have imposed an embargo on Georgian products. However it is easy to challenge this opinion because Russia does not follow international rules. Russia is a member of the UN, the Council of Europe and the CIS, yet it still launched a military attack on Georgia – also a member of the UN, Council of Europe and at that time the CIS.

Official Tbilisi has declared several times that it has not changed its position and visibly there is not much pressure on Georgia. The Georgian official position is very simple, but still Moscow refuses to negotiate with Tbilisi at all on any of the issues. Tbilisi has declared its readiness to negotiate with Moscow directly many times so the West should persuade the Kremlin sit at the table with Tbilisi. So far Russia stubbornly rules out any kind of top level negotiations with the leadership but if negotiations between Russia and Georgia are conducted, even if only on the WTO issue this would be a serious breakthrough and a diplomatic victory for Georgia.

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That’s the problem foreign credit card companies face as the U.S. Trade Representative presses forward with a World Trade Organization case against China for failing to open up its electronic payments market to foreign involvement.

Thus far, foreign firms have been reluctant to vocally support the action in part because even if the USTR wins the case they’ll still ultimately have to play by Chinese rules. And China typically doesn’t take too kindly to foreigners it believes have been pushing it around.

So far, that bodes most ill for Visa Inc. While WTO cases can only be brought by governments, Visa is widely perceived in China as being the driving force behind the electronic payments case, and regardless of the truth of the matter, industry watchers worry that could undo the years of goodwill the U.S. firm has been cultivating among Chinese consumers and regulators.

One thing’s for sure: When the case is completed – and it seems the USTR may have a pretty good shot at coming up trumps – foreign firms won’t have carte blanche to do what they want in China. Beijing’s regulators will still get to decide who gets to come in, and on what terms. Foreign card companies are likely already trying to work out where they rank on Beijing’s list of naughty and nice.

What’s unusual about the electronics payment suit is that it seems to be a fairly blatant case of China ignoring its WTO obligations. But even when China has fulfilled its WTO promises and opened up to foreign firms elsewhere in the financial sector, the result hasn’t been exactly what the foreigners were expecting.

China has typically complied more with the letter than the spirit of the WTO rules. The foreign negotiators that hammered out the conditions for China’s accession to the WTO 10 years ago probably assumed that financial liberalization was as much in China’s interests as that of Western countries, and that everyone was broadly on the same page regarding the amount of access foreign firms would get.

Read the rest of this Wall Street Journal article here

The U.S. made the request today in Geneva, five months after asking for consultations with China aimed at resolving the two disputes. China can’t block a second request, likely to come in March.

The U.S. is protesting limits on payment processing by companies such as Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. because China favors a monopoly provider, China UnionPay Data Co. China prohibits foreign companies from issuing their own bank cards denominated in its currency, building networks to support such cards or processing interbank point-of-sale transactions.

Foreign banks must “co-brand” with Chinese operators to supply these services and execute payments through UnionPay. The U.S. Trade Representative’s office says the rules run counter to the pledge China made when it joined the WTO in 2001 to open up its credit- and debit-card markets to foreign processing companies by the end of 2006.

The U.S. also wants WTO judges to rule on the legality of dumping duties China imposed on more than $200 million of American-made steel products. The complaint involves dumping and countervailing duties China has placed on flat-rolled steel, which is produced by companies such as West Chester, Ohio-based AK Steel Holding Corp., the third-largest U.S. steelmaker.

China, the world’s biggest steel market, said in 2009 it would apply anti-dumping and subsidy levies of as much as 25 percent on flat-rolled electrical steel products, used in transformers, reactors and electric machines. China said the duties aim to counter below-cost or “dumped” imports of the goods.

The U.S. says China didn’t follow WTO procedures by failing to disclose the facts underlying its legal conclusions and not explaining its calculations.

Read rest of the article here on Bloomberg

The 153 members of the global trade body were likely to accept Russia’s accession by the summer, Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht told reporters.

“If that comes through they could become a member by the end of this year, which means roughly speaking the duty (on timber) will diminish by two thirds,” he said.

