Dr Supachai suggested at the Apec meeting in November that the negotiations in the WTO should start from two issues, agriculture and services. Ms Srirat said that although the WTO had not announced plans for launching a new round, members had already mapped out a negotiation process. Proposals for the agriculture sector were submitted in December while the negotiations are to start in March. By November, there were 16 proposals and three discussion papers signed by 79 countries on the table for further negotiation. Proposals were submitted from both developing and developed countries including the United States, the European Union, and the Cairns Group of major agricultural exporting countries including Thailand.
More proposals are likely to be submitted before the deadline.
Similarly but different in nature, the discussions on service sectors have been done with more emphasis on setting up negotiating procedures and identifying negotiation areas such as financial services and telecommunications. Peter Mytri Ungpakorn, an information officer of the WTO Secretariat, said members had actively submitted proposals, showing good progress, although there was no new round of negotiations. He said progress had also been made on helping developing countries implement various agreements and creating more transparency in the international trading system through notification and review, in which members must inform each other of what they are doing under the WTO agreements. China, which struggled for more than a decade to join the WTO, made substantial movement in 2000 in negotiations with WTO members for its accession to the organisation. Developing members of the WTO, meanwhile, were struggling to achieve recovery in their economies and did not have much excess time to participate in multilateral negotiations, said Assoc Prof Sompop Manarungsan of Chulalongkorn University.