Tonga defers WTO membership [1]
Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - 17:18. Updated on Monday, October 6, 2014 - 11:14.
Tonga has deferred its membership of the WTO until July next year, the Tongan Prime Minister, Dr Feleti Sevele told the Tongan media yesterday, July 25.
The delay he said did not mean that Tonga was withdrawing its WTO membership application, but to give Tonga more time to improve its tariff system.
The announcement by Dr Feleti Sevele came a day after the Director General of the World Trade Organization Pascal Lamy declared in Geneva on Monday that the global trade negotiations for a new world trade agreement has collapsed.
The New York Times reported on July 24 that after five years of negotiations to reduce barriers to international trade, global trade talks broke down when the United States and the European Union failed to agree to reduce farm subsidies and protective tariffs.
Negotiators from the United States and the European Union each blamed the other for failing to improve their offers on farm issues. The talks July 23 were focused on trying to get the European Union to agree to deeper tariff reductions and the United States to cut farm subsidies further. But each side is under pressure from its farm lobby not to give ground.
There is also a growing popular unease about globalization in many European countries and in the United States, where some workers and politicians see the rise of developing countries like China and India as more threat than opportunity.
Developing nations are demanding that rich nations reduce the high tariffs they use to protect their farmers from low-cost foreign competition, and to reduce the billions they spend annually subsidizing farmers. Only then, the developing nations say, can they open their own markets to more Western manufactured goods and services. Brazil and India spoke for these nations at the six-way meeting in Geneva.
Meanwhile, in Tonga, Dr Feleti Sevele was optimistic that the collapse of the global trade talk was only temporary, even though there were indications that a revival in the trade talks soon will not be able to put the WTO into operation until 2007.