“”This will be put into practice at the moment of the entry into WTO,” he said.

Cuts in timber duties will boost margins for European paper and pulp makers such as UPM (UPM1V.HE), Stora Enso (STERV.HE) and M-Real (MRLBV.HE).

De Gucht met Finnish Foreign Minister Paavo Vayrynen in Helsinki after talks in Brussels on Thursday with Russian ministers.

Russia’s export duties on timber are currently set at about 15 percent. Moscow agreed late last year to make cuts to the duties and rail freight fees, prompting the EU to drop its long-standing veto to Russia’s WTO membership.

Russia is the largest economy remaining outside the WTO. The WTO estimates membership will boost Russia’s GDP 11 percent in the long term.

Read the rest of this article at Reuters

“If we have 13.5 percent for last year, this year will be somewhat half of that growth” because trade expanded at such a fast past in 2010 after the slowdown of 2009, Low said in an interview today in Hong Kong. “You may call it a slowdown, but I would say it’s a return to the normal trend.”

The WTO predicted in September that global trade would expand 13.5 percent in 2010, fueled by growth in Asia led by China and India, after falling the most since World War II in 2009 amid the financial crisis.

Global trade growth showed some signs of moderation in the fourth quarter, Low said. Higher oil prices and food costs pose risks to trade because they “tend to slow growth,” he said.

It’s part two of the crisis that started in 2007-08, which led to food riots in 18 countries. Prices in 2008 reached their highest since 1845, in inflation-adjusted terms, according to the Economist magazine’s index, before slumping. The crisis seemed to have solved itself.

But last month, global food prices actually broke the record, according to the experts at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. Over the past year the price of corn has risen 52 per cent, wheat 49 per cent and soybeans 28 per cent.

Advertisement: Story continues below Rising food prices have pushed an extra 44 million people into poverty in the past seven months, according to the World Bank. It’s even being felt in the rich world. In Australia, the opposition hopes to capitalise on it: “The year will begin and end with Australian families facing an ever-rising cost of living,” the Liberal Party’s Joe Hockey said in a speech last week.

Alarmed at spiking food prices, a score of countries, including big food suppliers such as Russia and Ukraine, have banned food exports to make sure they can feed their own people first.

This has provoked further alarm. Britain’s environment minister, Caroline Spelman, argued last month that it should be illegal for countries to halt food exports, even in an emergency.

At the same time, the British government’s chief scientific officer, Sir John Beddington, declared that “the case for urgent action in the global food system is now compelling”.

The Group of Twenty major economic powers, which includes Australia, agreed. But meeting in Paris on the weekend, the G20 finance ministers notably failed to do anything about it.

Thomas Malthus warned in 1798 that growing population would starve humanity. The world population at that time? About 800 million. Two centuries later, it’s about 6.9 billion. The world population is now growing at about 210,000 a day.

After being proved wrong for so long, is Malthus finally about to be vindicated?

Not at all. The world is today already producing enough food to feed 12 billion people, according to the FAO. There are only problems of price, supply and distribution.

Humanity managed to cheat Malthus through ingenuity and good policy. Improved farming techniques and developments in fertilisers, transport and plant genetics revolutionised food production.

In the so-called Green Revolution of the mid-20th century, India introduced high-yielding rice varieties that trebled the volume of rice produced per acre of land while halving its cost.

If there is so much food available, why are prices soaring and why is one-sixth of humanity permanently hungry?

There are old and new problems. The most glaring of the old include protectionism in the richest countries. The European Union spends about $365 billion every year subsidising uneconomic farmers and shutting out food exports. The US and Japan are almost as bad.

This tactic, which has distorted the world food system, would be ruled illegal in any other area of global trade, except that the rich countries, while successfully dismantling barriers to trade in manufactures and services, have kept the corrupt farm trade system off the agenda of the World Trade Organisation.

Then there is poverty: 1 billion people who subsist on $1 a day cannot afford to buy food.

There are three new problems. One is the “financialisation” of food. Big investors have come to treat the major traded commodities – including food – as instruments of portfolio investment and speculation.

Read the rest of this article at the Brisbane Times website