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TPP deal to have ‘positive impact on trade talks’

SINGAPORE — The chief of the World Trade Organization (WTO) said yesterday that the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade deal, if reached, would have a positive impact on the WTO’s global trade talks.

SINGAPORE — The chief of the World Trade Organization (WTO) said yesterday that the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade deal, if reached, would have a positive impact on the WTO’s global trade talks.

“Some suggest that such agreements may undermine our efforts to build a stronger multilateral trading system. I fundamentally disagree with that assessment,” WTO Director-General Roberto Azevedo said at a seminar organised by the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies and the Temasek Foundation in Singapore.

Elaborating on the impact of the TPP on multilateral trade talks to reporters after his speech, he said, “Many times the problems we have are precisely between those that are negotiating now bilaterally” rather than the multilateral negotiations.

The former Brazilian trade diplomat said that when the TPP and free-trade agreements “can solve these problems bilaterally or in a regional agreement, that may help the negotiations multilaterally”.

He also added that “there are several instances when agreements that come from these regional initiatives inspire the work in the WTO”. He said trade agreements must work together and not be at odds with each other.

The 12 TPP negotiating countries are hoping to reach a deal before summer. The problem so far is not that the TPP negotiations are advancing, but rather “that the WTO is not advancing with it”, he said, referring to the sluggish pace of progress of the WTO’s so-called “Doha Round” of talks.

He said the Doha Round is starting to regain momentum, and urged WTO member countries to work harder for solutions in the negotiations.

“We need to deliver more outcomes, we need to deliver them more quickly, so I am very pleased to say that after many years of paralysis, we are beginning to move. The Doha negotiations are back on our priority list,” he said.

“I believe that the momentum is behind us. We started a very intensive process in January. In my view in the first few weeks, months of this year, we made more progress than in the whole of 2014,” he said.

He said WTO members are “leaving their comfort zones and they are bringing new proposals to the table. We are moving from a process of finger pointing and blame placing into a mode of solution finding, and that’s exactly what we need to be doing now”.

But he added “our work is not done, there are still very significant gaps moving the Doha development agenda forward, still going to be extremely difficult”. KYODO NEWS

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